wax&wires

Finally, Guitar Hero For Real Guitars!

I’ve always struggled with Guitar Hero. The button moves often times seemed counterintuitive, moving down the fretboard to generate a higher pitch and so on. Ever since it came out, I’ve been wanting somebody to develop a box that would do a quick FFT analysis on the guitar, turn it into MIDI data and make a real guitar usable in Guitar Hero. The technology’s been there, with piezo pickups and MIDI converter boxes; we’ve all seen those used with Roland GK-2 Guitar Synth products. 

Well finally, at CES last week, the product I’d been waiting for was announced. Disney and Washburn have partnered together to create Disney Star Guitarist. The game lets users play real instruments in a Guitar Hero-esque video game. 

We’ve seen a slew of music-related products and games announced over the past few weeks, and I think it’s very encouraging. The recent trend in creative software shows a lot of potential toward drumming up (pun intended) a lot of enthusiasm for kids in their pursuit of music. I think back to when I learned to type. It wasn’t staring at the keyboard memorizing the home row that taught me how to type. It was games like Mario Teaches Typing, and wasting my days on AIM that gave my fingers the familiarity with the keyboard. This game has all the potential of becoming the “Mario Teaches Typing” for guitar playing. 

Other developers are rumored to be working on similar products. GameTank’s Guitar Rising recently won a Developer’s Choice Award at the Independent Game Conference in Austin.

I think the competition will be healthy for the end products. Disney will likely win out simply due to the money that the corporation has behind it and the press that they can generate. As we’ve seen with Rock Band and Guitar Hero, there’s even room in the market for more than one game to be successful. All they need to focus on is putting out a quality product, and getting some big name bands and songs licensed to help them sell games.

Piano and vocal versions of the game are also expected to follow shortly.

For the full wired.com article, click here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 7:43 pm. It is filed under wires and tagged with guitar, guitar hero, rockband, video games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.