Ever wanted to improve your picking skills? Imagine if you didn’t have to. Guitar player Olav Kvern has built a robotic device that fits to an electric guitar and picks its strings for you.
The idea started when Kvern was watching a Seattle guitarist he admired, the late Klaus Lendzian. “As I watched him play, I thought, ‘He’s really good. Lyrical, a great sense of timing. Wow, I wish I could play like that. What makes it all work is his right hand, his picking hand. It’s like a machine,'” Kvern writes on makezine.com. “A machine, I thought, at that moment. I can build a machine.”
“I wanted to be able to play patterns on the guitar that would be difficult or impossible for me to play,” added writer and software developer Kvern, 65. “Or for almost anyone to play. (John McLaughlin or Yvette Young notwithstanding).”
