Thursday, April 12, 2007

Starr Labs: Still trying to make MIDI guitars after all these years



1985 called. They want their guitar synth back. What could be more wonderful than Starr Labs, a tiny little company based in San Diego who have been producing weird, semi-one-off guitar MIDI controllers in the long defunkt line of the Synthaxe, and Stepp DG1 for decades? Their Ztar guitars have buttons/keys along the neck, touch sensitive strings you can strum, and a few other buttons and controllers. Most interestingly, the buttons on the neck are polyphonic, so you can play multiple notes on one 'string', which must make for a bit of mental adjustment for most guitarists. Starr Labs just put out a press release about their new model Z7-S, which looks like a Steinberger and seems pretty much the same as all the others, including this previous post. It costs $1,495. Of course, for $1,300 less you could buy a Yamaha EZ-AG teaching guitar, which works in a similar way, and - according to one review - is "easy to wipe clean"...

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