Hi, welcome to potentially genius where we tomorrow lab take what is probably a
potentially genius idea and turn it into more of a potentially genius thing.
It's more of a race against time to see how real, we can make something in the shortest
amount of time possible. We have a four phase process to do this.
We start with discovery, then we go into ideation followed by prototyping and then a
final presentation to our potential genius. So let's get into it.
We have a new guest dan sacks of noodle loaf. How's it going dan?
It's going great, how are you doing kevin? Good to see you.
Good to see your squad. What is noodle loaf?
It's a music education podcast, but the kids don't know that they just think they're having
fun. They think they're playing singing along or
moving or doing rhyming games or anything that kind of involves them in,
in the listening of the show. What's your potentially genius idea?
I want to invent an instrument for kids that empowers them um,
and has rhythmic elements, melodic elements, improvisational elements.
They can play the thing and it sounds good and maybe even interact with it in kind of a cool
way to what extent do you envision this product looking like an actual instrument?
To me, it doesn't need to look like an existing instrument in some ways like the kid instrument
market is a little bit limited because it's always like a sort of like dumbed down like
little, little version of an adult instrument, but there's no reason why it has to be a tiny
piano or a tiny, you know, whatever and I think this is a potentially genius idea but let's go
see if we can make it potentially genius thing.
Each of us went out to do some research to look
at different types of ways of making sound, ways of picking up sound electronically,
ways of transporting sound. And so we're going to jump in and look at that
research. I looked into force sensing resistors or FS
arts for short and basically they're exactly what they sound like depending on how hard you
press them. It delivers a different signal.
You can imagine that the heart of the kid presses maybe there's a bigger sound or even it
could be moving up the scale. Um so those whatever.
And then we have a ribbon controller and pressure sensor setup.
So there's some things we could play with their talk about basically you're just sending
numbers through an instrument to computer so that the computer reads what notes you're
producing, which kind of notes, how hard you hit the note.
It's converting some electrical input for user input into numbers.
And then the computer will later we produce the music.
If you're having something like a F. S. R. Can Essentially detect 128
steps of of course, although I am a keyboard guy, I started thinking about strings because
to dance point about authenticity, strings have this really cool analog response where you can
see it vibrating, like you can hear it, you hit the thing,
It does. The thing, The problem with string instruments
is that they require tuning unless there is only one string because although it may not be
in tune to concert pitch, it's always in tune relative to itself.
Um, and the intervals are fixed. So the simplest version of this is a Diddley
bow. It's an instrument you can make out of a two by
four and a tin can basically, they're tapping instruments.
You can tap on strings if they're on the fretboard.
That that instrument in the middle is a recently invented instrument called the harp
Edgy. It uses capacitive sensing and individual
pickups per string so that whenever you're not pressing on a string,
it mutes that string so you can play it without overlapping.
Does love the research on this one. Super fun.
Very excited.
Maybe like each of us could come back with an original instrument idea.
Mm hmm.
We are going through concepts this week. Fire away Guys,
I built a Diddley bow.
It's really large. I have it right here and
jesse. If you apply different tension to it,
does it change the pitch?
It does, yeah. So here's a tuning peg.
This thing right here controls the pitch in general.
I'm beginning to see like a potential to have like a bit of a circus,
but like a Diddley bow where like you have different modules,
you can attach to like make the string do different things.
What if we had a board that has these little rubber mounts sticking up from it?
And a kid could choose like they have a collection of shapes in a box and they could
mount those shapes onto the pegs and switch them out and see what sort of sounds they make.
And as you can see you've got these keys on both sides of the box and that enables play for
both a kid and a friend or a kid and their parents.
So they could both kind of jam on both sides. My concept that looks a little weird multiple
bellows on the basically a flat surface and I can like hammer all those to
create like different cells. If I have five of course can be a pentatonic
scale basically there's a hammer just like welcoming you to pick it up and then to hammer
some stuff in this one. The idea is that you would space out keys along
the Diddley bow. So we start with the same Diddley bow structure.
I'm imagining this one with a metal string just because I want a guitar pick up because I like
the grunge and along that string would be capos and when you press down on each one it will
shorten the string by that much.
And then underneath those keys is a common like striker key.
So that triggers a piano style hammer to hit the wire.
And then I was also thinking that if these things are on like a rack of ribs,
you can flip up the rack of ribs and then you could just use it like a really well.
One thing I do like about it that I see in all of our daily boat concepts is
that you get a sense of like where the intervals are on the wire.
Um I think that that's sort of like automatic physics lesson is really cool and it's
something that's lost hidden inside a piano. Here's a different type of keyboard action that
we maybe had been considered and I didn't really realize it was possible until recently.
Very old instrument called the class record.
It's one of the simplest keyboard actions you can have.
It's just a aqui balanced on a pivot. And at the end it has something called a
tangent which is a little piece of brass or something sharp.
And if the string is under enough tension and you hit it with something sharp and hard like
that, it will sound at the length that you hit it.
So this is called a frigid classic orry meaning you can have multiple keys play on the same
street early but was a great test platform for us.
So let's get I mean if you are able to maybe we can get a few things strung up across the build
a little raised bed for magnetic pickups And then also see what your PS pickups sound like.
Yeah, I can put a few strings on their happy prototyping and looking forward to seeing what
we pull together the next meeting.
Mm hmm. So Eileen, you're going to
take us through some research about the design in the form of this.
This idea basically has piano keys but they're centered in the middle and they're held up by a
spring coil which has its legs kind of like that.
