Control by Cable-within-Tube

[Jim Palenscar]

Ed Packard has been working on this idea for years~

[chris ivey]

as for the drone concept....wouldn't this allow you to have your steel at the venue and play it from your living room couch. you know, a little audio feed from the gig...yeah.
here's to the future, and the demise of soul!

[Will Cowell]

Les Cargill suggested there would be a need for a lot of servos because some guitars have about 30 pulls. That's not really a problem: you have one servo per string. You command the pitch desired shift and the servo responds by changing the string tension until you hit the target note. It doesn't matter how many changes: there will only ever be a need for one servo per string.

My design used miniature motors driving screwjacks. The motors were 18mm diameter, 5 each side, 9.5mm string spacing - no problem. You don't need to program "feel". The "feel" of a conventional PSG derives from the opposition to movement from springs and the string itself - another kind of elastic spring. You can put springs on a servo PSG to simulate the same opposition.

[chris ivey]

who's gonna pick the strings, you ask?
rc robots with servos and a cowboy hat.

[Jack Aldrich]

[quote="Alan Brookes"] I believe the reason that MultiKords were built with all the pedals on the left, in a semicircle, was because of the difficulty of angling the cables from any other place. This could be obviated by the use of bicycle brake cables.

quote]Alan - As I learned the history of the pedal steel from Jeff Newman, Winnie Winston and others, I was told that the impetus behind pedals, at first, was to accomodate retuning and reduce the number of necks on lap steel guitars of the time. Before split pedals, pedal pulls changed whole chrods - e.g., pushing pedal "A" moved the steel from an E to an A tuning. So, until Bud Isaacs recorded "Slowly" with Webb Pierce, nobody moved pedals during a song.

[Walter Killam]

I've toyed with the idea of using punchcards like the ones used in a jacquard loom. 1 card to set the base tuning, then a second card to configure the pedals. I may get to prototyping sometime in the next decade or so!

[Les Cargill]

Les Cargill suggested there would be a need for a lot of servos because some guitars have about 30 pulls. That's not really a problem: you have one servo per string. You command the pitch desired shift and the servo responds by changing the string tension until you hit the target note. It doesn't matter how many changes: there will only ever be a need for one servo per string.

My design used miniature motors driving screwjacks. The motors were 18mm diameter, 5 each side, 9.5mm string spacing - no problem. You don't need to program "feel". The "feel" of a conventional PSG derives from the opposition to movement from springs and the string itself - another kind of elastic spring. You can put springs on a servo PSG to simulate the same opposition.

Yeah, Will - I'm thinking you'd still need a changer, but you've seem to be done gone past me on that detail

Even then my math is off - you'd need at most two servos per string *with* a changer. If there's some way to get a servo to do both lowers and raises that cuts that in half. I bet that's doable, even with the little block ones the guy with the servo Tele bender used.

Your screw jack idea seems better, though.

[Stephen Williams]

I'm building a psg with cables.

Re 2 changes per pedal: use 2 cables on the pedal. You can use pulleys etc etc but seems simpler to just use 2 runs from the pedal.

Seems like it would be hard to terminate the cable sheath at the pedal so i was thinking of running bare cable from pedal to deck then using cables ending up in rods.

[Stephen Williams]

I'm building a psg with cables.

Re 2 changes per pedal: use 2 cables on the pedal. You can use pulleys etc etc but seems simpler to just use 2 runs from the pedal.

Seems like it would be hard to terminate the cable sheath at the pedal so i was thinking of running bare cable from pedal to deck then using cables ending up in rods.

[Kevin LaFond]

I made this in the early 80's. Every thing was made of Lexon except the bike cables and hardware. It worked very well and was pretty quick on the tone return after releasing the pedals. It was a fun project. Dennis

Dennis, do you still have this guitar?

[Dennis Brown]

I do not have this anymore. Sure wish I did.