Curiously I have the leather strap from one – probably picked up in Brick Lane market in the late 80s/early 90s – unfortunately not the rest of it !
About ’86 I bought a s/h bass from a bloke in Brum (where I both lived and studied) – subject to some degree of hacking-about as part of someone’s uni project to put some solenoids in it, to strike the strings – the seller had suffered a stroke and his right hand wasn’t working very well.
“this is what I’ve replaced it with” – and he opened up a case with a synthaxe inside. Probably about 7-10k£ at the time – I think as a relatively well-paid apprentice in BT at the time I was on about £7k pa.
Link on the synthaxe wiki page :
http://www.alendi.co.uk/synthaxe.html
I can’t help wondering if it was about 30years to early – the electronics side of things would be relatively cheap to do now, but the neck would still probably be relatively expensive – it consisted of segmented frets, and piezo sensors on the strings detected string bending:
http://patents.justia.com/assignee/synthaxe-limited
Interestingly this patent (maybe the rest) seems to have lapsed (see bottom:
http://www.google.co.uk/patents/US4726275
