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Science

Nanoguitar - The Next Musical Generation 78

Posted by Roblimo from the now-we-need-a-nanoguitarist-to-play-it dept.
Sewerpickle writes "Scientists ... have sucessfully made a guitar 10 millionths of a meter big (size of a red blood cell). And based loosely on the Fender Stratocaster. It actually can be played at notes around 10MHz." Let's see. Hemos is a nanotech buff and Cmdr Taco is learning to play guitar. Seems to me the Geek Compound ought to have one of these around.
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Nanoguitar - The Next Musical Generation More

Nanoguitar - The Next Musical Generation

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  • We have finally found a use for that nano-Yngwie- Malmsteen we created back in 88... now if only we could find a left handed nano-guitar, nano-Jimi would be able to rock a few nano-bars of nano-purple-haze.
  • (Begin annoying Guitar Center commercial voice)

    This weekend only, get a Cornell Nanocaster for only $199,995 in grant money. Yes, you heard right -- an actual Cornell Nanocaster. Not a Squire, not an imitation, the REAL THING.

    {Explosion sound)

    And get half off our entire line of nano-accessories. Nano cases starting at $79,995. Two-for-one nano strings. Nano picks, nano tuners, nano nano nano, Mork! It's the nano deals of the century! First come, first served. This weekend only and only at

    Nano Guitar Center
  • I'm sorry, but this is the second story I've read this morning. Both have been infiltrated by offensive bigots. I don't really want it, but perhaps now is the time to remove the concept of "Anonymous Coward".
  • Looks almost like one of those stupid "Fly"s.
    I forget who makes them or I'd give a webpage for it.

    If you've played one, you'd probably know what I mean when I say it's probably the same weight :)
  • I've seen the picture also. A long time ago. This isn't news. To be excactly the first press release was 2 years ago: July 22, 1997.

    take a look at:
    http://www.news.cornell.edu/science/July97/guita r.ltb.html

    Haven't they invented something new in these 2 years.
  • I bet he could too!

    This was in SNL skit if you don't know what I'm talking about :) Gets played on the Comedy Channel like once a day I think!
  • If this is a someone looking for attention, call your family and talk to them about being negleted as a child.

    And if you are serious, simply kill yourself and speed up the evolutionary process.
  • It should also be noted that this guitar isnt made with whats considered 'nanotechnology' but is created using regular 'bulk'-technology.

    The real meaning of nanotechnology is the way you build it, not how big it is, and in nanotechnology it should be built using single atoms each seperately placed where it should be.

    One significant difference is that in bulk-technology on the microscale you want to build as small as possible if you want to be cool, but in nanotechnology you want to build as large as possible, because you already have control over the induvidual atoms and want to build complex stuff...

    like nanobots =)
  • It's all conjecture. The front-page blurb says:
    "It actually can be played at notes around 10MHz"
    but all the article says is:
    "Plucking the tiny strings would produce a high-pitched sound..."

    They haven't tested it, they don't know for sure. My guess is that angels would pour forth from the device and flock to the nearest needle-point.

    Either that or Hemos would explode. I think we need a raging ethical debate as to whether or not we should risk Hemos to try and answer an old, old question.

  • The Fender XII was a solid-body 12-string discontinued in the late 60's. It had two split pickups. Too much guitar trivia knowledge is a sign of a misspent youth.

    http://www.provide.net/~cfh/fender2 .html#elec12 [provide.net]
  • You should set your preferences to a threshold of +1, then you'll filter all AC postings, except those which have been moderated upwards.
  • Hmmm. Doesn't look much like strat to me. And if it's a guitar (it does have six strings), why does it have bass pickups? It's definitely not a Fender head, the top horns look like a BC Rich, and for some reason they made it left handed...
  • if only we could find a left handed nano-guitar, nano-Jimi would be able to rock a few nano-bars of nano-purple-haze.

    Take another look -- it is left handed. Personally, I'd prefer a right handed one for nano-Yngwie anyway, but that's personal preference for you...

  • If you could work out a way to play these things, you could use them as a trnsmitter, coupling with a reciever to create isolation, similar to an optocoupler.

