Guitar Pickguard Wireless MIDI Controller with Adafruit Feather #Feather #MIDI #Bluetooth @Hackadayio

Kzra performs and records fingerstyle guitar music and wanted a way to control a software synthesizer during live performances. This would allow the performance of more complex arrangements and diversify the sound.

The simplest way I could think of doing this was by adding a MIDI controller to the pickguard (known as a scratchplate in the UK) of my guitar. This is in a convenient place for fingerstyle players as the picking hand rests close to this region of the guitar in most fingerstyle techniques. Capacitive touch sensing was used as it allows larger contact areas to detect note presses.

For a microcontroller, I decided to use an Adafruit Feather 32u4 Bluefruit as it allows you to send MIDI using low energy Bluetooth. Conveniently, it also has a JST port to enable charging via a Lipo battery. This makes it an ideal microcontroller to make a portable MIDI device with.

You can see the result in the video below. You can get the details on hackaday.io and read this Hackaday article.


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1 Comment

  1. Nice job, very cool project. I want to do something similar for my guitar rig – use bluetooth to communicate with my footpedals. At my age I have trouble seeing the foot pedals display on the floor when I have my distance contact lens in my eye so I want to just create a device to inconspicuously hang on my guitar that allows me to send bluetooth midi to my Line6 POD XT which will have a bluetooth midi dongle in the midi in/out. The device would allow me to switch on / off effects and to send control changes for various settings. I would also set it up so that I could choose from presets. I will check out your code.

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