Don Rickert Research & Design Blog

New Musical Instrument Designs at Adventurous Muse

At the center of the Don Rickert Design business plan revisions is our musical instrument operation, The Adventurous Muse. There will be radical changes in the coming weeks to Adventurous Muse and its associated Adventurous Muse Store. These changes will definitely involve dumping product lines that have failed to attract good customers...a good customer is a loyal customer who actually buys stuff. One set of musical instrument products that we WILL NOT be dumping are instruments of our own design.

In a recent post our Adventurous Muse blog we described our collaboration with Aalborg University on the Overtone Fiddle, pictured here, which will very likely be commercialized in time.

Of course, our Octave Violins, historic pochettes and modern travel violins are gaining world-wide renown and we intend to win some design competitions with some of these instruments in 2010...so those instruments are safe from the chopping block. In fact, we have a new Octave Fiddle on the drawing board as well as a really skinny (but full 4/4 length) travel fiddle that is extremely durable for the most punishing environments.

We have some concept sketches of the new travel fiddle, which we are currently calling the Rickert Mountaineer Backpacker Fiddle in a new post at Adventurous Muse.

Don Rickert Design Getting Back to its Core Business--Design!

Note: Cross-posted at DonRickertDesign.com

The adventurous business climate has prompted us to rethink our business model and tactics. While we will continue our work in the area of ground-breaking musical instrument (Adventurous Muse) and high-performance rowing craft designs, we will also be renewing our emphasis on being a full-service multi-disciplinary design research and product design firm.

For those who need details, you'll just have to wait until we figure out which of our business enterprises are worth moving forward with as the economy improves and which ones simply have an insufficient number of good customers to be worthwhile pursuing.

Dr. Don Rickert ponders our business future...

Click on the photo for a larger view.

  

For the observant Industrial Designers among you, that sure as heck is a genuine Eames Chair!

We will be posting to this blog a lot more in the coming weeks

Recently, our musical instrument operation, Adventurous Muse, has sucked all available energy from our initial vision of creating a true cross-disciplinary research and design firm.

We look forward to revealing our plans for getting back to what we set out to do, which includes musical instrument design (but not so much musical instrument retailing), but many other product areas and services as well.

Let's put it this way, our plan is to focus more on our musical instrument inventions via Adventurous Muse and less on the retailing of other company's musical products in an economy where musical instrument retailers are dropping like flies. We intend to overcome the damage already done.

Stay tuned for our re-birth plans.

Collaboration with Aalborg University, Denmark on Next Gen Synth Violin

Don Rickert Design is collaborating with the Aalborg University Department of Media Technology (Copenhagen Institute of Technology), section for Medialogy (media.aau.dk/) on the next generation of violin synthesizer. The instrument, an outgrowth of Professor Dan Overholt's extensive work in "active acoustics", is unique in that all processing occurs in the instrument and is not MIDI-based, nor does it require a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), such as Ableton Live!. It will be called the Overtone Fiddle.

For the details of how it all works, you will have to wait for Dr. Overholt's initial research papers early in 2010. Dr. Don Rickert of Don Rickert Design is designing and building the instruments that the musician actually plays and also house the electronics for this groundbreaking project. The initial instruments will be slightly larger than the travel violins sold by Adventurous Muse but smaller than conventional violins. Nevertheless, the instruments will have all of the critical ergonomic features of a standard violin.

Since all of this work is occurring in the public domain, we will have drawings very soon and photos a bit later of this new electronic bowed instrument.

Stay tuned, and all will be demystified ultimately.

D.R.

Cross-posted at Adventurous Muse