SO-89

Retro touchscreen-controlled electric guitar

Solo Project - Oct 2022 to Present | Digital Signal Processing | UX/UI Design | Raspberry Pi

It all started with my mom's old '89 Buick Reatta.

SO-89 stands for the "Summer of '89."Its design embodies the transition of late 70s surf culture to a new technological era of the 80s in a hollow-body, beach rock electric guitar. It’s a physical manifestation of the energy that represents my 1989 Buick Reatta - the catalyst of my creative career that got me into the automotive and product world. The Reatta was a vehicle ahead of its time; complete with a CTR touch screen where the user could pre-program different buttons and pop-ups. What if a guitar could do the same?

What if a guitar had user-selected digital pedal presets that could be accessed with the push of a button?

Overview

Design Philosophies

Neon Highlights

Pure Digital Modulation

70s Sunsets

Key Functions

Achieves the"Chorus Effect" in a purely mechanical way

Touchscreen controls 6 built-in digital guitar pedals

Touchscreen controls LED attributes (Hue, Saturation, Value)

Users can save various LED and guitar pedal presets to a settings library

Users can assign LED and pedal presets to programmable buttons

Sketches

And this is how it starts...

Mood Board

The mood board captures the "energy" I want the product to have. For the SO-89, it includes various moments of mine surrounding my experience with surf culture and sunsets through what I call “the tesla era.” For most of September 2021 to August 2022, I predominately lived in Northern California working on cars, hitting the waves, and playing guitar on the beach.

Brainstorming

Originally, I designed the SO-89 to be a smaller, travel-sized guitar. At this stage in the process, I wanted the body shape to be a lot simpler. Eventually, I scrapped this idea.

Not a huge fan of this...

Lackluster exterior design

Experiment with new body shapes

Concept Generation

Finally, after several iterations and guitar "speed form" sketches, I decided with this unique, bell-like guitar shape compete with a retro touchscreen and Buick Reatta-inspired "tail light."

Here we go again...

Bristol Board Prototype

Similar to when I built the Cyber Shredder, I created a 1:1 scaled prototype of the SO-89 using bristol board to see how the guitar would actually feel in my hands. I need to make sure the large "wings" that come out the sides were comfortable to hold and naturally guided the user's hand away from the centered touchscreen.

Prototypes

Bristol Board Prototype

Verify:

Dimensions

Ergonomics

Aesthetic

CAD Model

Renders

Almost there...

Activate LEDs

Electronics

Creating the digital pedal.

Electrical Architecture Outline

The SO-89 will be entirely digitally controlled - from its standard tone and volume nobs to the complexities of its internal reverb filter. A Teensy 3.6 will be used as a digital signal processor to alter various digital guitar pedal (filter) parameters based on inputs from a Raspberry Pi that takes user input from an LCD touchscreen. The Teensy will receive digitally converted signals from the guitar's pickups which transform vibrational energy into electrical energy.

SO-89 High Level Electrical Architecture (2).png

Touchscreen Input

Raspberry Pi

Pedal Parameter

Teensy 3.6

Digital Pedals

Chorus

Flanger

Echo

Fuzz

Reverb

Snips

(Modified harmony pedal)

Touchscreen

Beyond your standard potentiometer...

UI Design

There's a reason guitars haven't been digitized yet - Analog components like dials and switches are often easier to interact with!

How can I design a user interface that provides comparable sensory feedback to analog components while still using the CTR screen aesthetic of the '89 Buick Reatta?