Does anyone know how to set up a SparkFun Music Instrument Shield directly from electric guitar pickups? I would like to have onboard electronics on a guitar to make it sound like another instrument such as a piano. My understanding of the SparkFun Music Instrument Shield is that it requires separate digital inputs to trigger separate notes.
Hello!
Getting information from the guitar is going to be the real challenge here. Because electric guitar pickups are analog and the Music Instrument Shield is digital, there’s no way to directly connect the two devices. You’d need some sort of analog to digital converter to read from your pickups and a microcontroller to figure out what note is being played and what to do with the data, then drive the Music Instrument Shield.
It could be done, but this would probably be a fairly complex setup if you were to create your own solution. Unfortunately I don’t know of a tutorial anywhere that would show how but there are companies that make devices that [convert the analog signal from a guitar to MIDI. If you were to get one of those, you could then read the MIDI data, format it for the Music Instrument Shield and use that as an audio output.](https://www.musicrepo.com/guitar-midi-connection/)
Do you think this setup could work?
Yeah, I think that might just do the trick!