ACPAD Guitar Combines Acoustic and MIDI

US Solo performance from Robin Sukroso 08/11/11

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Very slick demonstration of a hybrid guitar and computer interfacing instrument known as the ACPAD Guitar as performed by Robin Sukroso, a Berlin based musician.
In development since 2009, its built around a regular acoustic guitar, with additional pads, switches and faders feeding an Arduino chip and MIDI interface and also what looks like a Roland GK-3(?) guitar pickup system.

For more pictures of the acpad guitar being built, check out RobinSukroso.de.
The video shows a pretty accomplished performance, by Robin who is also the developer. Clearly a guitarist of some ability enhanced by what I can only assume is an Ableton session with some realtime looping and recording.

According to the site, the instrument is patent pending - so perhaps we will one day see a more mass produced version.

Robin is performing in Berlin and Amsterdam in the coming weeks - so check him out.

“acpad guitar” has these different elements:
1. the actual 6 strings of the acoustic guitar
2. bass- and electronic sounds on the first two guitar strings
3. drum sounds (triggered by the white acpads)
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to modify and play with these 3 elements, several functions are built in the guitar such as:
1. led – buttons for selecting different virtual instruments (bass-, drum- and other electronic instruments)
2. buttons for live looping (live recording of guitar strings, drum sounds and/or electronic instruments)
3. two faders and two knobs, which send different midi values, according to which led – button was selected last to control effects, volumes, instruments etc…
4. global function buttons (such as metronom on, stop all loops, redo record, undo record, global record, global stop, tempo, overwrite modus etc.)
5. midi channel select knob (which modiefies the midi data of the 10 instrument select buttons on 12 different channels)

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