Handheld musical practice device

摘要

A micro-practicing device emulates a portion of a full size instrument. The micro-practicing device includes a fingerboard with fret wires dividing the fingerboard into frets. In order to emulate the portion of the full size instrument, a length of each fret substantially matches lengths of frets of full size instruments. At the same time, the fingerboard is sized to enable increased portability. The device includes capacitive sensors adapted to detect the longitudinal and transverse positions of the user's fingers on the frets, and to communicate that positional information to a body portion. The body portion transmits the positional information to an external musical module, which converts the positional information into musical tones.

主权项

1. A hand-held micro-practicing device for emulating a portion of a full size instrument having a plurality of strings and a plurality of frets, the device comprising:
a neck portion that includes:
a fingerboard having a length and a width, the length of the fingerboard being more than 3 times the width of the fingerboard but less than 20 times the width of the fingerboard, the fingerboard being configured to emulate only a subset of the plurality of strings of the full size instrument;a plurality of capacitive touch sensors;one or more fret wires on the upper surface of the fingerboard that divide the fingerboard into a plurality of frets, each of the plurality of frets corresponding to one or more of the plurality of capacitive touch sensors; anda neck connector operatively coupled to the plurality of capacitive touch sensors; and a body portion that includes:
a body connector adapted to operatively couple the body portion to the neck connector of the neck portion, the body connector adapted to receive electrical communications from the plurality of capacitive touch sensors via the neck connector;a human operable switch adapted to select which string or strings of the plurality of strings of the full size instrument are included in the subset of the plurality of strings and to generate string data indicating that selection; anda communications module adapted to translate the electrical communications into positional data and to transmit the positional data and the string data from the human operable switch to an external processor for conversion to musical information.