Hypertap Instrument
This is the second stage of my obsession with a portable piano of sorts. After abandoning the fabric controllers which were not stable, I opted instead for real strings. Several designs were considered and discarded when I discovered the Harpejji, a variation of an earlier custom instrument called the Starr Board. This is a tapping instrument where both hands face the same direction rather than a Chapman Stick where the hands face in opposite directions. As a Harpejji was out of my price range, I enlisted the help of a tapping instrument maker (Kevin Siebold of Krappy Guitars) to make the body, bridge and strings to my specs, and a young engineer to design the active pickup system ( a dual octal buffer, for 16 strings). I then found a set of piezo saddles which i adapted and wired up to the buffer circuit boards, and the Hypertap was born.
Future versions of this will exploit the individual string output available to do A/D conversion (onset,pitch detection) to potentially controll other kinds of processing.