The Geekiest Guitar Ever Made

Almost 60 years after Elvis swiveled his hips and played some bluesy, gospel-y, country music, the guitar has been the cool instrument in much of pop culture.

You don’t have to know how to play much. In fact, just three chords will get you some attention. If that doesn’t work, you can just hold one while pretending to strum along. There are other options, too: smash the thing for no apparent reason, toss it up in the air and try and catch it in your mouth, whatever works — you’ll likely look cool to someone. I mean, it’s not like Accordion Hero is selling that well.

But how do you make that guitar a little more geeky? There’s a way…

Behold the Misa Digital Guitar:

From Engadget:

It’s quite a pleasure, therefore, to point you in the direction of a so-called Digital Guitar that keeps the axe looking refreshingly familiar, while turning it into something that poses a legitimate threat of actually being useful. Essentially a MIDI controller, the Misa guitar has 24 frets and a large multifunctional touchscreen, which you can use to interface with the appropriate software on your pc.

As you can tell in the video, there are no strings. They’ve been replaced with a touchscreen you can manipulate beyond the conventional usage of the 6 strings. There’s more information at the creator’s website.

And as if it wasn’t enough to make an artificial representation of a guitar, it’s full of some tell-tale geekery: it’s MIDI controlled (which is why it has that 80s NES sound), and it runs on Gentoo Linux, the operating system that’s endlessly useful if you don’t mind compiling it directly from the source code.

But still, this thing has the coolness of the guitar intact. It’s clearly a toy for music geeks, and in the right hands it’s full of possibilities if one is patient enough to tweak it and play with both the guitar and the software.