So as a kid pushes it down it, you know, it comes together and there's a little knob at the
end of the key there. So the kid doesn't press too hard to break the
string by accident. The idea is that there are two playable areas
on the left and right of the keys. So they can do this with a friend.
They can do with the parent. And so it's kind of fun that way.
And the keys can adopt different shapes and also indicate the two notes that the string
could produce, depending on where it's pushed down the center.
Exactly What I think is the secret sauce here is making it electric,
right? Like, I don't know of any kids toys that are
electric. They're more tinny and Tankian Twinkie and like
this is a chance to give them something that's analog electric.
Right? Where would you place this as far as like a
mechanical complexity to prototype is at a scale of 10.
It's like a two or 32 or three. Okay. Yeah. Alright, let's build
it out. Mhm.
We are super lucky to be joined by our guest dan Saks host of noodle loaf.
Hey dan, welcome back! Hi, we know that you wanted to create a new
kind of musical instrument, something that kids could play and we decided we want to do
something around string instruments. This is the thing,
Okay, It's basically a Diddley bow, but also
electric and we've given it keys.
Each of these things is a key on the Diddley bow and each one hits the
string in a way similar to a classic cord. So we smashed up an electric
guitar, a Diddley bow and a Clavin cord to make an instrument,
you can play the keys uh and get different sounds.
The keys are rearrange herbal, so you can change which notes are being played and how
many notes there are on the keyboard. When you uh tap them,
they shorten the string and strike it at the same time creating the tone for that.
Like
because that works very cool. But you can basically trill by holding one key
down and playing a hierarchy. And so when you play that hierarchy and drop
down because it's vibrating, really needs real sounds and you can see it
going up and down.
I love how, I mean how visual it is in terms of, as you were saying,
like kind of understanding the sort of the relationship between,
I mean the pitch that you're getting and how it divides up the string to make it shorter.
That's that's really unique and and very cool.
But because it's electric and you can add some grunge to it.
You can sort of get those thirds and other elements out of the sound um by sort of
strumming it and playing it harder. So you can play it soft very gently and you can
play it really hard. And then because it's open,
you can also pluck it and hit it with other things and it sounds great when you hit it with
stuff. This is going to give you a good tone each time.
Sweet. This is basically all in one pickup amplifying
and an out putting set up on the far left. It's a magnetic picked up.
So the signal from that magnetic pickup is really weak so that we need to amplify it.
Preempts to line level so that it's good enough for it to be fed into the next
m which is spark but noisy cricket. We source it from digit key thanks to our
sponsor digit key. And what's cool about this product is the knob
itself. It's a on off switch to.
So as long as you um, turn it crank it up, it turns on it signals experience on the device
and also you can deal with the volume with it. And I really want to throw a lot at one here
for the record. Yeah, well that's what's fun about this is you
know, basically it's, this is essentially a guitar amp and because of that,
there are many other accessories that exist that are like 20 bucks.
You know, some of them even cheaper that you could put in line between your speaker and your,
your pre amp that that modify that signal so you can pitch bended and um change
the tone of it. Things like that in case you wanted to have,
like I'm imagining like, let's say you have four of these in a room,
you kind of want everyone else to have a different sound even if you're playing on the
same scale. And that way you, you, you jam like a band.
If we had a little more time with the positioning right now,
um they slide up and down the rail by unscrewing this little screw here and then you
slide them and then re secure them. But in the future,
if we could think about this more um something that a kid might be more capable of doing would
be perhaps pushing um like a little button in to clamp it down,
sort of like the clamps we have in the shop and then to release some,
you could squeeze and pull and then move them along the rail.
So that would be a more simple interaction for a child.
The keys are really, really simple. So we played around with sprung leaf things
that looked a lot more like um piano keys and what we ended up with here is something much
simpler. It's a scissor mechanism.
These are laser cut and three D. Printed but in the future there could be a few
pieces of injection molded plastic. The idea being that you could make these,
you know at fisher price costs with fisher price tolerances that way you have a set of
keys that you can pop in and out very easily on this iteration.
We didn't have any like no demarcations on here but there's definitely potential for us to add
graphics to this to label like what the notes actually are and also supplement the whole
labeling system by like maybe having prongs that specifically call out like the pentatonic
scale. Um so there could be fun graphic design
involved in further version. Yeah, I mean there's some,
there's a beauty in in its simplicity but I haven't seen anything that that really plays
like that. I feel like this is totally one of those
instruments where like you get it for your, for your little kid.
But like after they go to bed like you take it down to the basement,
like hook all your guitar pedals into it and invite some friends over and there's there's
sort of an adult version where you can really kind of space out with it.
So this show is called potentially genius. The idea is that guests bring us a potentially
genius idea and we try and turn it into a potentially and maybe even actually genius
thing. So the question for you dan Saks is did we make
a genius thing here today?
Yes you did. You made something that is
potentially genius.
Good job
geniuses.
Mm hmm, mm hmm.
It's
working. It's working genius.
Hey, thanks so much for watching. Thanks so much to our guest.
Thanks so much. Two digit key for sponsoring this.
Listen, if you guys have potentially genius ideas, not your big idea but just like a fun
idea or something that you want to see us make, put it in the comments were going to be reading
them. We're gonna be looking for likes up votes or
whatever you kids call it. And the ones that get the most traction we
might actually bring onto the show will reach out to you.
You get to be a guest and we'll build the thing that's in your head.
That's our job. Also, if you have any thoughts about our
process, comments, criticisms, we don't care. Tell us down below.
Yeah. And if you want to see more of our work,
go over to tomorrow lab dot com or you can find us on instagram.
Thanks again. Bye.
Mhm mm hmm. Mhm