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The Design Failures That Led To Rock Band
CNN is running an interview with Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos, founders of Harmonix, about the long road that eventually led them to the creation of Guitar Hero and Rock Band . It wasn't an quick or easy process, and the two worked on a number of unsuccessful concepts before arriving at the games that redefined a genre. Quoting:
"I was watching people interact with our product, and the realization came crashing down on me — we had spent 18 months on a music system that was fundamentally flawed. Karaoke isn't about personal expression. It's about people reproducing the songs they know as accurately as they can. The whole notion of adding improvisation elements just wasn't connecting. So I retreated to my hotel room and was depressed for the next two days. The company was on the rocks. We had zero revenue. We had been trying for four years to make something work. We were out of ideas. Those first four years had been a graveyard of mis-starts and product concepts that never made it anywhere. Worse, there was adequate information about two years into those four years to realize that our big concept was fatally flawed."
Here is a site that may be of use to you:
http://www.kindtree.org/
Ooh, what a burn.
Bow-ties are cool.
I've never seen this game. I've never played it. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I think that there is some kind of small plastic guitar-shaped controller with about six colored buttons on the fretboard. From what I've been able to determine, a version of a 1960s-1990s classic rock song plays and the person presses buttons on controller in a sequence determined by a video display.
Allow me to suggest an alternative.
Get a cheap guitar from Craigslist or a friend. Get a beater electric. Don't worry about the tone, but it should have all six strings and they should be close enough to the fretboard so that you don't have to press them more than 1/8th of an inch even at the highest frets (where the neck meets the body). A cheap 'strat' or 'telecaster' clone is an excellent choice. Don't buy one on eBay because the shipping charge will be more than the instrument is worth (if you take my advice and get a cheap guitar). Acoustic guitars sound great, but they are too loud. Electrics can be loud, or very quiet; you control the volume. Acoustics are always loud when you strum them briskly, and they hurt your fingers after a few hours.
Get a book from the library about guitar chords or have a friend show you some. Learn how to tune it. Get a real cheap electronic tuner from eBay or plug your new guitar into the line audio input of your PC and download a tuning program.
Look up some songs that you know from recordings on the web. Google the song name in quotes along with 'tab'. With luck, you'll be able to find the chord patterns to songs that you like. Try playing along with the song but be aware that the tab file and the actual song are likely to be in different keys.
Try 'dork' or pop songs that you may know from radio or old recordings. The older the song (at least for songs back to the 1960s), the more likely that it will be found as a good quality tab file.
When you get some skill at playing, try downloading a MIDI notation program and some MIDI files. You can play them through the sound card or IC on your PC. They sound cheezy, but that's not the point. Try learning how to read the music and chords from the sheet music displayed by the notation program. You learned to read English; you learned to read C++, you learned Perl and Python, you can learn to read music. It's not hard. Search the web for MIDI files of songs that you know, download them, and feed them to the MIDI notation program.
It will look overwhelming at first, but the music notation has every little riff and every complicated chord progression displayed in the notes and staffs of the music notation. It's an order-of-magnitude harder than 'Rock Band' because you have about 20 notes on each string and the instructions for playing are not numbers on a display, they are the position of the music symbols on the staff display of the MIDI notation program. For complex lead solos of classic rock, such as the Stairway to Heaven or Dark Side of the Moon, check out all the people on YouTube who are showing off their ability to copy solos in real time. There are also tab files available of most if not all the great classic rock guitar solos from the 60s and 70s. Some from the 80s and 90s are also available.
Use an old boom box as an amp if you can't afford a real and expensive one. Get cheap effects pedals from eBay. I recommend any Death Metal Distortion pedal to start, or a cheap Grunge pedal. If you know electronics, keep in mind that it is always cheaper to buy effects pedals on eBay than it is to make them. But check out all the effects schematics on the web so you get an idea of how effects work. The DSP-chip-based 'All-in-one' effects boxes suck. Anything with a seven-segment LED display is going to suck, don't waste your money.
When you feel good and up to it, start playing with other people.
This is the 'old-school' tri
Either that, or consensual sex.