Harpejji

[Barry Daniels]

I saw Stevie Wonder playing one of these on the 2015 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame show. Pretty cool. Kind of like an electronic auto harp but played by tapping. Shouldn't be that hard to make if we could get a plan.

http://www.marcodi.com/sights-sounds/

[Clay Schaeffer]

That is cool. I assume they run it through some sort of signal modification?

[Barry Daniels]

They apparently have some type of circuit that senses when a string is fretted and that sends the signal onward. As soon as the string breaks contact with the fret it is silenced so that you don't hear the open strings.

[Dan Smith]

So it is electronic?
I could not figure it out on the website.

[Barry Daniels]

Definitely electronic. It is basically a electric lap steel guitar with more strings, played like a tap guitar with both hands. The notes are arranged in a fashion that is a bit like a keyboard. I think it is quite clever and of course, I want to build one.

[Will Morrison]

It's a tapper, and one of the more interesting ones I've seen. Decades ago, I saw in the back of Electronic Musician magazine a little blurb about a thing called the Starrboard (named after a Denver guy, John Starr, who owns the patent) , and they had a pic of it. It was kind of like the Harpedji and a bit like a hammer dulcimer in appearance. From the short description, it sounded really interesting, and that was the last I heard of it until I heard of this new instrument while researching tappers.

I'm not sure if there is a wired fret thing going on here, but I think that would be really complicated to do, where if you just put a piece of felt under the free end like they do on the stick, it deadens the open strings a lot easier. From what I've been able to figure out, the strings are tuned about a minor third apart. that way, the fingersings tend to be more uniform, like doing a guitar in all 4ths if you're tapping. It does make things a LOT easier in the long run.

You'd most likely have to wrap your own pickup, as I don't know where you'd find one with 24 pole pieces, or however many strings this thing has (or that you would want on yours). A bar maget or pole piece would be the way to go, I think.

I'm not sure what else I can say about this instrument, other than it's really interesting, and I'd like to build one, too. Figures that Stevie would be one of the first to pick one up, he's so often at the forefront of inoovations like this. I built a 12 string tapper about 5 years ago, and it's been a blast to play, though I'm not great at it. Trying to get both hands to do separate things after 40 years of trying to get them to work together is a real pain, but it's cool when you get it happening. This would be a fun thing to try.

[Jim McConkey]

The website says there is a small piezo pickup under each string saddle. There are independent bass and melody volumes, so they are probably just summed somehow. No other processing on-board that I can tell.

[Barry Daniels]

No, they have a circuit to kill the open strings (as stated on their website) otherwise the cacophony would be overwhelming. I don't think it would be hard to reverse engineer this. Just have a continuity check when the string makes contact with a fret which would turn on the piezo for that particular string. In other words, the piezo signal could be routed through the string and fret so it serves as a simple switch.