My field recorder! Chilling after band practice right now, and being able to clearly listen back to my jams has been invaluable in progressing my musicianship.

Oh! Actually I’ve seen something similar done before with a modular synth! There’s this awesome Instagram profile called Ellingson.tv with a guy that uses modular synths to manipulate CRTs and combines that idea with a “Pepper’s Ghost” hologram effect. Highly recommend checking it out

My background is in audio engineering & live sound, so I’m not sure about the specifics of those ports. But there is zero risk of frying anything with the signal generated from a guitar, even an acoustic w/preamp. You would need orders of magnitude more power to do any damage, like if you plugged the 1/4" inch into a power amp designed for passive speakers (which can take the same 1/4" input as a guitar for some stupid reason.) I have to imagine that the only interaction happening within the CRT is directly with the built in speakers, so even if you did that crazy thing the speakers would blow but the video might still work (kinda want to see what would happen here lol, we need one of those YouTubers who like to break things.) For you though, the worst that would happen is the signal getting distorted and sounding horrible. My guess is either port would work granted you have the right adapter, and I actually think you’re more like to hear something from an acoustic because of the slight boost from the preamp. All this to say there’s nothing to worry about, but it’s a lot of work for something silly, I’m sure you could make the world’s worst amp with it if you try hard enough, seems like it should work to me.

The only way you’ll blow your CRT is if you tried to plug that dongle monstrosity into the speaker output of a power amp haha, guitars have a high impedance signal. Direct boxes actually lower the impedance, so that definitely won’t help make your output safer. (Still safe) So I say go for it directly from the guitar, the worst that can happen is nothing, (which is likely) which probably means you actually do need to lower the impedance with a direct box. (Which I still doubt would work but who knows) An amp with a line out or a digital pedal board would be the most likely options for actually getting sound through.

Same issue I mentioned in my comment! There’s a constant battle happening between the audio engineers and the noise floor of the the venue. It surprisingly doesn’t take too much more db to be heard above the crowd, like in a perfect world, if the crowd is sitting at 90db then 95db would be ideal. But unfortunately a crowd’s loudness ebs and flows and that can easily get drowned out so most just default to 100db and embrace the inevitable tinnitus. I recommend everyone invest in Earasers or something of that quality so y’all can appreciate music safely without losing all of the dynamics.

I’m taking live sound classes at my community college right now and we talked about this yesterday. The biggest issue with a large venue packed with people is the noise floor is very high. For instance if the crowd is 90db, then you’ve only got 10-20db of headroom to work with. 90db is already enough to cause hearing damage after 8 hours, and it gets exponentially worse with just a few db more, by 100 you can only safely be in that for 2 hours and that is generally the ideal loudness for that kind of venue. Of course since the engineers probably have hearing loss, they tend to raise it even higher to 110 which is loud enough to still cause damage over time even with regular earbuds unfortunately. So unless you can have a quiet crowd there is nothing you can do about needing ear protection, I recommend hanging by the engineer booth because they tend to be just far enough away to comfortably hear everything around 90db because they generally can’t use earbuds while actively mixing.

Random unrelated thought I just had, can you guys think of any interesting musical applications to a laser microphone? I found this super cool video when I tried to look it up (there’s practically nothing)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ja6gsoNJCY

A Kora! It’s an African instrument that is considered a guitar harp, with 21 strings ranging from the size of bass guitar string to fishing wire. The way it is played allows you to play the bass, lead, and rhythm at the same time. Here is a short example of a master kora player Toumani Diabate showcasing the instrument: https://youtu.be/8luhdxS2KuM?si=llpa2YVyIOf77_Nd

As a guitarist I found this guy who transcribed Toumani’s work onto a classical guitar, very interesting listen https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=55QnOlXckOk

My other thing would be trippy out there instruments that seem to put you in a different state of mind like the Yaybahar or “The Beam” that the grateful dead likes to break out sometimes

Yaybahar example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_aY6TxC1ojA&pp=ygUWeWVoYWJhciBhdCBpbnN0cnVtZW50IA%3D%3D

The Beam example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0h8o-1IQ5G0&pp=ygUSZ3JhdGVmdWwgZGVhZCBiZWFt