Musician Anthony Dickens has created a unique guitar equipped with a mechanical step sequencer allowing it to create a wide variety of different sounds, textures and rhythms that would be impossible on a conventional electric guitar.
Thanks to a motor-driven spinning disc in the body of the guitar, rotating at up to 250 beats-per-minute under the strings. The guitar has 128 slots for guitar picks to be placed in, and these strike the strings instead of a player’s pick hand. To add even more scope to the music, the force the picks strike the strings can be set by the musician. Check out the demonstration video below to see the Circle Guitar in action.
“Hand built with the help of a team of brilliant engineers (all hail Jacob Boast, Luke Perkin & Marie Tricaud) in London. Circle generates sounds, textures and rhythms that would be impossible with a conventional electric guitar. By using a mechanical device to strike the strings, rather than a human hand, you can exceed what is physically possible and push guitar playing into new, unexplored territories.”
“The sound is caught by a hexaphonic or ‘multi-channel’ pickup. Each string has its own output that can be amplified, recorded and processed individually. You can pan each string across the mix, blend different effects across the strings or set up rhythmic gates to turn individual strings on and off in time with Circles set speed. The options for audio processing using guitar effects pedals, amplifiers, modular synthesis or digital audio workstations are vast.”