The Misa Kitara is a digital

MIDI Musical Instrument Digital Interface (; MIDI) is an American-Japanese technical standard that describes a communication protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, ...

controller and musical instrument developed in 2011 and discontinued in 2013. It allows for a guitar player to produce a synthesized sound using techniques and motions referential to guitar playing. It is built in the shape of an

electric guitar An electric guitar is a guitar that requires external electric Guitar amplifier, sound amplification in order to be heard at typical performance volumes, unlike a standard acoustic guitar. It uses one or more pickup (music technology), pickups ...

, complete with a full twenty-four

fret A fret is any of the thin strips of material, usually metal wire, inserted laterally at specific positions along the neck or fretboard of a stringed instrument. Frets usually extend across the full width of the neck. On some historical inst ...

neck. The name comes from the Finnish word for "guitar".

History

The Kitara was the first digital musical instrument to combine the use of touch buttons for strings and frets with an 8 inch multi-touch screen. The player controls sound effects and parameters through this display, as opposed to strumming strings like on a traditional guitar. The display allows for comprehensive control as well as a wide-variety of noise and effect production. The produced sound changes based on the position, number, and movement of fingers on this display. The Kitara uses an internal wavetable synthesizer with effects to generate sound. The Kitara is powered by an open-sourced

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

based

CPU A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...

, making it possible to reprogram the Kitara, modify existing sounds, and program new ones. At the 2012

NAMM Show The NAMM Show is an annual trade show in the United States organized by the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), which describes it as "the industry’s largest stage, uniting the global music, sound and entertainment technology commun ...

Misa Digital announced a stripped-down Kitara which does not have a synth engine. It went on sale on the Misa site Misa Tri-Bass.

References

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History

References

External links