Several years ago I backed a Kickstarter for a guitar attachment called One Man band or OMB for short. this device could be installed on basically any guitar and turn it into a MIDI guitar and I thought that sounded kind of cool and I bought the kit version. When I received it I did not actually have a guitar that I found myself willing to install the device to. The reason being that installation of the OMB required that a certain amount of modification to the guitar be undertaken, so I went ahead and just held on to the device until I had a guitar that I was willing to sacrifice to the experiment.

Today I attended an estate sale and came across a strat knock-off selling for all of $20. this seemed like the perfect vehicle to attempt the OMB. it is a lovely shade of blue, kind of turquoise, and as far as strat imitations go, I’ve seen worse. The installation has taken me the better part of the afternoon, I had to install the main device under the tremolo bridge, and that part was very easy and took fewer than 15 minutes. The heavy lifting came in when it was time to solder conductive copper tape to the edges of the frets. I managed this but in order to do so I actually had to swap necks as the neck that came with the guitar had frets that contained so much nickel that they refused to accept solder. fortunately I had a bolt-on strat style neck from a previous Frankenstein guitar project and I was able to utilize that neck instead.

After putting everything together and connecting the device to the neck itself via a final soldering step I tested the device and found it did not work. I got out a multimeter and evaluated my handiwork, found one bad solder connection, fixed it, and lo and behold the OMB was working.

if you are looking for a review of the OMB as a product, I am afraid I cannot yet provide that as I have had no time to evaluate the software or the functionality other than to calibrate it and validate that it does work. I can tell you that the installation process itself was very straightforward and simple with the exception of the fret soldering step but that was only really complicated by The neck I was using. when I switched next it was quite straightforward as I am experienced with soldering. if you were not experienced with soldering you would probably not want to attempt that step yourself.

Here are some pictures of the build, I will post again with thoughts on what it is like to use the OMB.