Building a better electric guitar

Washingtonpost.com: University of Maryland engineering professor Bruce Jacob had a few songs he wanted to record, tunes that had been jangling around in his head for years. He bought a guitar, but the notes he played never sounded as good as the music he had imagined.

Here's how Jacob, 43, describes the sounds a guitar makes: "If you have a bunch of paints, you can create any paint you want from the three or four fundamental colors. With guitars, it's the exact same thing. You can make any sound you want out of three or four colors. But most guitars have one color."

So Jacob decided to create a better guitar, attacking an elusive aesthetic problem with a series of math equations, a circuit board, and wiring. He and a couple of his students launched Coil, a company that uses the patent-pending electronics they developed to customize the sound in guitars.