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BILL AITKEN
The SynthAxe was an 80s British invention, designed by Bill Aitken, Mike Dixon and Tony Sedivy, and it set out to reimagine the guitar synthesizer. Looking like a futuristic spaceship, it dispensed with regular pitch-to-voltage converters and instead sensed every nuance of the required non-standard playing techniques and converted these to MIDI. The Synthaxe cost around £6,000, and fewer than 100 were sold.