Open Source Guitar
* Article: Open Hardware: The Open Source Guitar.
- Part one of a series by Ziv Bar Ilan about Open Source Hardware and Zoybar, his open R&D lab for academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers to easily create music instruments and applications.
- Part two
Why Open Guitars?
Fender and Gibson guitars dominate the industry. The Stratocaster and Les Paul electric guitar designs, are 60 years old, but still dominate the industry--for a variety of reasons.
But smaller companies are innovating.
Open/P2P Guitar Business Models
Open versions of existing guitar designs are here. They're sold as kits on ebay. However we can go further. Guitars (and instruments in general) can be designed, manufactured, funded, in an open/p2p way. For instance, wood, can be sourced locally or regionally. And local labor or regional (or more depending on the complexity) can be networked for production.
Differences to Current Businesss Models
Guitars (and many instruments) are predominately made in alignment with neoliberal environmental, ecological, political, economical, social and cultural values. Low wage foreign labor in Chinese, Korean and Mexican factories with harsh conditions, dominate. Generally, higher quality instruments are produced in American, Europe and Japan, but under the big government/big corporate capitalist model.
More Information
See: Zoybar Open Design Guitar