And it looks like robots everywhere will be jazzing up the world of music. And their newest ally? Mechbass, the Robotic Guitar. Another musician here to rock out the party and play some legit music.
The Mechbass was made by a Victoria University of Wellington student called James McVay, for his honors project. Using SolidWorks to design the robot, and laser-cutting and 3D printing parts, he assembled it all by himself.
The Mechbass is similar to a regular bass guitar in most ways; it has four strings, each horizontal bar containing one string. Rather than frets (raised portions of the neck of a regular string instrument) the Mechbass uses its pitch shifter with an aluminum carriage slide across the string to do the same thing as frets. And for the tensioning system, regular bass machine heads are used.
However, there’s one key way that they are fundamentally different. Bass guitars generally use magnetic pickup to capture string vibrations and convert it to sound, but because of the material that this project was made with, using electromagnetic sensing wouldn’t be accurate. Instead, this robot uses infrared emitter and phototransistor to send and receive sound information, all to become one rocking song.
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