But it will also cost $800 or less by the time it hits stores (the MSRP is $1000). The original (Tenori-On W) was $1200 when it arrived last year, but the official U.S. distributor has since dropped it down to $1000. You even get a free 2GB SD card.

The original Tenori-On W is also getting an OS update in January. No word yet on what that might include.

By the way, if you're super tight (and have an iPhone), you could also give the Tenori-On-like Melodica or PacklSound1 apps a go. [Yamaha]

It doesn't do it in real time, but there's a computer connected to this piano which analyzes human speech with the assistance of a composer and converts it to key-tapping. It's looks pretty great and is reasonably clear considering it's a piano that's "talking."

You'll quickly notice that the video's in German, but fortunately Hack a Day's Astera came through with a rough translation of the narration to accompany your oohs and aaahs:

Pretty amazing, how all of a sudden the words of the Declaration become understandable to a European Environmental Criminal Court. Wien Modern was one out of ten cultural institutions asked for an artistic contribution to the event in Palazzo Ducale in Venice.

The ambitious goal was to make this message audible with musical means, without falling back to a simple setting.

Berno Polzer: I think, its partially understandable, partially not. And it plays well with the limits of our construction abilities. That is, we hear sounds that obviously aren't normal music, but neither they are language, and one could say that sometimes, a bridging happens. Personally, I think you can understand individual words even without knowing the text, and the Eureka moment happens when you see the text, and suddenly, the language is there.

Yet another bridge: Miro Markus, an elementary school student from Berlin, narrated the text for the performance: Youth as a hope for the older generation.

The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger transferred the frequency spectrum of the child's voice to his computer controlled mechanical piano.

Peter Ablinger: I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something the voice, in this case -, in individual pixels, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.

From voice to "pixels" to music back to speech. Incredible. Now. Who's gonna make a talking trumpet? [YouTube]

You see, you play this note/tadpole-shaped instrument by tapping or sliding your finger up and down the neck. But you can also adjust the pitch by squeezing the face at the bottom to open and close the mouth.

It's certainly not going to be included in any symphony orchestras anytime soon, but it's a whimsical piece of fun. And if you watch no other part of the video you owe it to yourself to watch the end, where Novmichi plays The Star Spangled Banner in a wig and sunglasses. Amazing. [Maywa Denki via Tokyo Mango via Boing Boing Gadgets]

You be the judge. I say, resoundingly, yes.

[YouTube via MAKE]

No, even more bizarre are the guitar pickups: The device uses 12 of them, focused on each of the 12 notes in the musical scale, feeding back what they hear to a speaker transducer positioned at one end of the massive "resonance hull."

Unfortunately, Oddmusic doesn't yet have sample tracks from the Harmonic Generator, which was created by a guy named Isac Zal and was not, as I had initially imagined, a joint effort of Tim Burton and the late Dr. Seuss. The site does at least describe the sound, calling it "a symphony inside the belly of a whale." Somehow, I think that would make ole Theodore Geisel proud. [Oddmusic via Make]

Think of it as the Robot plus the Moog synth guitar rolled into one. First and foremost, it's a guitarist's guitar, with three different kind of pickups—a humbucker, a single-coil and a bridge-mounted piezo acoustic—all capable of contributing their sound to an original, organic blend of totally real guitar noise.

Having anchored itself firmly in Gibson's traditions, it's also got some crazy new stuff. Like the Robot, it self-tunes (now up to 500 times on a single battery charge), and using the "Chameleon Tone Technology" it is capable of producing "every imaginable guitar sound," says Gibson.

The company is quite proud of the Master Control Knob—presumably with a bit of a Tron shoutout there—though I can only imagine that the "sophisticated full color matrix display featuring LEDs and high-tech light pipe technology" takes a little bit of a hike up the learning curve.

Those who know of Les Paul's guitar innovations will appreciate that Gibson is carrying on his tradition of complication as a necessary means for cooler guitar tech. Some of Les' personal guitars had tons of mostly unmarked switches on them, not to mention a few boxes off to the side.

