HISTORY / INFO:
I got this from a Once Upon A Child store for $3. There are 4 buttons on the neck that play short guitar riffs when you press them. The whammy bar plays a 'whammy bar' riff. If you 'strum' the yellow strings, the guitar will start to play one of 3 tunes, one of which is the Sesame Street theme. If you touch the 'strings' while it is playing, it will allow you to cycle through each note of the song. Also, while the music is playing, LEDs under the button on the neck light up sequentially. If you press on Elmo, you get one of three sayings: "Yeah! You're rockin' now!", "You can do it!" & "Jam with Elmo!". I think I must have heard these sayings a bajillion times when searching forbends. Oh yeah, it also has a 3 position volume switch.
I was very happy with the job that I did on this guitar. I found some sweet mods and the aesthetics are probably the best I have done to date. I had some trouble with the cheap-ass momentary switches from Radio Shack so the body got scuffed up a little bit. It was this guitar that made me leard the correct way to wire an audio out. A friend of mine came over to jam and he tried plugging it into his guitar amp and it did next to nothing. I knew it worked if I hooked it up to a pair of old computer speakers. After fumbling around on the Yahoo benders group, I found a schematic. After trial an error, I finally got the output right. It now sounds like a champ.
PRE-MODIFICATION PICTURES:
MODIFICATIONS:
1) pitch down knob - Flick the switch, and turn the knob to put Elmo in the basement. You can pretty much bring the sound to a crawl with this one.
2) speed up - This mod uses a momentary to speed everything up. When the pitch down is not enabled, this thing flies! If the pitch down is being used, it speeds it up to about, I dunno, maybe 4 times what is currently playing. I managed to get this mod my hooking up two points through a specific LED. Certain LEDs would make it slower and others didn't work at all. *shrug* The one I used it the primo one of the lot that I had at the time and it speeds it up fast.
3) loop switch - This causes a single guitar sample to lopp over and over again. I believe that there is a 'loop' for every note in the song it is currently playing. You can interupt the loop by pressing the other buttons, Elmo or the whammy.
4) reset switch
5) on / off switch
6) 1/4" audio out
POST-MODIFICATION PICTURES:
 front view |
 back view |
SOUNDS:
elmo-blue.mp3 - Just a sampling of me goofin' with the blue Elmo guitar.
FUTURE MODIFICATIONS PLANNED:
1) Fix the Glitch - Every once in a while, Elmo will seize up. I used to have to open it up and start poking around until one of the LEDs would flash on momentarily. I've realized that if I fiddle around with it for a while, I can usually un-seize it, but it really is really a pain in the butt to deal with. I'd rather figure out what points on the board fixes this problem and hook it up to the reset button, since the reset really doesn't do much of anything anyhow.
2) If I get bored, I might try to add a volume LED. Maybe.
3) There was one other mod that I didn't add which caused a certain riff to play whenever a certain LED was lit. I like the way the guitar looks now so most likely I won't add this, but just for reference sake... it can be done.
Last Modified: February 13, 2005