    Modulation would be handy

  • Seems to me the Geek Compound ought to have one of these around.

    Perhaps it already does. I mean, at that size, it's not like you'd see it lying around or anything...

  • Hiding from a problem doesn't usually cure it.
  • the neck is too small for his nano-vibrato.

    I can't think of anything more annoying than a high pitched Ymkme Plmkreem.
  • <insert visual image of someone rubbing fingers together>


    A: It's the world's smallest guitar playing for wannabe rock stars in science labs.

  • Ok, who's smoking the dope... This was posted about a year ago on /.
    Oh well.. Back to Geek News [geeknews.net].
  • Seems to me the Geek Compound ought to have one of
    these around.


    Perhaps they have a few million around but don't know it.

    Perhaps I do, too. (I WONDERED why things were getting so dusty...)

  • So indeed it is left handed...

    But I seem to recall that Jimi had a normal right-handed guitar, he just flipped the thing over.

  • I think the Nano-Guitar is a cool thing. But this story is at least a year old.

    I remember copying my friends about it in mid-98.

  • Looks to me like a guitar-shaped carving. I don't see working tuning machines, implying that the strings are not under tension but are simply carved there, and would not vibrate. Still, pretty cool looking though. If only the people who did these things knew to produce 1024x768 jpegs of them for desktop pictures! :)
  • It took ahwile,. but it's all coming back to me now.

    I think it was Dice Clay that played the part.

    Heh heh.

    (I still need some sleep)
  • Now all we need are a set of nano-people to play the guitar. Heh.

    (FIRST POST)

    -
  • This is a really interesting aspect. Now my ant farm can have entertainment. :) Seriously, though. What is the practical application for such a device? I may be wrong, but aren't our tax dollars going towards such research? I personally wouldn't want a guitar I couldn't play. A nice collection item for a millionaire, but that's all I can see it as...

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • Are any flea circuses going to start a spinoff
    from this vital new technology?
  • Did you ever look at a guitar string with a TV behind the string (to create a strobe effect). It's very cool. You can see the wave move and change.

    Well now ya know what I do for fun!


  • It would be particularly cool if you they could study coherence effects and quantum strings (not related to superstrings) by actually playing the instrument in some repeatable fashion. Unfortunately, the strings seem to be too big for quantum effects according to the specifications ... maybe one could generate "whispering gallery" matter wave modes in clumps of similar atoms nearby, if the material is indeed springy enough.

    The primary significance of this seems to be to study nanofabrication industrial processes, instead of doing anything particularly funky scientifically.

    Pardon me if I've thrown a wet blanket on the discussion ...


    *** Proven iconoclast, aspiring bohemian. ***
  • Look at the press release [cornell.edu]. It's from July, 1997. I've seen this picture in books. Why is it on Slashdot? I could understand some breakthrough, but this site is "News for Nerds," and this story isn't news.
  • pays for stuff like this?
  • I was sitting here with my laptop, jaw comfortably attached to my skull, then this strange web page popped up with a black and white picture of a guitar.

    Then I saw how large the guitar was(two microns), and there went the jaw.

    The IBM-Written-In-Atoms was cool. The fact that this guitar is That Small, That Accurate, and That *PLAYABLE* is mind boggling. I've never seen a more visceral sign that Nanotech is real than this.

    Wow. Just...wow.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com



  • BC Rich (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It looks more like a BC Rich [bcrich.com] than a stratocaster [fender.com]. It looks a heck of a lot like those custom guitars Jerry Garcia played.
  • How many nano-rock stars can you fit on the head of a pin?
  • Wow...I think I need one of those to complement my Gibson semi-hollow and my Larrivee steel-string...
    But seriously, there isn't even any question of why? That's some serious uber-geekdom. We should all be proud. I am proud. I want them to make an entire nano-rock band and then have an elctron-microscope webcam set up so we can watch them play.
    That would be a really cool video anyway...
  • "And he could play the guitar like ringing a cell..."

    Sorry.

    As a musician, I must strongly protest this development.
    This will allow pub landlords to compress the band into
    smaller and smaller spaces until we'll end up playing in
    a cigarette packet at the end of the bar. As an added
    effect, the music will be beyond the hearing range of most if not
    all of the punters. (although the drummer will still be too loud, of course.)

