Guitar As Controller

In this project we present a series of algorithms developed to de- tect the following guitar playing techniques : bend, hammer-on, pull-off, slide, palm muting, harmonic, plucking point. Via the de- tection of these information, the instrument can be extended as a natural way to control external content (i.e. loops, audio effects, videos, light changes, etc.). The guitar used is a Godin Multiac with an under-saddle RMC hexaphonic piezo pickup (one pickup per string, i.e six mono signals, one per string). Two exhaustive databases have been recorded by two different guitarists with dif- ferent playing technics (finger style picking and plectrum style picking) to test the different algorithms. Off-line implementation of the algorithms are showing good results. A global implementation on a dedicated software seems to be the solution to provide a more robust solution to real-time hexaphonic use. Implementation on FPGA have been investigated as well, in order to asses the problem of the big amount of process- ing power needed for hexaphonic detection.