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Ubisoft Announces Music Game For Real Guitars
Despite recent troubles in the music game market, Ubisoft thinks the genre still has room for innovation. They have announced Rocksmith, a rhythm game designed for use with real electric guitars. The guitars will connect to a console or PC through the standard output jack.
"... the 'note highway' is actually a virtual guitar fretboard, complete with numbers which correspond to the different frets, and the 'target zone' consists of six horizontal strings. Wherever each note appears on the virtual fret board, that’s where your finger(s) go on the physical fretboard. Once the note reaches the target area you strum the string it comes into contact with. Simple. The camera zooms dynamically to highlight where on the fret board you should be looking at, in much the same way that a musician’s eyes would scan up and down the neck of the instrument during a performance."
At this point, why not just buy a real guitar?
You can already play with a real guitar using rock band 3. You can't use any guitar though, you have to buy the Fender Rock Band Pro Squier Strat. I have it and it is awesome.
Ubisoft's game is not the first announced game that lets you use any electric guitar. That honor goes to Guitar Rising, which was never released.
The Wii and the various dance games started this trend by making players move and exercise. Now Ubisoft wants to introduce formal music teaching and practise via a game. Well it seems that simple games are getting too shallow and the game industry is poaching time honored ways to waste time from other domains, which have proven to offer more or less unlimited levelling capacity.
I just can't wait to hear people talk about how easy it was to beat the Bon Jovi level but that they're stuck on that evil Habanera Flameco boss before they can get to the Mariachi level.
this will be wicked!!
-Sebastien Lemery a.k.a. xplo-
It is all the ultimate plan. Make games increasingly realistic by weening you off of the games and systems themselves.
A generation from now we'll be paying a $15 a month World of LIfecraft fee to be hooked up to the most realistic game ever. MPAA and RIAA will declare eyes and ears recording devices and seeing unlicensed events for free copyright theft.
Well I think its great when any game can impart a skill people could use in real life the existing and even the Rockband 3 "Real Guitar".
Arn't real guitars IMHO.
Its like the final step but lets hope that more than a couple of people get hooked and make some good music.
P.s. isn't this a bit like http://www.guitarrising.com/ Which seems like its going to be vapour-ware when it comes out.
I for one thinks this should of been first. I like this idea, turning guitar tab into a game. Would make learning the guitar more fun for some. I mean have you seen those people who ace guitar hero on expert....imagine if they learned to ACTUALLY play the songs using that level of dedication. I play guitar and have been for over 20 years, I support this idea and hope to see it come to fruition.
it's really frustrating trying to learn guitar. Following finger positions is almost impossible at first because as you face the person everything is backwards and your brain wants your hand to move left, for instance, when you see the other person move left.
what's more is trying to learn guitar with guitar-hero and the like is like trying to learn sex through masturbation. You are kind of doing it, but there is way more going on with the real thing.
i 'll be checking this one out when it hits the shops!
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I've played guitar for 30 years, and the following quote is disturbing to me:
"in much the same way that a musician’s eyes would scan up and down the neck of the instrument during a performance"
You're not really supposed to be looking at the frets while you're playing. Your fingers are supposed to know where to go without looking, much like when one learns to properly touch type. Looking at your fingers while you're playing is a bad habit that sadly a lot of new guitarists fall into. Yes, in the initial learning stages one needs to do so, but any good teacher will break that habit in their students as soon as possible.
That being said this might still be a useful learning aid for aspiring guitarists. I'm not interested.
Early speculations indicate that you just have to plug your network cable into the guitar to maintain a connection to Ubisoft's servers
And how exactly this should differ from Guitar Pro or similar software?
If this game works out, these guys are going to be very sad pandas.
They've been active for a few years now, producing computer-aided practice/scoring software for a variety of instruments, and voice. The computer knows what sounds are supposed to be produced, takes MIC input, crunches it into a reasonably meaningful delta(or, rather, series of deltas over time, so that the instructor can see where the student is or isn't having difficulty with a given piece). It is heavily geared toward schools, with lots of "class management" and grading features; but the "cloud" portion of the operation appears to be run by amateurs, and the interface is... utilitarian.
If Ubisoft can do a slick, mass-market version(even if only for a single instrument, at present) they'll likely have something with a lot more polish and shiny bits, as well as an engine that could be adapted to other instruments if the market so demands. That will likely put nontrivial pressure on the SmartMusic guys...
