Chord-Innate

A attachable system to an acoustic guitar that can accompany another musician or play on its own as a self-playing guitar. It can play 5+ different songs in a variety of keys.

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Inspiration

Playing and listening to live music is not only more enjoyable, but also more comparatively beneficial for mental health according to studies. However especially in a pandemic, people often can’t play live music with others and lose out on these benefits.

What it does

We created a system attachable to an acoustic guitar that can accompany another musician or play on its own as a self-playing guitar. It features a plucking mechanism of solenoids controlled by an Arduino and also an adjustable capo. Just with these relatively simple features, it can already play 5+ different songs.

How we built it

Picks were attached through specifically designed laser-cut connections to a solenoid on five places around the base of the guitar. The angles of the pistons are adjustable with screws in order to fine tune how our attachment interacts with the guitar. We also manufactured a strong detachable clamp with interchangeable positions designed specifically to produce a clean sound.

Challenges we ran into

The positioning and rotation of the plucking solenoids was hard to calibrate in order to make a consistent and accurate sound. Additionally, we had to go through a lot of versions of string pressing mechanisms to get a clean sound. Our design process was initially naively oblivious to the fact that guitar strings are hard to press, already ubiquitously known to be hard to press firmly for beginner human players.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We really love our plucking mechanism and hope you do too! Specifically, in order to get around the challenges we mentioned, we made the solenoid positioning adjustable to make our project more versatile. Getting it to play so many songs with a simple design was awesome but behind the scenes took a plethora of different permutations of the components in our build. Additionally, we're proud of our web app to allow users to control the guitar. (we have to admit we're also slightly proud of the hidden meanings in our name "Chord-Innate").

What we learned

We learned that it takes a lot of work to design consistently working solutions to even simple specifications. Relatively simple mechanisms for non-common tasks like plucking strings are hard to design quickly, so in our future engineering projects we will anticipate these difficulties into our planning process in order to stay on pace.

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