I often ponder novel ways of augmenting existing instruments. It’s either a side-effect of being into Steampunk, or part of what drew me to the culture to begin with. Historically, people have come up with some truly nutty ideas for new or modified instruments, some of which are now commonplace (the saxophone) and some of which remain oddities (the Stroh violin). Harp guitars are one of my favorites, and I’ve come up with a way of making these strange beasts even stranger.

Let’s start off with one of the basic Gibson models, made around 1905. This behemoth has a regular guitar neck, playable in the normal fashion, with the addition of 10 sub-bass strings that can be plucked in accompaniment. Sort of like being your own bass player. Thing is, it takes a lot of concentration to work both the guitar neck and the harp strings, plus it limits the styles you can play in, since you’re constantly alternating between the two. Wouldn’t it be sweet if those bass strings could play themselves?

Not only can it be done, but you could use technology that was readily available when this guitar was made. Harp-style playing is pretty easy to automate—unlike a guitar or violin, where one hand plucks/bows the string while the other frets the string to change its pitch, harp strings always play the same pitch and only need to be plucked in turn. One could position a small “paddle-wheel” made of hard rubber, at intervals, under each harp string, that would pluck the string when turned:

Now comes the question of programming. The automation of musical instruments goes back to the 9th century, when a trio of Persian inventors came up with a hydropowered organ in Baghdad. Their instrument used a pinned barrel, a mechanism that is the basis for many other instruments to follow. Barrel organs and music boxes both operate on a similar principle, and both were well established by the 19th century. The idea is that a cylinder is studded with pins that trigger a sound, either by striking a bell, activating a reed, etc. The pins are spaced on the wheel so as it turns, their horizontal location denotes a pitch and their relative position on the cylinder’s diameter determines when the note is played. In fancy devices, the cylinder can be swapped out for another, playing a different melody. These cylinders represent the “programs”, and can be seen as a very early form of digital music (as they represent music in a discrete, numerical encoding).

We get an interesting inversion of the barrel with the player piano, prototypes of which began emerging in the mid 19th century, resolving into a fairly final and standard form in the 1890s. Now, instead of the pinned mechanism containing the notes, it becomes a reader, and a punched tape (the piano roll) is fed into the device and determined what notes are played in which sequence. As you can imagine, a paper scroll is a much better data medium than a big ol’ cylinder!

Back to music boxes: I don’t know when and if it ever happened historically, but there are currently punch-tape-operated music boxes available, using the player piano mechanics on a small scale. You crank through the tape and it plays the song. The cool thing about them is they usually come with blanks so you can make your own songs. Here’s the idea:

Now, putting it all together: the harp guitar has a trap-door in the back of the body, giving access to a spring-wound player mechanism. You insert a scroll with dowels at both ends, so that one side picks up the tape as the other unfurls. Once the scroll is set in place and the mechanism is wound, a switch on the top of the guitar starts it rolling. The mechanism triggers those little paddle wheels in sequence, plucking the bass strings according to the programmed arrangement on the tape. There’s probably a way of using gears to adjust the speed of the windup mechanism, to change tempos (another switch) and it would be easy for musicians to write their own accompaniment with a blank scroll and a hole punch.

Ta-daaaa!