Guitar Rising was first to announce a real guitar game back in 2008 but never released, presumably because of problems with the polyphonic pitch detection.
The first real guitar game released was LittleBigStar, back in 2009. LittleBigStar supported a wide range of instruments, including guitar and bass, and loaded mp3s and standard tablatures in different open formats. It had a good momentum and indie developers made different kinds of musicgames, which they called MusicWare, but it was closed down two years ago. By those measures RockSmith is hardly new...
The LittleBigStar team decided to go commercial, presumably because they had success cracking the polyphonic pitch detection nut. They released Offbeat guitarist which is freeware, support open formats and works great.
In 2009 Disney claimed to have found the holy grail of music gaming: Disney Star Guitarist but it was never released.
In 2010 Rise of the SixString was released with a guitar-controller hybrid.
Holiday 2010, Harmonix showed RockBand 3 pro-mode with the Squier Strat Controller. It went for sale in BestBuy stores in March 2011.
Holiday 2011, UbiSoft claim to have found the big new thing...
As someone who at least had 7 years of classical guitar lessons, even though never any super-great guitarist came out of it, I can only shake my head in dismay. Like with any other instrument, without a teacher who corrects your posture and technique you will become an absolutely horrible guitar player and the more you get used to bad technique the harder it will become to later correct it.
Of course, it's just a game... but the way they advertise it....as if t there weren't already enough lousy guitar players out there on the streets and beaches, pestering everyone with their tunes (and guitars out of tune).
I've thought about this a bit over the years.
I got a nintendo when i was 4 ('88) and a guitar at 8 (acoustic),
but it took until years later when i got my first electric guitar to realize the biggest problem
with this, delay and mis-judgement.
15 years or so since then, i'm still not a phenomenal player, but i know the mistake being made are due to
myself and/or my ears.
I could be wrong though, look at how those with nearly unlimited budgets have been solving the problem....
I'm in as long as the game will teach me how to play like these guys.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jgrCKhxE1s
Mod me down with all of your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I'm can only assume that with a name like Rocksmith the playlist is going to be generated by M$ Songsmith. Another fine example of a marketing fubar. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E
You don't need a game to do this! It's called Real Life and it's a lot more fun.
same principle applies to any type of musical instrument. hundreds of man years of experience are distilled and shared among pros, generation over generation they in turn, teach students good habits, best practices, and most importantly, help them avoid critical mistakes that will carry through the long term. a little proper instruction goes a long way. sometimes all it takes is just SEEING someone do it proper.
...kids who make their parents buy them expensive electric guitars that are now gathering dust in their rooms because they lack the discipline to practice, and would rather play video games instead.
It's really a brilliant marketing ploy.
There is a reason that Rock Band 3 did this with a MIDI controller instead of allowing any "real guitar." What Ubisoft is trying to sell us isn't yet possible. The best polyphonic pitch detection in the world isn't anywhere near good enough to confidently say which notes we're playing. All Ubisoft is doing is using an FFT to do frequency analysis. The trouble is, even with ONE note played on a guitar, the harmonics are so rich that it ends up looking as if several are being played. It gets much worse if there really are multiple notes being played. Add to this the fact that guitar notes don't stop when you move onto the next note - they continue to ring. You can try subtracting out previous sounds, but it never works well.
The bottom line is, this game won't really know what you're playing. It's going to check to see if the required pitch is somewhere in the spectrum with some reasonable amplitude, and if it sees it, just give you the benefit of the doubt. That's the only way to make the game playable - give too much credit rather than too little. Unfortunately there will be many, many times that you don't play the right note, and it will give you credit anyway.
This is why Rock Band 3 uses MIDI instead of pitch detection. I've been working on software that does pitch detection for instruments for the last 10 years. We've contracted out to the best companies and research groups in the industry. Thus far, the only thing we can honestly offer to customers is pitch detection for monophonic instruments - that's the only thing that works well enough to offer commercially.
It's for the XBox and PS3 only. I game on the PC. I would buy this on opening day, but I don't have either. The war on PC games continues.
Well, guitar pro doesn't have flashy graphics. But it does have a larger catelogue than any music game will ever have.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=squier+strat+rock+band+3 Journalism must be tough.
Does this smell like Chloroform to you?
