Firstly, the ElektroCaster can be played like a normal (baritone-)guitar, which in itself I'm quite proud of. It's neck is admittedly kind of thick and I whish there would be thinner v-slots available (15x15 would be nice). But all in all, I really do enjoy playing it. 

Let's talk about what the ElektroCaster can do what others can't, by quickly sketch some possible applications. Some of them I allready have implemented and some are in the pipeline.

There are two main categories of applications I have in mind, while devolping this Guitar, which partially overlap: Eduaction and making music.

Education

• learning a scale:
  • display the scale on the fretboard. Highlight important intervals like the third and fifth by different colors
  • sense whether a wrong note is played and give feedbacke, e.g by
    • muting the string on which the note was played
    • play a particular sound
• play one note and immediatly see all other notes of the same value on the fretboard to look for alternative ways to play something
• teach guitar
  • connect two ElektroCasters, one for the teacher and on for the student.
    • Display notes the teacher plays on his guitar on the on fretboard of the student to help him find the next note.

In the Video below you see me improvising along a b-major-scale. It's a bit hard to see, but there are different colors for different intervalls: The root is red, the third is green, the fifth blue and the seventh pink. The second, fourth and the sixth are darker and white. Although I know how to play a major scale over the entire fretboard, it's a really interesting experience - It feels releaving not think about the position of the notes.

Music making

In the video below you can see me playing a sequencer projected to the fretboard, which is programmed by using the touch-sensing frets. It works not perfect yet, but I'm making good progress to improve on that. Notice that the strings are muted and do only sound when the string touches a fret and the sequencer hits an activated step. The strings are hit with the blue device next to the pickup which basically consists of 6 solenoids. I call it KickUp.

This is just a demo implementation, but I think it shows which sonic possibillities are opend up by this combination of sensing led-frets, hexaphonic signal path with dsp and robotic elements like the kickup. Next step to improve the sequencer is to use envelopes to switch the strings on and off more smoothely.