Photo courtesy of Dylan Menzies

November 22nd, 2010 – Lately, I’ve seen a lot of crazy instruments being created, and especially a lot leveraging MIDI in interesting ways. Some of it is interesting in an eccentric and fun way, and then there are some that have the potential to be straight up game changing.

The most exciting I’ve seen in a long is Dylan Menzies’ O-Bow. In a nutshell, an optical sensor tracks an object, in this case a “bow” made of wooden dowel, and provides feedback for a modelled stringed instrument. In the video embedded below, the result sounds much like an urhu.

We’ve had wind controllers for ages, allowing more realistic modelled wind instruments, but even though strings are so common in productions, I’m not aware of any commercial device (I don’t really consider touch strips the same) that has attempted to emulate a string player’s bowing. Seems to me that bowing technique would be one of the first things that people attempted to bring into the DAW world.

Definitely check out Dylan’s video below to get an rough idea of what the O-Bow can do. Very exciting stuff!

O-Bow via Engadget