Visionary Instruments
At Visionary Instruments in Oakland, Calif., guitar designer Ben Lewry is putting a new, technological spin on a classic instrument.
Each handmade instrument is custom built and designed to hold electronics that run a video screen mounted on the body underneath the strings.
Videos are loaded into the instrument's 2GB hard drive or run off of an attached USB device.
Guitar hacker
Many incarnations
Lewry built his first video guitar in 2006. The design has come a long way since then, going through numerous incarnations.
The model pictured here contains a Toshiba laptop which Lewry ordered new, disassembled, and fit inside a custom guitar body. He quickly came to realize that putting an entire laptop inside a guitar made it uncomfortably heavy, and modified the design.
Lightening up
Custom made
Screen insert
Circuit boards
The insides
Lewry's training
Lewry does not have formal training in instrument building or engineering, but he did study in Dharamshala, India, with a Tibetan man named Kunga, who hand-built a traditional instrument called the dramyin. (Lewry and Kunga are pictured together in the photo frame at the bottom left of the image.)
Lewry learned to craft instruments with hand tools and applied this knowledge to guitars before setting out with his video guitar designs.
The newest guitar
Lewry's newest video guitar, seen here, is an edgier design geared toward heavy metal. Two videos loaded on the instrument are a crawling bug video and clips from King Kong. Weighing in at about 9 pounds, the guitar is similar in weight to Fender Strats and Gibson Les Paul guitars.
This isn't the end of innovation for Ben Lewry and Visionary Instruments. While so much technological change has come to musical instruments in the past few decades, most of it has come in the hardware accompanying instruments. The sounds are affected through changes in amplifiers and manipulated with pedals.
Lewry sees a new dynamic emerging in guitar playing, where custom tones and sounds are created right in the guitar with MIDI, and the guitar itself becomes a visual focus of the performance.