New piano-like prototype guitar - for Carlos

[Livia]

Guitar can be a piano
Bernard Lane
22mar06

IT'S piano-like, but you can pick it up. In fact, beginners readily pick it up and strum away, which makes its inventor, Bryce Jacobs, very happy.

"I didn't want it to be aimed at an elite market," says Jacobs, a composition student at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
The market he has in mind is one for a 12-string electric guitar with a neck that's not too chunky and a range approaching that of a piano.

"I just realised, when I went to uni, that I'd never played a piece by Beethoven or Wagner on the guitar," Jacobs says.

"I found it a bit frustrating because there's all this phenomenal music that's out of the reach of the guitar."

It was just an idea when he began his bachelors degree. Now, doing his masters, he has a prototype, funded from private teaching and a modest Australia Council grant.

"The whole thing cost about five to five and a half grand. That's bloody cheap! You can pay that for a manufactured guitar," he says.

Its 12 strings are individually tuned and it has two sets of pick-ups so the pitch of either set of six strings can be shifted, opening up a near-orchestral range.

"It's a wider neck but it's quite easily manoeuvred around and I've got average-sized hands," Jacobs says.

Even so, the next prototype may narrow the neck by bringing the strings closer together.

Already sponsored by guitar-maker Fender, Jacobs hopes to show off his design at the company headquarters in California later this year. And he'd like to put it in the hands of Carlos Rios, the California-based guitarist for Stevie Nicks.

"I'm looking forward to seeing other people doing what they do on it; their personality will come out," Jacobs says.

For details of the guitar's first gig, see

brycejacobs.com.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...E16947,00.html

[gold_dustgypsy]

YAY Carlos

[Phil Lee]

It looks very similar to a Chapman Stick.