    Harrumph.

    dave
  • ............at least it sounds that loud. Oh, how I long for a Marshall. As for playing it, if the strings were tuned you could cause a string to vibrate by matching the frequency with an outside noise. Like an Ebow (for those in the know), almost. It would basically be like starting a feedback loop, but instead of playing the start of the loop on the guitar it would come from an outside source. My other thought is if you possessed such a thing, how would you prove it.

  • Clarification... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06, 1999 @08:09PM (#1632577)
    Lets clear this up... This guitar was made in 1997 by Dustin Carr at Cornell University. It was _not_ I repeat _not_ made by the american institute of physics, who just happens to have the press release on there home page. I happen to work in the same building as the Craighead group (of which Dustin was a member at the time) and can swear to the fact that it was created by him, and not the AIP. In fact, I think this was on slashdot way back when...
  • ...where could one find a pick small enough to play it?



    -AP
  • But in this case, moderation and filtering is the best solution we have. There are many Slashdot readers who like having Anonymous Cowards, and many insightful AC posts. The current system lets you choose whether you want them or not.

    In any case, I'd say that hiding the problem is the same thing as curing it in this case. If you never see the offensive messages, never even know that they exist, then for you, they might as well not be there. Unless you are advocating censorship, or 24-hour monitoring of what everyone says and types, I don't see that there is a better 'cure'.
  • Ocource there are practicle applications. If the nano-guitars could carry oxygen I want my blood replaced with them so the music could travel through my body for real.

    The fact that you can actually play the guitar is impressive, not just need self operated moving parts and you pretty much have the most advanced medical applications to man.

    Screw the damn organic immune system, this leaves room for robotic defences, maybe eventually to the stage where robot cells could identify HIV and destroy it. Still it seems unlikely any advanced sensory unit could be added to a nano-robot anytime soon.
  • What the hell is the use of a nano guitar? I could understand interesting applications, like a nanocpu or something useable, but who the hell is going to play a nano guitar, esssh, people need to freaking get real and do more interesting thing with whatever they do, I do tell them to shove that nanoguitar up their, but they do need a trillon of them to feel pain.

  • Check out this BBC news article [bbc.co.uk] for more up to date information. S'cool - so are we going to have clockwork robots made of this stuff? Kinda amusing thought, having purely mechanical driven nanobots, instead of electrically driven... You'd have to have more robots to wind them back up once they run down, though...
  • Personally, I think it strongly resembles a left-handed Parker-Fly.

    The pickups are a bit worrying. Maybe someone's finally made a six-string bass of a reasonable size.

    dave
  • Pure reasearch is its own reward....

    Seriously, maybe they're interested in the
    effects of shm of a string ~ 1e-9 metres long...

    Ie the effect on human tissue for instance...

  • There was on old fender - really old - that had jass-bass style "split" pickups. Cant remember the name right now.

    By the way, they say it is "loosely" based on a strat. But then again, every guitar made after '54 was "loosely" based on a strat.

  • Scientists at wsvw1u labs have designed and built a nano-man of size proportionate to the nano-guitar. This conveniant size enables him to "rock out" with sed guitar.Here [ctstateu.edu] he is, pictured complete with really cute hat
  • And that one person is Atom Ant.

    Or was that Adam Ant that was the musician ?

    Ok,. so there is only one BUG that could play the thing,.. ATOM ANT !

    Oh yeah,. he's not a bug,..... (everyone!) HE'S A FEATURE !

    Oh man,. I need some sleep.
  • this tiny guitar is a playful example of nanotechnology, in which scientists are building machines and structures on the scale of billionths of a meter to perform useful technological functions

    Yeah sure, extremely useful if you happen to be a member of the highly acclaimed metal band Nanobotica from Planet Zorp!

    Nice promo stunt, you |33+ d00dz!

  • yeah but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Would a bewolf cluster of these make up a nano-band?
  • Well, right now the nanotech people can't make anything useful. They expect to some day, but right now they're learning how to move atoms around into structures. If you can't make something useful, at least make something cool.

