Kaoss Guitar

I was going to wait until I got batteries for my camera to post this, but that night not happen soon, so here is a the post about the Kaoss Guitar:

I love Muse. If anything that is an understatement, my obsession with them has taken me to foreign lands to see them live. They influence a large part of what I do, at least the projects I do. My obsession with Muse is what lead me to my (second) most successful project.

Matt Bellamy has several guitars with things built into them. Cool things, like MIDI controllers and effects. I wanted one. His guitars are all custom made by Hugh Manson. So I decided to buy a cheap guitar and throw some cool stuff in it, making my own "Muse Guitar". This is probably the longest an idea has taken for me to finally take action and start it, and finally finish the project. I had the idea over the summer of 2007, but at the time I had an unpaid full-time internship, and no money or time to work on something like that. So I spent a lot of time dreaming about building the guitar, but never did anything about it. I searched the Internet for the right guitar to rip apart and I did research on parts to put into the guitar. Then I went to China for a semester.

While exploring the area around the campus in Beijing, I stumbled upon a music store. They had a bunch of guitars, all Chinese knock offs of other guitars. They were dirt cheap. They had a guitar that was perfect for my project. The right price, the right body style, and it played pretty well too. It is (kind of, but not really) knock off of a Fender Jaguar. So I bought it, as well as a small amp to play though while I was in China. I left the amp in my dorm when I left, but I brought the guitar back with me.

Once I was home, I planned the rest of the guitar. The first thing I did was order a Z.Vex Fuzz Factory. It is by far the coolest thing ever invented by a human. It does distortion, fuzz, buzz, crunch and squeals. It was also incredibly easy to put into a guitar. The PCB is very small. All I had to do is drill a few more holes for the control pots and I was set. Now I had a guitar with fuzz pedal in it. I was happy. I installed a bypass switch to turn in on and off, basically replacing the foot switch. It rocked. But, it was about to get much cooler. Enter the Kaoss pad.

The Kaoss pad is basically a multi effects unit with a few built in synth sounds, all controlled by a X-Y touch pad. Move your finger around the pad and it changes the sound. Really fun to play with. It also has MIDI out, so you can control other devices with it.

I headed to guitar center one day and looked at one. Thought about buying one too. The sales person informed me that they had a used one. Used is cheaper than new, and I felt better about destroying it too. I took it home and opened it up. I removed the X-Y pad, removed the ribbon cable connector from the PCB, replaced it with a Ethernet cable jack, and wired the hold button through the Ethernet jack.

I traced the pad onto my guitar and carefully routed the body to fit the touch pad. I also needed to drilled a new hole for the Ethernet connector. The ribbon cable for connected to the touch pad is very fragile, so me being me, I broke it. Luckily all it took to fix was a thin piece of wire and some scotch tape.

Once everything was wired up and installed it was time to test. I'm pretty sure it didn't work the first time, but I can't quite remember. If it didn't work then it didn't take too long to fix whatever was wrong. The guitar is connected to the Kaoss Pad via an Ethernet cable and a regular quarter inch cable.

It is really fun to make the synth sounds using the touch pad, but when you plug in the guitar you get some really nasty noise. I think it might be a shielding problem, but I also don't like the analogue/digital converter in the Kaoss Pad. It really sucks the tone out of the guitar, which is a shame because you can get some really cool non-guitar sounding sounds by running the guitar through the Kaoss Pad. In the future I'll hook up the Kaoss Pad to my computer and play around with controlling some soft-synths with it.