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Electric Guitar Marine

Plays using harmonics
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A Trumpet Marine is a stringed instrument with one very long thick string. The string is bowed, and tunes are played by touching the string at harmonic nodes.

The Electric Guitar Marine has one long single string. Instead of touching the string to force certain harmonics to sound, the string is allowed to vibrate open, but the pickups are arranged along the length of the string, positioned carefully so that some are at nodes and some are at antinodes. A pickup at a node will not get any sound, whereas a pickup at an antinode will get the full sound of that harmonic.

Pickups are switched in or out of action using a kind of keyboard, either electrically by switching their output into or out of the mix, or mechanically, by swinging the pickup closer to or further from penguin the string.

The string could be actuated by a mechanical bow (like a hurdy gurdy), or by electric induction, or by plucking with the fingers.

I wonder if it would be possible to have inducers alongside the pickups, allowing different harmonic vibrations to be induced in the string?

pocmloc, Oct 16 2012

Trumpet Marine http://www.trombama...ments/tromba-marina
[pocmloc, Oct 16 2012]

[link]






       A string of fixed length has one fundamental frequency and the harmonics of that frequency.   

       Unless you vary either the tension, length or thickness of the string in some way, it will only even produce one resonance, no matter how you drive it.
8th of 7, Oct 16 2012
  

       You play the tune on //the harmonics of that frequency//.
pocmloc, Oct 16 2012
  

       Not for rocking the casbah then?
rcarty, Oct 16 2012
  

       //one fundamental frequency and the harmonics of that frequency. //   

       BUT the harmonics are not all octaves. Thus, several distinct notes can be played.
MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 16 2012
  

       guitarists get harmonics through some special technique.
FlyingToaster, Oct 16 2012
  

       Unless you touch the string at some point, regardless of where you pick or bow it, you'll still get its primary tone regardless at every pickup, regardless of where they're placed.   

       You can get rather cool effects by picking or bowing anywhere from the halfway poing on the string (where the double dots are on most guitar fretboards), which give a very overtone free sound, to very close to the bridge, which gives a very overtone-rich sound. You can switch pickups on a normal electric guitar, and get a similar effect (that's why there's a switch on most of 'em for that), but it doesn't change the primary tone.
CraigD, Oct 17 2012
  

       But two pickups in different places, some harmonics will be in phase and some out, right? You could combine their outputs.
pocmloc, Oct 17 2012
  

       // the equivalent of a stringed bagpipe //   

       [marked-for-tagline]
8th of 7, Oct 17 2012
  

       so you can rip harmonics out of a guitar... there's 46 that I've been able to force.... 2nd,3rd,4th,5th,7th frets and 12th for the octave. You need a lot of overdrive-based compression... anything apart from 5,7&12 are pretty quiet.   

       However, what's key here is that to catch them you pluck the string, then touch the string over one of those points. Your finger damps the vibrations at that point, creating a node, you can actually see the string vibrating as a whole, then when you touch at the 12th fret, you can see the node form and the string develops 2 separate visible waveforms (it helps a lot to be under strobe lighting at this point ;-)). Which is why the note shifts up in pitch by an octave.... if you touch at 5th, you see a greater number of nodes/anti nodes form. Simply placing pickups in different places won't catch this phenomenon, it has to be created. As people have pointed out, electric guitars frequently have different pickup placements, but this doesn't change the note, just the timbre.
bs0u0155, Oct 17 2012
  

       But strongly changing the timbre in a stepwise manner does give a strong *impression* of different pitches; and is even better than damped harmonics, in some ways, as you hear the stronger harmonic against the background of the others, creating a very cool effect that is neither one pitch nor many, but somewhere in between. Throat singing and Jew's harp are examples of this effect.   

       I've considered building a long electric monochord (or oligochord), to be played like a tromba marina, or with a slide (like a slightly glorified diddley bow). I hadn't thought about using many pickups. The effect might be relatively subtle, but I'd very much like to have a go on your idea [+].   

       (sp. one very long _thin_ string. The string has to be thin in proportional to its length to get the higher harmonics)
spidermother, Oct 31 2012
  
      
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