    That's why Logo is a neat language to learn about programming. When you learned to program in Basic you probably wrote a bunch of useless trivial prgrams that printed out a table of squares or something like that. On the other hand, in Logo you end up with a neat star shape or spiral on your screen, useless in itself, but you're learning about recursion and iteration, and maybe some geometry too.
  • Okay.. where does it say on the title of a post
    by An.. Co.., White Anglo Sax Protestant

    For all we know, some of the biggest names in open source might be African-American, Aboriginal, Jewish (almost definately here, I know several), or any one of a number of other ethnic minorities, or popular scapegoats. I have not read one peice of code that has leaped out and said to me "Oh the author of this must be Afro-Am cos' he's using that 'nigger' style indentation".. Look beyond the world you live in guys (and girls :)...

    The other point from this article is that, if someone hasn't gotten a first post article, this suggests to me that they might put a little more effort and thought into a comment, That is a noble thing rather than something for sneering at.
  • Well, I don't know if it's a local quote or not, but

    *rubbing thumb and forefinger* "This is the worlds smallest violin, and it's playing just for you"

    takes on a whole new meaning now :)
  • Guys, the press release on this is from 1997...Its been old news for a while...I had the picture as a background on my laptop over a year ago....guys, keep up
  • Yeah sure, extremely useful if you happen to be a member of the highly acclaimed metal band Nanobotica from Planet Zorp!

    As the Interplanetary Liason For the United Brotherhood of Zorpian Metal Bands, I can tell you that this is only the beginning. Our scientists have acquired DNA samples and are currently at work creating nanoclones of Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn to play the nanoguitar.

    There is a downside... recently hundreds of nanorock fans were crushed to death when a Zorp's Angel hired as a security guard inadvertently stepped on the nanomosh pit.

    ======
    "Cyberspace scared me so bad I downloaded in my pants." --- Buddy Jellison

  • I work for wsvw1u [wsvw1u.com] labs, and i dont know who you are, or how you got a picture of our nanoman, but shut-up about it, and stop posting it all over the damn internet!
  • Not to be picky, but as a bassist I must correct you...

    The Fender Precision Bass has had a split-coil pickup since 1957. The Jazz has two single-coils pickups (one in the middle, one in front of the bridge).

    So far as I know, the only guitar I've ever seen with split-coil pickups is a G&L. This nano-guitar looks more like an Ibanez Iceman with that huge lower horn.

  • It should be noted that this is a micro-guitar, and not a nano-guitar. Micrometer-scale are not horrifically difficult to fabricate using even conventional means. But nano-scale objects get down to the messy business of moving molecules around.
  • Actually, St. Jimi played a right-handed Stat turned upside-down and strung backwards; said he liked the position in which it put the control knobs.

    There's a right-handed guitarist I've seen playing the Baltimore bar scene who takes a left-handed stat and plays it upside and backwards to get the same effect. Interesting how people find unanticipated ways to control technological devices.

  • Heh, Anon-guy.

    I wasn't aware I wasn't allowed to be impressed by something I've seen.

    Were you referring to this specific post(which I just shot off, not being a nano-geek but now officially being much more fascinated with it), or my posts in general? A bit more content would be...uh...useful.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky
    DoxPara Research
    http://www.doxpara.com

  • Was new in 1997, now the process is better (Score:3)

    by vik ( 17857 ) on Wednesday October 06, 1999 @09:40PM (#1632606) Homepage Journal
    That was announced in July '97 and the guitar was made with what is now an old manufacturing process, limited to 3 layers of silicon.

    The latest red-hot technology is 5-layer silicon, which allows the manufacture of far more complex machines - including machines which can errect themselves into structures out of the plane of the manufactured silicon.

    HP are now making 2 nanometer wires - much smaller than the 40nm wires used on the nanoguitar - to join up their molecular logic gates with. In about 8 years time the first "molecular chips" will start to appear, and my guess is that the next 5 will see the advent of the first nanotech assembler. (see http://www.foresight.org [foresight.org])

    Vik :v)
  • Look at the shadows near both arms. Look just a little bit ...photoshop'd...?

    And 1997?? Yeeesh.

    My .02
    Quux26

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