Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by jawbone on February 26, 2015 at 10:56am

Yeah - I'm thinking of whatever makes the strobe lights react to the beat.

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Permalink Reply by David L. on February 26, 2015 at 12:38pm

Hi,

I have been thinking of doing something similar. I have bought two different modules off eBay to have a play around with

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/KA2284-Power-Level-Indicator-Battery-Indi...

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/1-PCS-LM3915-Audio-Level-Indicator-electr...

they arrived yesterday and I plan to give them a quick test over the weekend. I will let you know if they work.

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Permalink Reply by jawbone on February 26, 2015 at 2:52pm

Yeah - if a peizo generates electricity and the more the vib the more it generates - who knows...

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Permalink Reply by Ron "Oily" Sprague on February 26, 2015 at 5:21pm

Pretty sure someone has done this, with both a homemade amp, and a git. Remember seeing pics or a vid sometime last year...here's one, but not the one I remember:

http://www.cigarboxnation.com/photo/cbg-four-body

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Permalink Reply by turtlehead on February 26, 2015 at 8:23pm

Yes jawbone, very dangerous - I recently went down this rabbit hole.  I've always wanted to put LEDs in place of/underneath fret markers in the neck and have them respond to my playing.  I got an Arduino for Christmas and was able to breadboard a fairly simple circuit with some readily available code to make a VU meter.

Something like this:

Here is a more refined version.  The necktie layout makes me think fretboard.

Food for thought. I only know enough to be dangerous.  It seems like you could get some stuff to light up without the Arduino, but I'm not sure that it would be responsive to the dynamics in playing.  More like on/off with sound/silence.  I'll leave that to the electrical engineers.  What I really want to do is to have the LEDs light based on the note that is being played.  G is green, A is red, E is yellow or whatever. 

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Permalink Reply by jawbone on February 27, 2015 at 5:22pm

Maybe a piezo could trigger a switch ??? 

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Permalink Reply by jawbone on February 28, 2015 at 8:57am

This might be a good beginning ??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klxg3nT9OBQ
But that tie looks promising !!

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Permalink Reply by turtlehead on March 15, 2015 at 6:36pm

That looks pretty good too jawbone.  I was able to spend some time playing around today and found this circuit.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Ultimate-guide-to-LEDs/step15/Proje...

Only a battery, 2 leds and a transistor.  I didn't want to crack open my guitar, so I wired into some old sunglasses.  Works better than I thought it would except for the fact that it needs some kind of amplification.  I have a small amp that I used here, but a preamp or lm386 circuit would be the way to go if you were going to install it in a guitar. Oh, and you can't see out of them!

After doing some research, I think there are better options like David L's links that are really cheap, but it was fun to put something together with parts I had laying around. 

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Permalink Reply by jawbone on March 16, 2015 at 1:58am

Hey Turtle - that's exactly what I was thinking of - I'm gonna try that.

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Permalink Reply by jawbone on March 21, 2015 at 6:23am

Does this circuit work - I'm terrible at trying to read schematics !!

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Permalink Reply by Scott aka Farmer Ted on March 21, 2015 at 7:33am

Not sure if schem works, having not tried on a breadboard, and dont have those parts. But if you just want a circuit that can be turned on/ff that activates LED lights, the only component besides a battery and an LED is a 330ohm resistor.

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Permalink Reply by turtlehead on March 21, 2015 at 1:18pm

That's it Jawbone, I've got it working on the breadboard right now.  I've tried some other common transistors and they seem to work as well if you mind the pinouts.  Still needs to be amped somehow before you get to this circuit at least with my piezo guitars.  Going to try a lm386 tonight and see what happens.

EDIT:  Just hooked up my MP3 player to this and it works without the amp, so that might be something to try as a test.

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