Development of an Individualized String Pickup for Guitar Chord Recognition

There are various methods that are used for chord recognition. For an acoustic guitar, the typical pickup gets the summation of all signals which results in the cancellation of some frequency components in the overall signal. In most studies, an algorithmic approach to process the audio signal is used to identify the chords present. These methods produce an accuracy of roughly 70-90%; however, the algorithms can only detect basic chords. In this research, a proposed system with an individualized string pickup will be used to offload the data acquisition process done by the chord recognition algorithm, effectively reducing the algorithm’s complexity. The assisting hardware also opens the system to also recognize complex chords and basic chords alike. The hardware interface is a modified hex pickup for individual string output which is followed by an intermediary device that will process the signal before sending the data to the computer via USB. Tests show promising results, with strings being successfully isolated from each other.