Fans of Jimi Hendrix, Slash, B.B. King, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, eat your hearts out. While your heros rocked a few generations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, guitarists of the future will be robotic and vastly more talented than your mortal heros.
It seems like a record company producer’s pipe dream: a musician or band under contract who produce marketable music without attitude, girlfriend or boyfriend problems, damage repair bills from trashed hotel rooms, or the occasional career and revenue stopper: a drug overdose.
But now, robotic musicians and bands are a reality. Take the Robocross version of Led Zeppelin’s “Rock n Roll” playing at Muskmesse 2013. There are no words to describe it; take a look!
Four-Armed Drummer
Next, is Compressorhead, a three robot band with a guitarist named Fingers, a bassist named Bones, and a drummer named Stick Boy who features four arms. In the video, our three heros play “Ace of Spades” by Motorhead.
Robots Aren’t Limited To Five Fingers
The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, one of the greatest human guitarists of the past half century, played guitar with nine and a half fingers, having lost half of a middle finger in a wood chopping accident with his brother at age four. The Squashpusher Z-Machine robotic guitarist has 78 fingers and if one is ever “chopped off,” it can be quickly reattached by an engineering technician. And the music is mesmerizing:
Related articles on IndustryTap:
- Hotel Coming to Nagasaki, Japan Will be Staffed by 10 Multilingual, Humanoid Robots!
- Amazon Continues to Expand Workforce…Robots Playing a Major Role
- GM Invests $300 Million in Robots to Expedite the Process of Building Cadillacs
References and related content:
- Robots Podcast: Robot musicians | Robohub
- Mortimer: the musical robot that gives musicians a helping hand | Science Codex
- Watch a human musician and his robots improvise together – The Washington Post