From a "real" guitar player, I Find this quite interesting, and honestly, is what I was craving from music games. It's like Powertab with a score at the end. Too bad it's not the first, and the games never came to fruition like guitar tabs do. I can't go find a song, find someone else's interpretation of it, and learn to play it how the "real" guitar players do. I never got the chance to use a MIDI guitar, which is basically what this game converts your guitar into, I'd imagine. The possibilities with those are endless, I've seen and heard great stuff. At the very least, This technology should be exploitable to that end, I believe. Anyone know? It'd probably be a real simple MIDI controller, but it'd be enough for any savvy OSS user, with the plethora of free studio tools available.
And from there to Infinite Jest the road is quite short.
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
Well, it's good to see this development finally comming. A lot of companies have been working on this for years, so I'll believe it when I can actually play it and it doesn't suck.
Of course, I was also playing with a real football long before the first Madden game was ever released.
Leave it up to the hyper-analytical lot at slashdot to show complete ignorance about music. You can't quantify music. It is very subjective and playing an instrument is an art that cannot be measured by frequency analysis. A qualitative analysis (i.e. qualified judges) is the only way to determine how well an instrumentalist is playing.
Sadly, any music you play by learning this way will not be considered art.
The happy in-between is this:
http://www.misadigital.com/index.php?target=home&lang=en
Rock as you knew it is dead. ;)
Long live Rock!
Bono, is that you? Did you stop taking your medication again?
I've been training for this game for 30 years. I knew the reason I have 7 guitars and thousands of dollars of supporting gear was so that I can finally crush the video game skills of a 12 year old. At least for the first couple of months, after which they'll blow past me and I'll go back to playing my real guitars for fun.
"The camera zooms dynamically to highlight where on the fret board you should be looking at, in much the same way that a musician’s eyes would scan up and down the neck of the instrument during a performance."
Any second-year guitarist would have already learned various modes, chords, and scales and can play them WITHOUT needing to look at the fretboard at ALL.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Synthesia (http://www.synthesiagame.com/) seems to be the only viable remotely close thing to teaching yourself how to play an instrument via a computer game. However, the main advantages that Synthesia has is that you can use any keyboard/digital piano that supports MIDI in and out (which is practically all of them in the past 10 years at least) and you can use your OWN MIDIS! Plus, you can choose whether you want a piano roll, sheet music, or both; depending on what/how you want to learn.
I personally have been using this for over a year now, after forgetting how to play, and it's enabled me to go so much further. It's not a replacement for a teacher, but it sure does a damn good job alongside one.
what a joke .. the whole point of being a muso is playing with other musicians. i guess rookie guitarists may enjoy it tho.
thank goodness there's no bass version, coz we're too busy workin with drummers instead of dreaming of adoration while dressed in spandex . LOL
Could be good for the little ones :)
Anything that can't be picked up and enjoyed by everyone out of the box is doomed to failure. In this case because: 1) Barrier to entry too high, especially for people who already have a truckload of guitar hero/rock band stuff 2) Not comparable with existing rock band/guitar hero tracks that people own a metric ton of 3) The whiny bitches who complain about plastic guitars are the minority who are too stupid to understand that it's a game, not a life choice. This game will appeal to them, but probably not the vast majority of other people. Rock Band was successful because given half a chance, even people initially petrified of it found that they could do it too. Real guitar is too complex for those people and the chance that they will outright reject it is going to go way, way up.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
The scrolling effect is a novel improvement, but the limits with the "note highway" are the same as they are for tab notation: it's a low level representation. It adds in an extra level of translation from cue to sound that will slow a person down. Sure, people who only master all levels of this kind of guitar training might be able to shred on tunes they've already learned, but they will be stuck trying to play along to something they've only just heard, or playing along with others live.
Positional notations train the brain to think of playing instruments in terms of "finger goes here, here, then here." That's can be good enough for starting out, but skilled musicians practice to the point that specific instrumental positions are mapped to tones. Once you reach this point, any tone you can hear or sing you can play. Reading music becomes a matter of seeing a shape and thinking of a noise, not a fingering.
Tablature has existed for a long time because sometimes it is a useful shortcut, but classical music notation is far more robust because it is a method for representing tones, not fingerings. Having to thinking about where to put your fingers to make the sounds you want will slow a person down. It's like the difference between translating your thoughts into a different language, and thinking in that language.
Musicians who are fluent readers are able to see notes and hear them in their head. When you see notes you hear the sound, like when you see words you hear them in your head. Tab and note highways are more like seeing words and knowing where to press on your keyboard to reproduce them, letter by letter.
http://xkcd.com/359/
FC Closer