Electronic musical instrument employing variable resistor fingerboards

Claim 1

In an electronic musical instrument having a plurality of variable resistors coupled to variable frequency oscillators as the frequency or tone pitch determining element for said oscillator in response to manual operation, said resistors each including an elongated rectangular base member and a metal stripshaped conductor juxtapositioned over said base member and spaced a small distance therefrom functioning as a keyboard, the improvement therein wherein there are a plurality of strip-shaped resistors acting as first electrical conductors carried by one surface of the base member, said first conductors having mutually parallel axes, a resilient pressure contact member spaced from and covering the first electrical conductors, a plurality of mutually insulated, elongated strip-shaped second electrical conductors fixedly secured to and carried by a surface of the resilient contact member facing the first electrical conductors, said second conductors having mutually parallel axes, the axis of each first conductor being aligned with the axis of a different one of each second conductor, said first and second plurality of conductors normally being spaced from each other whereby conductors of the first and second conductors are arranged in cooperating pairs adapted to engage each other in response to manual depression of a selected portion of the contact member, and means for preventing more than one cooperating pair of first and second conductors from contacting each other in response to a single manual depression of a portion of the resilient pressure contact member aligned with the cooperating pair, said contact member and each of second conductors having sufficient resiliency to establish point contact between aligned regions of each cooperating pair substantially aligned with a manual depression point of the resilient pressure contact member.