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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."
It's cool, but I highly doubt it will convince many people to really learn the guitar. Guitar Hero is a game. You can pretend to be Slash or Jimmy Page with minimal effort. That's why people play it.
I smell Christmas cash-in on parents who worry little Johnny and Susie are wasting too much time on a video game. "Now they can REALLY learn music... the FUN® way!"
People would be better off putting that money into a month's worth of guitar lessons at the music shop down the street. That's about the amount of time it would take for someone to decide they're serious about learning to play, and also about the amount of time it would take to get sick of playing this "Headliner."
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...
Just imagine a guitar teaching you how to place your fingers on the strings. A little negative feedback for misplaced fingers maybe? As long as the current is limited, it shouldn't kill anyone. :)
Real guitars are lame
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Wasn't this idea thrown around when the MIDI interface was created, 20+ years ago?
But of course...we're now coming full circle when people realize that they can do this Guitar Hero stuff on real guitars, and without the buttons either. Turns out, guitars actually make music all by themselves (with possibly just an amp)!!! But I digress--for those interested in music, here are the relevant things that precede this in time and in awesomeness:
Yamaha MIDI pickup for guitars -- turns the note you're playing into a MIDI note that can then control a synth on your computer. And I don't mean the 80's era crappy "synth" sounds, modern sound synthesis engines are INCREDIBLY realistic.
Alternatively, you could skip Guitar Hero completely and do the following:
This is the method I use and it's incredibly satisfying if you don't happen to have a band lying around. Plus it also lets you choose which part you want to play along with, speed up/slow down the song. Sure there aren't any vocals, but it's still mucho fun and way better for impressing people with.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
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.
But does it tell you that YOU ROCK! if you get most of the notes right?
I work at Zivix. The comments here (both positive and negative) are helpful for us to figure out hw best to explain what we've developed. Here's a few points: - Our core technology is proximity-based fingertip sensors that can be installed in a fretboard. The Headliner just has 12 on the first string, but other models can populate up to a full guitar - The challenge with Guitar Rising and other methods that work with a normal guitar is to analyze the signal, possible with one string, really really difficult with more than 1 string at the same time, which is why Midi guitars have separate pickups. Delay is a big issue, since analysis is always done after the fact - Guitars only allow 1 note per string. Playing the game across more than 1 string would be pretty hard, our guitar allows "chords" on one string, just like the plastic controller - On the Headliner, you don't really learn to play guitar, but you do learn to fret and pick a string, and end up with a real guitar when the game is over. Bundled software will let you trigger loop combinations interactively to play on top of, makes practicing a lot more fun. - On our other products coming out, you can learn to chord, and view the result on the screen, chords can be seen before picking a note, so delays are minimal - hope this helps....