This is the first Wond handheld string exciter, launched in 2015 with a successful Kickstarter.

With a little help from my friends, by the end of 2015 we’d built almost 500 of these and shipped them to musicians all over the world. Guitar Player magazine wrote a great review and the Wond was chosen as one of “The 10 Coolest Guitar Gear Innovations of 2015.“

The first Wond experimentally introduced the technologies of acoustic synthesis and tactile feedback in a hand-held device for playing the guitar. I then spent 2016 figuring out how to make it much better…

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The Wond II will be based on the advanced vibration control technology I developed last summer, (2016). It completely overcomes all of the non-ideal restrictions of my older control tech. To musicians, this means:

• Works with any kind of magnetically responsive string. No special strings needed!
• Bass players take note: Works with any gauge of string!  The new tech loves fat bass strings!
• The field emitted by the Wond II is purely musical – no harsh digital hash with this new tech!
• Increased range and more power. You don’t have to position the coils as closely to the string as before.

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This is a concept drawing of the Wond II. Amazing new features are now possible:

For example, microphone 134 (see drawing) will record a sound – any pitched sound. Imagine this: You press a button and record a sample of your own voice. The Wond II will drive the string’s harmonics to follow your recorded sample. It’s making your string act like an acoustic vocoder. And as you work the Wond closer to your pickups, you hear a re-synthesized sample note in unison with your electric guitar tone. This one feature turns the Wond II into a hand-held monophonic synthesizer / string-vocoder that perfectly tracks whichever string you apply it to.

Display 115 and selection buttons 117 will let you select from and manage these recordings. We’ll store several at once in the Wond II. We can all review the options for bidirectional data interconnection. Wireless and USB are two possible choices. What do you think? As a supporter your feedback will help guide such decisions.

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The first Wond introduced tactile feedback of string proximity. This is a powerful idea that was not fully realized in the first Wond design. It’s there, but only “sort of”.

The goal with tactile feedback is to create the illusion of feeling the Wond’s magnetic field touching the string as you play. It can be something like way your guitar pick feels to your fingers as you pluck a string. To achieve this illusion convincingly the Wond II’s tactile feedback must be shaped by a far more advanced behavioral algorithm than I was able to squeeze out of the analog circuitry in the first Wond. This is why the Wond II will include a digital subsystem for advanced algorithmic control of tactile feedback.

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