Slashdot Mirror
Guitar Hero Hacks
Edge Online has a short blurb mentioning a project at the University of California turning the Guitar Hero guitar into a real instrument. From the article: "For the final project of their Computer Audio course, University of California students Travis Chen and Sunny Chan have created Guitar Hero Hack, a plugin for sequencing software Max/MSP that lets players assign switchable banks of samples to each of the controller's buttons, utilizes its tilt switch as a way to clear current audio on any given track, and, the two hope, might be on its way to a fully functioning live instrument." His incredibly impressive demo video is well worth watching.
"Sequencing software" wouldn't be my first choice for describing Max/MSP, but at any rate it's much more than that. Max/MSP is a very powerful modular synthesis environment, allowing the user to assemble very interesting and complicated instruments and processing chains using a graphic interface. Miller S. Puckette (the MSP in the name of the software) has also released a similar package called 'pd' under an open source license (or, at least, it is distributed as source code).
His loss.
Read at -1. The site is much more entertaining that way and I recommend it for everyone.
Seriously, there's a lot of interesting stuff going on below 1. Modding at higher levels does Slashdot a disservice.