Chuckle

Hoag has developed a guitar with optical picks. I.e. instead of microphones, the sound is picked up off the strings using optical detection of the string movement. MusicThing decided that this is "just wrong", which is understandable for a vintage / retro-oriented blog.

Most guitarists I know are so fussy, geeky and "analogue" about their gear that I expect this to be eaten alive anyway. Want to know a secret? Guitarists spend hours and hours discussing the minutiae of the technical features of their guitars, amps, and the miscellaneous hoovers and moulinexes they plug in between them. It's all about them having this or that component that makes them superior. Or they have the fret board that only uses bio-organically heat-molded spruce from the southern hillside farms in Guatemala, where the optimal micro-climate has enhanced the porousness of the material in such a way that it allows 2% more upper-range vibration-damping when playing fast passages. In each guitar that a proper guitarist owns, there are at least 3 such features, which, so they say, have been the criteria for choosing that particular guitar among the 3 655 430 they have tested in various music shops around the world, by playing 'Stairway to Heaven' and the riff from 'Smoke in the Water' driving all music shop keepers to become the edgy nervous wrecks they are. And the secret? They just buy the guitar that looks the coolest.

The makers of the optical guitar clearly know their target group, the geeky hifi-guitarists who publicly claim to prefer progressive rock, while they secretly hope they could play in Bon Jovi. So, the guitar actually looks as boring and mainstream as Bon Jovi sounds, and to give them the argument their proge-hifist side-personae would approve, according to HarmonyCentral the "pickup is responsive to string movement below and well above human hearing".

Fan-tas-tic. As blogger M brilliantly put it: "That's awesome. I've been working on some compositions that are outside the range of human hearing, and now I can finally not hear how they sound."