Misa, a touchpad guitar

The Misa is “not a guitar” says Michael, it’s creator, based out of Sydney, Australia. The Misa is designed to play electronic music.

In electronic music, the timbre (or colour) of the sound can be morphed in an infinite number of ways. For a guitar to accommodate this, the right hand needs more control than just plucking strings. You need to be able to control elements of the sound, such as sustain, pitch, filter cutoffs, contour or any other synthesizer parameter, in a way that has no physical constraints.

Misa digital guitars to acoustic guitars or electric guitars. Those are different instruments, for different artforms, for different music. This is electronic music.

The Misa plugs into a MIDI controller and runs a Linux kernel. The instrument’s software is open-source and designed to be enhanced by the community.

Here’s how it works.

if you tap on the left side of the screen you play a note with an effect parameter knob turned more to the left and if you tap to the right side of the screen the note is played with the knob turned to the right. Similarly with the top and bottom of the screen. Since there are two axis’ (X/Y) you can actually control two parameters at once.

Pretty cool.