GALLERY: South by Southwest 2011

Casio’s Dimension Shifter is a beautiful and thoughtful idea. It reveals an understanding about how electric guitar players tend to move as they play, and the lyrical, maybe even balletic and poetic, manner in which motion can transform the music they make. The fundamental notions behind the Dimension Shifter are not new—essentially, it combines the basic mechanical concepts behind the expression foot pedal and the B-Bender into a wireless digital expression tool. But where an expression pedal weds the player to a single location, and the B-Bender (and its cousin, the Palm Pedal) can only alter the pitch of one or two strings, the Dimension Shifter enables a player to change effect parameters using the pull-and-release, strap-tension-based mechanical action of a B-Bender—all as they meander about a performance space. Depending on your average state of animation on a stage, this might not seem like a big deal. But for any player that tends to get lost in their musical reveries or likes to interact more intimately with bandmates while they sweep a filter, tweak their delay feedback, or increase the modulation rate of flange, it’s a very liberating technology.