Odd News Valve's Jeri Ellsworth Creates Cool Bass Guitar Out of Old Commodore 64!

Yesterday, we brought you news that hardware designer Jeri Ellsworth had been fired from Valve for reasons currently unknown, as were several of her colleagues.

After I wrote that story, I had a look at the video in the source article and figured that was also newsworthy enough to write about.

Jeri likes to build homebrew gear out of old parts and here she's done a pretty good job of turning an old junk Commodore 64 into a cool bass guitar. The classic 30 year old computer cost her around $50 and didn't work, yet it had enough life left in it to build this project.



In the video, Jeri explains how she attached the guitar boom and strings to the old C64 and had the signals from the strings processed by the C64's 6581 SID sound chip (remember that?!) via electronics that she designed herself. This circuit includes piezo transducers, tesla coils and a modern FPGA chip which cleans up and converts the string signals so that the SID chip can process the notes. By using the keys on the original C64, the waveshape of the notes can be changed in various ways, including sawtooth and square waveform shapes. The whole rig is then powered by 18 AA batteries lashed to the inside with tape, lasting for about 8 hours.

Finally, she gives a brief demo of the guitar, which sounds surprisingly good!

The video can be seen below and she has her own YouTube channel featuring many other fascinating and highly technical videos.

This is one person that would put many other techies to shame. Respect.