Washingtonpost.com:
University of Maryland engineering professor
Bruce Jacob had a
few songs he wanted to record, tunes that had been jangling
around in his head for years. He bought a guitar, but the notes
he played never sounded as good as the music he had
imagined.Here's how Jacob, 43, describes the sounds a guitar
makes: "If you have a bunch of paints, you can create any paint
you want from the three or four fundamental colors. With
guitars, it's the exact same thing. You can make any sound you
want out of three or four colors. But most guitars have one
color."So Jacob decided to create a better guitar, attacking an
elusive aesthetic problem with a series of math equations, a
circuit board, and wiring. He and a couple of his students
launched
Coil, a company that
uses the patent-pending electronics they developed to customize
the sound in guitars.
