31–40 of 100 posts
I'm curious how playable and hackable it will be. The Kickstarter page says it's MIDI compliant, but MIDI is a terribly restrictive protocol not really suited to the range of expression you have on a guitar.
As a guitarist, I don't think this is a useless tool for people learning how to play, but "the first guitar that anybody can play" is a ridiculous title. Anyone with two working hands and no cognitive disabilities can learn how to play a guitar already. It takes effort, but if you keep at it, learning how to play is inevitable. What they are promising with the title is that this device will take all the effort out of…
This seems like an interesting concept and the LEDs should make it easier to see which strings need to be played. I'm curious how it compares to the Rocksmith video game which is played with a real guitar (which I haven't tried). There is considerably more risk with this project than many other Kickstarter projects as the lowest tier is $350 -- if the project fails and the GTar is never made that's quite a bit more m…
The money isn't taken out of your account until the project is successfully funded so even if you contribute $350 that $350 doesn't get taken out if the project fails to reach its goal (at least this is what happens with other kickstarter projects)
Neat. But hyperbole makes me an anti-customer. "Anybody (with an iPhone)" is a far smaller set than "Anybody". Also some peoples fingers are just too short which nothing can help and/or they lack musical "sense" (hearing, rhythm, whatever it is that makes me suck at anything musical) which I doubt this setup helps.
This is a classic excuse and complete BS. My hands are much smaller than average and I adapted. Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath) lost the tips of 2 of his fingers in an accident and still manages to play!
As a guitarist, I don't think this is a useless tool for people learning how to play, but "the first guitar that anybody can play" is a ridiculous title. Anyone with two working hands and no cognitive disabilities can learn how to play a guitar already. It takes effort, but if you keep at it, learning how to play is inevitable. What they are promising with the title is that this device will take all the effort out of…
That being said, when Guitar Hero came out for the Wii I got a copy, realized that they had captured some of the 'feel' you get when you are playing for real (my nominal instrument is trombone but not a lot of call for that :-) and found it fun. So I took the open source bluetooth driver for the Wiimote and created an app that basically let you play a song and pace it with the 'strumming'. Its great for kidding around but not as satisfying as having to work the frets etc.
So here we have a guitar that can do a bit of both, play 'fake' where only the correct notes play, or play 'real' where all notes play. Cool idea.
The price though. Ouch. Lets look at that for a minute. After they build their first batch, guitars will be $450 each. And they need an iPhone to work at all. So a used iPhone is maybe $100 so you are looking at $550 all up. A student guitar is $60 and lessons are like $100/month so call it 5 months of lessons.
I'm guessing that if you don't even know if you like to play the guitar its going to be too much of a 'risk' to invest in it. That will greatly limit the market. If they are successful I hope they come out with a dedicated built in compute unit.
That being said, you also want to encourage people to play and write your own music. If all this does is teach you how to play your favourite songs (by other artists), that is all you'll learn.
I notice it has a 'free-play' mode, where it turns into what looks like a Kaoss pad. This is also good, but I'd hope it'd have some sort of learning mode where you're taught chords, and basic chord progressions, and barre chords.
I'd see more value in that than the Guitar Hero, 'mash out epic rock and roll guitar solos' style of game it shows at the start.
Edit: I suppose the form of this will make parents a lot happier than they would be if they bought their kid a Strat and a 300W guitar amp.
Playing the guitar is "valuable" because not everyone can do it.
Last time I checked, Fretlight didn't have an open API that anyone can use, but reverse engineering the protocol and providing open tools would cost way less than $100K.