Keith McMillen is the founded Keith Millen Instruments about 7 years ago and it now has about 15 members. Keith made his name in the music invention and instrument making industry with his innovative and interesting creations. His music instrument inventions give the artist of today inspiration and a more advance and dynamic way of self expression. New technology inspires him and his team to explore new dimensions to showcase the wonders of music.
Keith has been into music technology for about 30 years already. He started at 1979 with Zeta Music. His desire to showcase a more interactive and modern music instrument has lead to his numerous design innovations. His creativity has paved way to creating a new market for music instrument design. Through the years he has founded G-WIZ which is a research and development laboratory for Gibson Guitars. Several years after that, he founded Octiv Inc. which focuses on the problems regarding inconsistent audio quality. He later on sold Octiv Inc. and went on to fund BEAM Foundation’s operations. One of his precious music inventions may be the MAPPS. This is described as “an integrated computer composition, notation and performance system”.
Our team is building research notes on successful kickstarter projects. Here are our background notes on the ten most funded kickstarter musical instruments. You should be able to guess the most popular idea. But, where does your idea fall into the top 10? Considering how small many of these groups are, the industrial design, quality and price points of many of these instruments is incredible.
EDIT: The folks at Gtar pointed out that we somehow missed the Queneo during the first draft of this article. This list is now the top 11. In order to make amends, our next piece is on Keith McMillen.
Win $10,000. The king of music instrument competitions is out again. Get your entrees ready for Guthman 2014. Georgia Tech’s annual competition to make music instruments. Guthman 2012 inspired the Atlantic to write this piece, “Why is it so hard for new musical instruments to catch on?”
Tuning a violin can be done in a few simple steps. Understanding how to tune a violin is essential for beginning violin. This post moves past violin basics and dives in to what violin strings are made of and how the tuning of a violin works. A on violin is 440 Hz, one of the easier pitches to remember.
How to Tune A Violin
This youtube does a fanstastic job of walking you through violin tuning. This simple online violin tuner is a handy tool for adjusting the pitch of your violin strings.
What Are the Strings on a Violin
The four strings on the violin are separated in fifths. The violin strings notes are G, D, A and E. The strongest argument for using fifths, is the increased playability of the instruments. Others argue, violins are tuned in fifth to provide richer overtones. Over the years, violin strings evolved to provide a good balance of tension and thickness to meet tuning in fifths of the four strings. But this was not always the case. In a nod to quality over features, the E string was dropped on many models during the second half of the 18th century. Instrument makers of three string violins felt the quality of that thicker string didn’t live up to the tone of the other strings.
Originally, violin strings were made of sheep guts. Since the 1920s, violin strings were available as different metals. The original steel strings resonated too strongly. Metal strings have since mellowed yet people claim “metal will always sound metallic”- synthetic materials have since been developed to compete with guts. For each type of string there are multiple manufacturers that provide different claims to timbre, reliability, longevity, dynamics and feel. Shapechanginginstruments has yet to do our own study on different violin strings.
Finally, its worth noting some violins do have 5 strings by adding a C. Electronic violins can add lower notes with a sixth or seventh string. Naturally, these versions of the instrument are used in more modern styles of music like jazz, country fiddling and swing. But the additional strings leads to compromises in tone that prevent these violins from universal adoption.
Introduction to the Physics String Vibration
Violin lengths, materials and thicknesses in general are chosen to have equal tension across the strings. Light gauge violin strings or heavy gauge violin strings can be both be used. The tension affects the decay of the note, the playability, timbre and amplitude dynamics of the strings. Heavily tensioned strings – on a certain style of bass instruments – require a large amount of bow force to start the attack on the string. The classic model for understanding string vibration is:
This provides enough background to adequately design materials for the well pitched strings and the violin neck that won’t break. But it likely lacks some of the non-linear affects that come from the coiling found in many strings. There is more in depth research on violin physics, but we have yet to digest it.
Moving beyond the Magnetic Resonator Piano, Andrew Macpherson joined a team to make Touchkeys, a kickstarter project that brings multi-touch add-on to keyboard controllers. Touchkeys allows every key on a MIDI controller to have individual X-Y location mapped on the keys. Keyboardists will instantly become more expressive and creative with this add on. Here at Shapchanginginstruments.com, we think this will be a historic project.
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