A plastic feedback sustain guitar with a digital signal processor for feedback control

My original motivation for designing a guitar in CAD was to enable quick design iteration
in order to incorporate all kinds of interesting electronics.

I was especially interested in building in a Sustainiac which is an electro-mechanical feedback device
for giving a guitar infinite sustain. Unfortunately Sustainiacs can be a bit temperamental and hard to control.
CAD design allowed me to iterate on placement of the electronics..

In this quicktime movie we demonstrate DSP control of the Sustainiac.

The DSP is programmed as a digital delay line. Each time we touch the button on the DSP board, the delay length
is increased by 6 milliseconds. Different delay lengths support the sustain of different frequencies.

Jeff Kauffman, spent a week programming the DSP for his junior year high-school internship with me.

Big thanks to Alan Hoover, maker of the Sustainiac,
for all of his tips and for supplying me with transducers!