The touch guitar (or touch-style guitar) is a musical instrument of the guitar family which has either been designed or adapted to utilise a fretboard-tapping playing style..
Although "Touch Guitar" was registered as a trademark by musician and instrument designer Markus Reuter in the late 2000s, the term has been used formally or informally for a variety of instruments since the 1950s.
History and instruments
The touch-style playing technique has been traced back to a variety of sources and players (including Merle Travis but was formally codified by American guitarist Jimmie Webster in his 1952 book Touch System, with various players and instrument builders developing the ideas further. Webster himself collaborated with Gretsch Guitars on a guitar stereo pickup design for the Touch System (which fed the bass and melody output to two separate amplifiers) but the concept was not commercially successful.
Prominent examples of touch instruments include the Dave Bunker touch guitar "Duo'Lectar" first instrument to be specifically designed and patented in 1961 for double neck fretboard-Touch/Tap style use), Single Neck type tapping instruments include, the Chapman Stick (developed in 1970 and produced in 1974), the Warr Guitar (first produced in 1991) and the Mobius Megatar. Other touch guitars have included the Solene, Chuck Soupios's dual-necked BiAxe (patented in 1980 and produced during the early 1980s) and Sergio Santucci's TrebleBass (another 1980s instrument, which won the endorsement of Stanley Jordan), while other current manufacturers include Box Guitars and Crimson Guitars. Markus Reuter developed and began manufacturing instruments under the "Touch Guitar" trademark in the late 2000s.
Later developments of the touch guitar concept featured digital touch screen technology, such as Max Battaglia's Hyper Touch Guitar and the Misa Digital Guitar. These are string-less instruments in which strings and their interactions with plectrums and fingers can all be mimicked digitally: in some cases, fret spacing and relationships can also be customized.