Speaking of boxes, a lot of the digital mojo is facilitated by the guitar's interface, the Robot Interface Pack, which has jacks on the front for the guitar and headphones. On the rear there's a FireWire connector (hear that, new MacBook shoppers?) and a hex connector, which can be adapted for MIDI output. The good news for suckers who bought the first-gen Robot is that the upgrade will be available to them at a price close to cost. (My guess is they'll make the money on labor when you take your Robot in for the upgrade.)

Though Gibson won't promise "infinite sustain" like Moog, it does say that its body design makes "the Dark Fire one of the best-sustaining Les Pauls ever produced." Cool. [Gibson]

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Available for $99.97. [Sweetwater via UberGizmo]

And now it's back! From outer space! I'd love to say that it walked in here with that same look upon its face, but I would be a lying cow and you would all pay a midnight visit to Gawker HQ, flaming torches clutched in your paws, shouting, "Burn the witch." Ahem.

Anyways, Stylophone. The 2008 version has two sockets, one for headphones, and one to connect your MP3 player to, which will enable you to really murder your favourite songs, as well as, for the first time, volume control and three different sound modes. Costing a smidgeon under $30, the Stylophone runs on three AA batteries and there are a schwazillion clips of people doing hot Stylophone action on YouTube.
I couldn't decide between the Star Wars Death March, the William Tell Overture, something by Michael Jackson, or the Stylophone Orchestra of Great Britain, (relax girls, they're married) so I plumped for Bowie. [Firebox]

[Hammacher Schlemmer, via TFTS]

Unfortunately, the first run of the guitar will be limited to 4000 instruments (10 units in 400 stores); and I have no doubt that when the price is finally announced, it will be far out of the range of your average garage band. Still, if you would like to take a shot at picking one up, December 7th is the day to remember. [Gibson via Electronista]

Add that amount found in the guitar to all the cocaine the guy had mixed up in ten Thermos flasks in his luggage, and the grand total value (certainly inflated by breathless War on Drugs enforcers) was $5.12 million worth of the stuff. Just think of how many times this has been done without detection. [Music Thing]

See Eddie Van Halen launch into his famous solo on "Jump," trying in vain to somehow transpose to this otherworldly key that is nowhere to be found. This travesty of a performance happened earlier this month (in my hometown of Greensboro, North Carolina), and the funny thing is, the crowd was delighted with it. I shutter to think that no one realized something was terribly amiss, but those hometown folks always were overly polite. [RW370, via BoingBoing] (Thanks, Joel Johnson!)

• Disklavier 2.0 - $10,000 to $80,000 - Grand piano's brand new software streams digital player-piano songs over the internet, for a live piano via net radio. PDA remote operates over Wi-Fi.
• EZ-200 Keyboard - $150 - Learning keyboard for kids. Like many, it has light up keys to show you where to put your fingers. But this one will wait for you: it eases the tempo of the song down automatically to match your playing.
• Modus H01 - $12,500 - Sexy "velvet rouge" reimagining of the traditional piano. It's electronic, but with a natural feel. It contains a 40-watt sound system, and also comes in "amber glow" and "deep brunette."
• Clavinova CVP400 - $TBA - Do-it-yourself Barry Manilow workstation: sing into the mic while you play, and it automatically mixes voice and piano into a WAV that you can save on USB thumbdrive.

With reporting by Jennifer Hooker

It works by using piezoelectric pickups rather than the usual magnetic pickups used on most electric guitars, and these pickups are able to isolate the sound of each individual string. Underneath the pickups is a processor that senses the pitch being played, and sends a signal to the tuning pegs at the top of the guitar's neck to change the pitch until it's all tuned up.

Even though this machine may be perfectly accurate, turning a guitar can be a subtle art, where you can slightly change some of the notes to fit the key in which you're playing. However, for musicians who like to play various songs with the guitar tuned in completely different ways for each song, this technology could be extremely useful. In fact, the $899 it adds to the price of the guitar might seem like a bargain compared with buying two more guitars, each tuned in a completely different way. [Technology Review]

This gallery contains just a fraction of the crazy git-boxes Ed Roman has found, sold, commissioned or custom built. Some of these things have such sharp edges they're just downright dangerous, and speaking of dangerous, check out the Ted Nugent guitar with a compartment in the back for your Derringer. Might be handy to have that guitar on hand when you play one of those nightclubs where the stage is surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling cage. [Ed Roman]