iTar interactive Guitar controller for the Mobile musician

The iPhone / iPad surface serves as the guitarist’s “right-hand” strumming and picking interface, that is, the strumming and picking that a guitarist does when while playing guitar, are now performed on the iPad screen.

The fingerboard mates intimately with an iOS app that serves as not only the strumming-hand expression controls but also as a setup tool for selecting sounds, organizing the various fingerboard functions, splits and layers, configuring connectivity with other devices and apps, and managing the special functions for both music performance and lighting on the fingerboard.

About the iTar project – a collaboration between Starr Labs and iTar-UK a new company created for the express purpose of promoting the iTar product line. Starr Labs prototyped several versions of the iTar – modifying and adjusting – before we created tooling to mass produce it. Through the support of Bil Bungay and iTar UK we’re developing iTar as a brand to stand on its own, as it’s easy to see that we can a variety of accessories to enhance the look and utility of the iTar, just as we do for the other Starr Labs Ztar instruments. What can I say…we like options.

Toward that goal, Bil has created a new itarguitar.com dedicated website maintained in the UK that elaborates his vision and which will eventually become the home for iTar information, and a polished professional hub for sharing multi-media music, and handling sales and support. It’s a big job and we’re not quite ready to build hand off to a new crew in the UK – so for now all of the work to create, support, and purvey the iTar is being done by the elves at Starr Labs production shop. It’s a brand new baby and needs the personal touch. For starters, our new cool promotional content will go to itarguitar.com and the nuts and bolts will be Starr Labs, info@starrlabs.com.

At this stage we are super-interested to create relationships with early adopters, forward thinking musicians to explore the iApple iOS music territory. Full disclosure though the iTar fingerboard is fast and responsive, the iTar as an integrated iOS/musical instrument is at an early stage. The iTar app has a lot of the basic features set up to act as a responsive wireless MIDI controller as well as offering some new features but there’s more to come. We have a new clean UI and we’re now re-connecting some of the cool features developed actually some years ago. (It’s a long story…)

Because the Itar app is not limited to emulating actual guitar strings, it offers a variety of other touch screen performance surfaces that provide novel ways to interact with a guitar fingerboard. A lot of creative iOS apps are available to the mobile musician and we’re anxious to try them all – while playing the iTar fingerboard!

The iTar’s fingerboard sports 15-bit RGB color LEDs that respond to your touch as you play and has the capability to display tablature, images, and text as well as execute a variety of animation commands that will transform the fingerboard lighting display interactively as you play.

The iTar fingerboard communicates with the external world via Bluetooth and USB. The iTar iOS app supports multi-track sequencing, tablature display, VST plugin hosting, and Ableton-Live display/control directly on the fingerboard – all of which is coming after we make some structural changes to support Apple’s newest fastest MIDI API – we’ve had to temporarily disable these while we upgrade the plumbing!

The fingerboard LED array lighting is controlled using a dedicated MIDI-based command set to create a variety of interactive coloring and animation effects, providing a concurrent light show as well as teaching tools for beginning to advanced guitarists.

The iTar is a basic building block , a platform for a guitarist’s exploration of the world of mobile apps and desktop computer software. Its consistent, low-latency performance offers guitarists, producers, and electronic musicians a clean solution for getting music into the computer or mobile device and as the product evolves we will be offering hardware accessories as well as additional software features as they are created.