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.

Comments

The hack we really need is

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

a device that electrocutes the guitarist as soon as it detects the first notes of Smoke On The Water...

Re:The hack we really need is

[RandomPrecision]

You might not like this program then...I thought it was funny at the time.

#include <windows.h>

void main()
{
Beep(392,500);//G
Beep(466,500);//Bb
Beep(523,1000);//C2
Beep(392,500);//G
Beep(466,500);//Bb
Beep(554,500);//Db
Beep(523,1000);//C2
Beep(392,500);//G
Beep(466,500);//Bb
Beep(523,1000);//C2
Beep(466,500);//Bb
Beep(392,1000);//G
}

Sequencing software, eh?

[croddy]

"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).