Play Guitar To Send Email - Say Hello To 'Email Guitar'

How do you like the idea of playing Guitar to compose and send that important email to your boss? What do you think about adding music to the boring business of sending email? Well, you've got to say hello to the Email Guitar - the guitar that replaces your keyboard with the fret-board. Wieden+Kennedy's David Neevel used his Roland GR-33 Guitar Synth along with an Arduino Uno and some crazy electronics & code to turn his Flying V into keyboard. The guitar is a true 'plug-n-play' - because to use it as a keyboard, all you need to do is attach a USB cable from computer to your guitar.


David says that the system could not detect individual notes using guitar's pickups. He found a solution by mounting a Roland GK-2A divided pickup so that he could capture output from individual string. This technique allowed him to map different keyboard keys to various locations on fret-board.

The pickup captures and sends the signal to the GR-33 synth as MIDI output via opto-isolator circuit to the Arduino board. The microcontroller then syncs with a relay board that David custom designed for his email guitar.


The keystrokes that have been mapped to the fretboard include numbers, shift and delete keys as well. Check out the following video that shows David Neevel typing a simple line of text using his email guitar.