The whammy bar is going to be a lever that is mechanically connected to the analog stick on the hacked pad. This should let it both spring back to center and trip the appropriate switch when moved. I'm going to have it pivot so that it's balanced between two leaf switches. The strum bar you can see in the diagrams below. For now I'm just going to use the buttons off of my Agetec Dreamcast Arcade stick. In the end I'm going to use Sanwa or some other snap-in Japanese pushbutton as they have a very shallow mounting depth. I'm then going to use sheet metal over the top of it to mount the buttons. The neck of the guitar will be 1-1/2' PVC pipe cut in half.
Cut-away sections of the plywood should give me enough hollow area to mount the electronics (a solderless-hacked Playstation 1 Dual Shock that has a broken right analog stick). The guitar body is going to be plywood sandwiched between two sheets of hardboard. If everything works out as well as I hope, I'll make a newer, cleaner version (that's probably wireless). I'm going to use several arcade buttons and parts for this.Īfter trying to figure out how to make this work, I realized that I have enough materials around to at least make a rough-looking prototype. I'm going to start working this weekend on a scratch-built guitar controller for Guitar Hero.
