Jeff, an electronics technologist, has posted an instruction for building a laser guitar!

The Prism is, quite simply, the best laser guitar on the Internet. At least I think so. I hope that you take these instructions and not only make your own, but improve on my design!

I suppose I should clarify what the Prism is: It’s a bit like a guitar with some synthesizer mashed in. It has aspects of a theremin and a laser harp thrown in to boot. In short, it’s not like anything else, and you can use it to make some really neat sounds. Anything from cold Sine and harsh square waves to heavily distorted noise.

At its heart the Prism features a VCO (Voltage Controlled Oscillator), based around the very shiny XR2206 monolithic function generator. The octave range is selected by blocking one of four laser “strings,” and the pitch is controlled by the position of the musician’s hand on the fretboard. The musician has the option of selecting a sine, triangle or square wave. The sine and triangle waves can be skewed using a separate Skew control.

It also has two other controllable oscillators, one acting as an LFO (Low Frequency Oscillator) and the other acting as a Sync generator.

I designed the Prism to plug into any regular guitar amp, with no computer required. In fact, there is no programming involved at all in this project! It is just as portable as a regular guitar, and meant to be used at gigs or wherever else an “alternative” instrument is needed!

Here is a video showing the basic functions:

demonstrate the on-board effects: