Guitar Robot: From Player Instruments to ABB Arms

A guitar robot has to do what a player does with two different hands: press the strings against the frets with one and pick or strum with the other, in time. This post follows that problem from the coin-operated Violano-Virtuoso of the early 1900s through the Compressorhead robot band to a 3D-printed guitar player that appeared in August 2026. It also looks at where ABB robots could fit. ABB has not built a guitar robot, so that part is a possibility rather than a project.

Fingers, the Compressorhead guitar robot, with a Gibson Flying V at Musikmesse Frankfurt in 2013. Photo: Torsten Maue / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

From self-playing violins to Compressorhead

Self-playing string instruments came before the robots. In 1905 Henry Konrad Sandell applied for a patent on an electric self-playing violin, granted that December and assigned to the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago. It was shown at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle and was on sale by 1912 as the Violano-Virtuoso. Small electric rollers bowed the strings, and metal fingers rose under each string to stop the notes. Sources put production at roughly 3,000 to 5,000 machines before it ended around 1930, many of them in public places.

A Mills Violano-Virtuoso, the self-playing violin and piano, at the Music House Museum. Photo: H. Michael Miley / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The next big step was Compressorhead, a Berlin robot band built by Frank Barnes and collaborators from recycled parts. Its first recorded performance was on a German RTL television show in March 2012, and its first live audience came at the Big Day Out festival in Australia in 2013. A viral cover of Motörhead's "Ace of Spades" spread the band online that year. Fingers plays a Gibson Flying V with two hands that have about 78 fingers in total, though sources differ on the count. Bones plays bass from caterpillar tracks. A MIDI sequencer drives all of them. A rhythm guitarist, Hellgå Tarr, joined in 2017.

Compressorhead's Fingers on guitar and Bones on bass, at Musikmesse Frankfurt in 2013. Photo: Torsten Maue / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

A different route was taken by Eric Singer's League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots, known as LEMUR. It built GuitarBots, one-string automatons. Pat Metheny used LEMUR instruments in his 2010 Orchestrion album and tour, with nearly 40 robotic instruments around him, including GuitarBots, mallet instruments and a large array of percussion. A Berklee profile of Singer puts the count nearer 50, most of them built by LEMUR. Metheny played a MIDI guitar and the robots responded, so the machines worked as a live band around him.

Pat Metheny on stage with robotic instruments during the Orchestrion tour in Texas, 2010. Photo: Steve Rainwater / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Guitar robots after the viral years

In August 2026 Hackaday and New Atlas covered the MegCell Pulse, a 3D-printable pair of robots that clamp onto an acoustic guitar and play from digital tablature. One robot frets by moving along the neck, and the other plucks with six individual plectrums. Its builder, known as Bruce, spent about six years on it. It cannot reach the whole fretboard or slide between frets. It is sold as plans on Kickstarter, with a top tier of $100 for the print files, guide, software and parts list, so you build it yourself.

A guitar-playing humanoid robot on display in 2023. Photo: Burkhard Mücke / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The guitar is hard for robots because fretting and picking must stay in step. Compressorhead solved fretting with dozens of fingers. MegCell Pulse uses a single sliding fretter and accepts its limits. Both approaches trade skill for hardware, and neither matches a player's bends and vibrato. Guitar makers use robots differently: a 2024 photo from the Martin Guitar factory shows a robot arm holding a guitar body against a polishing wheel. The same timing problem shows up with keys in the piano playing robot post.

A robot arm at the Martin Guitar factory, seen through a window while polishing guitar bodies. Photo: Henrysz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Where do ABB robots fit? ABB has no guitar robot, so what follows is speculation. The nearest precedent is ABB's dual arm YuMi, which conducted the Lucca Philharmonic with Andrea Bocelli in Pisa in 2017. A guitar version could pair a YuMi arm or a GoFa CRB 15000 cobot with a pick or a strummer, with a separate fretting device holding the chords. Teams would simulate it first in RobotStudio, checking timing and reach before any strings are touched.

ABB's YuMi conducts the Lucca Philharmonic with Andrea Bocelli in Pisa, 2017. Photo: ABB

What comes next for guitar robots

For homes, the likeliest product is a practice partner: a device that plays rhythm parts or backing chords from tablature so a solo guitarist has a band. Teachers might use one to show a passage at slow speed without tiring. Cost decides whether that happens. MegCell Pulse shows that a basic version can be built from printed parts for a modest price, but a machine that plays a full fretboard cleanly will cost more. Noise is a second concern, because a mechanical picker clicks and buzzes more than a person does.

A hobbyist's robotic guitar with a tangle of wiring at Maker Faire in 2007. Photo: Bill Ward / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The open problems are expression, reach and safety. A person bends strings, slides between notes and changes touch from phrase to phrase. A robot needs force sensing and fast control to do the same, and ABB cobots such as the GoFa already use force sensing in assembly and finishing. Reaching every fret demands a moving hand that does not collide with the player's own. Safety rules for a robot near a person's hands matter in a home where children may reach for it. Skills are the last gap, because few musicians also program motion. ABB's MultiMove option lets one OmniCore controller coordinate several robots, which suits a fretting arm and a picking arm that must stay in sync.

Lead-through teaching: moving an ABB GoFa arm by hand. Photo: ABB

For factories, the lesson is that musical instruments already use robots for finishing work. The Martin factory arm polishing guitars is one example, and the musical instrument manufacturing post covers more. ABB's small arms can sand, polish and handle delicate parts, and a tool programmed in Wizard or RobotStudio can repeat a finish on every body. Factories pay for repeatable finishing work, so robots in guitar making are likelier than robots playing guitars at home.

An engineer programs a robot cell in RobotStudio next to an ABB industrial robot. Photo: ABB

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