Get started making music

>I can see how this dumbs it down for people in the beginning, but where does a beginner learn how to play an instrument with a 90% failure rate in the first year? It's clear that the problem hasn't been solved, otherwise more than 6% of the US population would playing a musical instrument.

I don't see that failure rate as a bad thing. People who don't want to play guitar that bad will "fail," which also could be known as moving on to something else (?). How is this guitar a stepping stone to actually playing a guitar though? I imagine most people will simply stop at this guitar and use it as a party trick, which is fine; I'd even play around on it if it was on hand. The furthest this guitar can go in teaching someone to play an actual guitar is the matching of the strumming hand to the fretting hand's basic location on a fret board, to say nothing of the fingering (pushing a button doesn't come close). In other words this guitar it seems will get you like... .5% of the way to being proficient at an actual guitar and really no more. The strings on this guitar seem oddly loose, like rubber bands. Just an observation. I'm sure you guys have a reason for this. More catch for untrained thumbs, no blistering? The only way I see this being a step toward real guitar playing is if someone has a really good feeling about being able to hold a guitar shaped instrument and being able to coherently produce sound and decides to give it a full go. But the reality is that making the leap to a real guitar will lead them to run about against the same wall that everyone runs up against: the pain, blisters, hours of infuriating attempts at fingering, having to learn shapes, names of notes and chords, having to learn to tune, read sheet music or tabs, listen to songs to learn them by trial and error, etc.

>Partially correct, it's as easy as Guitar Hero in the beginning, but the only correlation is that there are buttons instead of strings on the fretboard. Otherwise, it's an entirely different product. We're a computer that is shaped like a guitar.

Exactly. So learning to play this is learning to play a computer shaped like a guitar, not a guitar. Like I said, if someone gets a good feeling out of this and that's what it takes to take the plunge into the long hours of pain that guitar learning is then that can be a positive. Though I really cringe at the thought that someone might be fooled into thinking they've arrived at a replacement for a real guitar.

>While it's fun to think that guitar made of wood with tensioned strings and metal has more personality vs. a guitar made of plastic and metal, without trying the instrument yourself I beg you to defer your criticism until you try it.

Okay. I don't see how you can suggest that this guitar is capable of any nuance. It's a brute chord computer. The muscles of a hand on a real guitar with a pick or thumb can operate in such minute and multifarious ways that as far as I can see cannot be done on this guitar. You can play a single note on a real guitar in so many different ways. You can strike the string with varying intensity, you can palm mute the string, you can use varying pressure with the fretting finger on the note, you can vibrato, bend, and so on. Maybe I'm missing something. Can you do slides on your guitar? Bends, vibrato? The basics. Is picking your strings vs. finger-picking different or is the signal just interpreted the same? Can you influence the timbre in any way other than using that knob? Can you post a video of someone doing a solo on your guitar? Doesn't seem possible. I guess you can use it to write basic songs if you're a songwriter. I guess on your guitar you can fret chords at a speed that is inhumanly possible, which is sort of interesting. If I played this I'd be tempted to treat the chord buttons like individual notes to come up with something outlandish. But I don't get how you can insinuate that the guitar is capable of doing what a real guitar can, if that is what you're doing. I take back my "hate" comment. I don't hate it. I'd mess around. But my criticisms above pertaining to your insinuation stand.

>Kind of like electric cars vs. ICE cars. I'm a car geek through and through and there is nothing like slamming your foot into the gas pedal and going fast. The smell of petrol and the noise from the engine/exhaust are the visceral traits people talk about when they drive their ICE cars. Does Tesla lack personality and nuance because you don't smell and hear the same things? I like to think it's a different personality because I still get the same goosebumps when you switch to insanity mode and floor it.

I don't think that analogy works. A Tesla has all the functionality of a combustible car. Your guitar doesn't seem to have the same functionality as a guitar, has most of the functionality cut out, paring it down to chords, and that's saying nothing of the sound of the actual chords, which sound like my first $80 electric plugged through my first $50 amp. There's not a rich tone there. Maybe you could sell it with an amp with effects.

https://youtu.be/SdGYBI1fBhs

What would McLaughlin do with your guitar?

Am I missing something? I went through all the tutorials and AFAICT there isn't much here. It seemed like "here's a piano. Here's some music made on the piano. Now bang on the piano. Fun yea?"

Is there really any learning here? Did I miss it? I saw the sample songs a few minor things like "major chords are generally considered happy and minor sad" etc... but I didn't feel like going through this I'd actually have learned much about music.

I'm not in anyway against EDM or beat based music. I bought Acid 1.0 through 3.0 back in the 90s which AFAIK was one of the first types of apps to do stuff like this. My only point is I didn't feel like I was getting much learning in order to truly use a piece of software like this. Rather it seemed like a cool flashy page but with a low content ratio. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I guess I'd like some guidance on which notes to actually place where and why, not just empty grids and very vague direction.

Only if your claim to fame is primary sound transduction and not, say, being a guru of giving other people tools and help with their ideas. My own career over the last ten years or so has been based on the latter.

I will say that I think the 'power-law' nature of that is not dissimilar to being a primary sound transduction artist. You don't get a large number of people being celebrities at tutorials, or of disseminating free plugins.

And yeah, I do mean to expand upon this: got a likely domain for it just yesterday. The trick there is that you need to be inter-disciplinary enough that you can produce a really wide range of content, that by definition a newbie couldn't possibly process. I can go from 'slew rates in op-amps in boutique guitar stompboxes' to 'exploiting unusual interpretations of the Circle of Fifths' (did you know the Four Chord Song can be read as a atomically contained minimum-area space in an extended diagram of the circle of fifths?) but a newbie wouldn't cover that range.

There are no secret weapons, just secret masteries: by that, I mean 'stuff that's sensible and obvious, but to the contextless outsider seems like black magic coming out of nowhere'. Any sufficiently deep context seems like magic to someone who has no idea of the scope of that context.

THIS, this right here. That idea has come to my mind many times, having something like a library of "recipes" for sounds. The hardest part for me whenever I try to do something in FL Studio is getting the source samples and make them sound the way I want individually. It's a shame to have an idea for a song in my head and not being able to materialize it just because I don't know what kind of plugin or instrument I should use.

No reason they have to be. I recently ordered a couple 'Bastl Kastles' to use as oscillators and LFOs (patching them into Xoxboxes and/or each other). Part of the reason some of those old things like DINsync hardware are prized is retro nostalgia, but the other reason is they're using primitive timing systems that have less jitter than the more sophisticated centralized MIDI systems. If you're using DINsync, all your instruments are playing their own sequences and a timing tick is just keeping them aligned. If you're running MIDI then you have to send actual note descriptions over a 31.25 Kbaud serial bus before you can get any sounds out. If you're sequencing from a DAW (not doing realtime processing) and daisy-chaining instruments, forget it ;)

I'm currently getting a bank of Delta Labs Effectrons together for delays: old delta-sigma (like SACD, but potato grade) digital delays. It's possible that popularizing this would make Effectrons trendy and pricey, like the EMS VCS3 synth is trendy and pricey… but Bastle Kastle kits are dirt cheap. There's no reason there can't be a delta-sigma digital delay kit with the same functionality as Effectrons and the same or better sound in relevant ways. Tools don't have to be expensive these days.