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Guitar Hero, On a Real Guitar, To Hit Shelves In 2009
An anonymous reader writes "The Minneapolis Star Tribune features an article (with photos) about a prototype electric guitar that doubles as a Guitar Hero controller. It is not just another guitar-shaped controller with buttons: it is an actual, playable guitar, shown in-action. The startup company, Zivix, LLC, intends to bring the product to store shelves in 2009. Web searches indicate that the company may have raised around $800K for the venture. The company is also working on technology that enables finger sensing on a real guitar that would allow your computer to teach you how to play chords or evolve into a future guitar synthesizer."
Yes, it was, but the signal processing technology wasn't up to it the time, nor the mechanics of the crappy (Yamaha I think at the time GS20????) Guitar itself. Seeing this post on /. has me slapping my forehead in a 'why didn't I see this coming' way, but now it seems likely that perhaps the future of guitar lessons will be through thePS3/Xbox360/Wii instead of the weekly trek to the tutors. Or maybe the tutorage will still be home based, but a little bit less air axe based...
I think it can be done. One of the driving forces behind Guitar hero aside from accessibility is the fact that it scores you.
We can tell when we hit the wrong note of course, but mistakes weigh heavily in the mind of a new player, and frustration can easily kick in before fascination. That's how so many new players just end up quitting.
With scores, you can see progress with a concrete metric. You may have only managed 1 more note correctly, or ran your scale .5 seconds faster, but it's an improvement you can see that you might not have noticed. This can give them the encouragement to give it one more go to see if they can do better.
And the fact that they're fretting actual strings instead of buttons goes a long way in teaching them to successfully work their way around a guitar.
You could even modify the game to teach real guitar concepts. Add scale time-trials, at harder levels, remove the note indicators so they have to memorize it, then transfer between scales midway through...the player could pick up quite a bit.
You can have the game accept different variations of notes as correct inputs. Like instead of a vanilla D, let them play a Dsus4 and recognize that as a successful note as well. Everybody in Guitar Hero plays the same song by default, they can try their own combinations and impress their friends.
It's an idea with a lot of potential, and also an idea that's been around for a long time. The devil's in the details and the successful will all pivot on how well they execute this product. (My bet is that they will fail completely and fade into obscurity).
http://www.guitarrising.com/
This will be awesome if done correctly. My only hope is that we see this kind of technology become available for other instruments, as well.
Why not? I liked Guitar Hero so much I bought myself an electric guitar. I'm not great yet but I have a blast messing around and I've learned to play a few songs. (As a side note my fingers got much stronger and faster from playing a real guitar and consequently my guitar hero scores improved as well.)
Having worked on a similar project, I can say this .. encoding analog signals created by guitar strings is tricky. Especially if you're modifying your standard electric guitar.
It doesn't seem like that difficult a problem (just make a ADC, right?), except you run into interesting problems such as: for low E, if you wait for the full cycle of the vibration to finish, it's already too long to create a satisfying user experience (i.e. even with no processor overhead, by the time you conclude the wavelength matches, there will be noticeable delay to actual sound); the string affect each other; the amplitudes can vary wildly (which can force a large encoding size; strumming looks very different from plucking, etc.
By the time you can throw enough processing power at the problem, you have a very expensive device on your hands. The keyboard, on the other hand is a much more precise instrument, and you can map any sound onto it, making it much more prevalent than guitars in the MIDI world.
Thus, for a long time, there just wasn't much demand for MIDI guitars. However, with the advent of guitar hero/rock band, it turns out many people have collectively slapped their foreheads and realized the potential. I know of at least 3-4 other companies working on this problem.
Whoever can create first a low-cost MIDI interface with a compelling game will reap in large sums of cash.
There are, however, a few important factors involved. For example, does it make sense to create a device for gaming only, or do you want it also to be able to do studio quality work.
On one side of the equation, you have a cheap device that doesn't track the player's notes 100% of the time, and is somewhat lossy in general. However, in a game-scenario, you know what notes are coming your way, so you can implement a few intelligent algorithms that can decide which note you most likely meant to play. Additionally, even if you have delays in your system, you can retroactively score the player's performance.
On the other side of the equation, you have no idea what note should be next (actually, this isn't entirely true .. it's a problem not entirely disimiliar to the iPhones adaptive keyboard). You also need want to be able to reproduce as many of the attributes of the vibrating string as possible. This can be a complex issue, especially considering that the strings will vibrate differently if you strum up or down. Again, you might be able to guess what note the player meant to play (think auto-tuning), but it's still no easy feat.
So, the first choice is easy, cheap and lossy. The second choice is hard, expensive, but useful outside of the game world. If it's really only games fueling this endeavor, it's more about coming up with creative hacks than trying to make a MIDI guitar.
Once upon a time, I rigged my Guitar Hero controller to play 32 different chords: guitar poseur (requires a USB guitar hero controller plugged in, error handling is non-existent).
A12A.713 is the root of ASC('evil')
Was that Yamaha pickup any good? I remember seeing it in a music store some years ago and wondering if it actually worked. It seems like a relatively trivial problem to solve if you can attach a pickup, as they did. Transforming the audio into some kind of useful MIDI information in realtime seems horribly difficult but also doable... just not without immense processing power.
I tried it in a music store and it seemed to be capturing basic pitch and velocity pretty well for each string, which is pretty neat. I don't imagine that it would take too much computational power, since the underlying computation is basically just doing an FFT on the audio signal and picking up the fundamental frequency. That translates quite well into a MIDI note on/note off command. FFTs can be done really efficiently in hardware I believe.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.