Keith over at kyubmusic recently took some time out of his day to answer my questions. He has been cooking up some interesting musical inventions, and recently had success with the Kyub kit. I am grateful for his insight, and had to share it with you.

First off, who are you? And how did you get started making these delightful boxes?
I guess I am a musical instrument designer! I’m not trying to dodge the question, but it just made me realize that maybe I passed a threshold in some sense of having sold musical instruments I designed. So if you stick with something you like may be it does work out. I studied electronics in college but was always interested in music and constructing things. I am mostly self-taught in these latter categories, something possible, I think, because these are things that interest me. I live in Milwaukee with my wife and my dog who sings to the violin if it is played just right :).
My first working design was for a servoelectric guitar in which the strings are tuned by changing their tension at high speed over about an octave – so it’s different than an auto tuning guitar. There are a handful of videos on the web of the various iterations of this and I have a website www.servoelectric guitar.com which has build instructions. It’s something that got a lot of views but didn’t go much beyond that.
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