WASHINGTON — 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, the University of Maryland engineering professor 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 crammed a dizzying number of variables into a simple product that he hopes will allow any player to capture just the tone desired.

Jacob and the students launched Coil, a company that uses the patent-pending electronics they developed to customize the sound in guitars. He has received office space and a research grant from the university, which wants to promote entrepreneurship, but the risk is his and his partners’: They have staked about $100,000 on the venture. Now he and his partners are waiting to see whether the Korean-made guitars with U-Md.-designed electronics will sell, starting at $1,000 or so. The school announced the launch of the Web site where the guitars are sold this week. But will guitar enthusiasts buy it?

If the technology really lets someone get the tone they want, “they’ll sell a million of them,” said Rick Hogue, owner of Garrett Park Guitars in Maryland.

Musicians trying to define tone are by turns eloquent and tongue-tied.

“Tone is — it’s a quality you’re trying to achieve. It’s a derivative of skill and passion. You’re always looking for it,” Hogue said, adding that he wouldn’t be in business if tone weren’t so elusive. “People look their whole lives for that tone they had one particular night, or the tone in their mind. [Jimi] Hendrix said he couldn’t get all the things out that were in his head, he couldn’t play everything he heard.”

That’s what Coil is trying to create with its guitars.