GTar: The First Guitar That Anybody Can Play
As a guitarist, I don't think this is a useless tool for people learning how to play, but "the first guitar that anybody can play" is a ridiculous title.
Anyone with two working hands and no cognitive disabilities can learn how to play a guitar already. It takes effort, but if you keep at it, learning how to play is inevitable. What they are promising with the title is that this device will take all the effort out of learning, so that even those who don't want to put any effort in can learn how to play.
But it will still take effort to learn. Lots. It's not just having to learn where to put your fingers. It's learning how to make your fingers move the way they should. It's learning to keep going even though your fingers just refuse to do what you tell them to do when you first start out. It's also learning rhythm, and musicality, and a whole host of things.
I'm sure this tool would make it somewhat easier to learn how to play. But you'd still have to actually learn how to play before you could play.
This is relevant for me because I just started trying to teach myself to play guitar at the beginning of 2012. For me, the hardest part was definitely not figuring out where to put my fingers, but putting them there without touching other strings. Even if your finger is just a little bit too close to another string, it can push a note flat or sharp, making the chord sound bad. Learning the mechanics of finger placement is more difficult than learning the basic locations.
The other difficult thing is developing the muscle memory to move quickly between chords. At this point, I can play simple passages from songs, but complicated chord movements are what's most difficult, not figuring out what finger placement is required. This means sitting down and playing the same passage over, and over, and over, and over... You get the idea.
Having played instruments all through school, this isn't a surprise to me, but for a lot of folks it is. Playing an instrument is a skill just like many sports, or even video games. Think of how much better you are on hour 30 of playing a FPS game than you were in hour 1.
The gTar seems to solve the most rudimentary of the challenges, but I can't see where it gets you to "playing songs" (in a real way) much faster.
The thing that gets me about a lot of these products being built around the iPhone, iPod, etc... is what happens if the next generation changes the physical form factor? It may mean getting a new iPhone also means having to replace 10 other gadgets you have come to enjoy.
Edit: looking closer this one does seem to have a module the phone sits in so it may be future upgradable however... you still require the upgrade, and it seems the module isn't much wider than the iPhone4... not much room to adapt if the phone gets bigger.
For $500 you could have a great guitar teacher for almost a year's worth of lessons (maybe more in some areas). As someone who learnt music in the old-fashioned laborious way and know how fortunate I am to be able to sight-read on several instruments, I would hesitate to give this to a child rather than some actual lessons on a real instrument. For a teenager or adult, I'm sure it's great to give you that satisfied achievement feeling but maybe I just think too much of kids and their ability to stick through a few lessons. I've seen how in awe they are when they start to make music just 'happen' through their own musical ability.
I really don't like it at all! Don't get me wrong, as an engineer I think it's a very exciting project. But as a guitarist, who spends a lot of time teaching others how to play, I could not think of a more misguided idea of what the instrument is about.
gTar works on the assumption that playing the guitar consists of putting your finger on the right fret at the right time. Imho this is as wrong as assuming that programming consists of pressing the correct keys in the right order. (million dollar idea: Teach you programming by putting LEDs on your keyboard! $599 only).
There's a common misconception that learning to play the guitar consists of learning where to press; after all, isn't this what tablatures are all about? I tend to put much more emphasis and practice on right-hand techniques. Other comments in this thread speak of 'early reward' or fast gratification; stubbornly trying to bend your left hand in unintuitive positions while your right hand cannot cope is NOT the answer.
Side-note for beginners wanting to learn the guitar: Learn a few chords you don't need a lot of them, then practice right-handed techniques (you can find plenty of examples off Youtube) religiously. Early mastery of this would rapidly give you comfort around the body. You can then get your gTar, read your tabs, or do things correctly by watching videos of your favorite artists and learn slowly to reproduce their songs.
Again, the engineer in me thinks this is an amazing project. However I would never recommend it as a guitar teaching tool.
The Fretlight guitar already does this: http://www.fretlight.com/
Last time I checked, Fretlight didn't have an open API that anyone can use, but reverse engineering the protocol and providing open tools would cost way less than $100K.
Neat. But hyperbole makes me an anti-customer.
"Anybody (with an iPhone)" is a far smaller set than "Anybody". Also some peoples fingers are just too short which nothing can help and/or they lack musical "sense" (hearing, rhythm, whatever it is that makes me suck at anything musical) which I doubt this setup helps.
Also see: http://chordbuddy.com/.
If I were to use one, I'd use Chord Buddy because there is an extremely objective learning process: take one chord-helper out at a time until you need none.
Having a source for songs to learn might be cool for some people, but the drawback of having to learn by site rather than touch makes the gTar something I'm not interested in.
Awesome project, though. Godspeed.
I feel like this could be a great thing but the way it's presented doesn't convince me that it is. Is the gtar an instrument for making music or is it something to help you learn to play a real guitar. If it's the latter then how does it compare with other learning methods, what are the advantages etc. If it's the former then it would be nice to hear how it sounds and what it can do. Other than the last few seconds of the video I have no idea about what the thing sounds like.
I want to take this seriously, but I just can't stop laughing at the picture of the stereotypical college guy trying to impress girls. If this thing gets made, I want to hear from the first guy who gets laid with his gTar on easy mode.
A few issues:
First, if you don't tune it (the write up strongly suggests that tuning is optional), the strings will still make a sound, and that sound will be awful. I think the optional-tuning should be kept on the down-low, since taking advantage of it is sort of a bad idea.
Second, I don't think muting wrong notes is actually helpful, since you lose auditory feedback. Knowing whether the note you just hit was too high or too low is a valuable thing for a guitarist to be able to hear instantly.
Lastly, does it do string bends? Video isn't working for me and it's not mentioned in the write up. If not, somewhat serious limitation.
I'm 50% excited by the idea of an assistive guitar. And I'm 50% excited by having LEDs all over my guitar neck.
This seems like an interesting concept and the LEDs should make it easier to see which strings need to be played. I'm curious how it compares to the Rocksmith video game which is played with a real guitar (which I haven't tried).
There is considerably more risk with this project than many other Kickstarter projects as the lowest tier is $350 -- if the project fails and the GTar is never made that's quite a bit more money to lose than a ~$20 video game.
From the pictures, it looks like each fret is separated into six pieces, one for each string.
Presumably, this is how it tells which note you are playing. Pressing a string to the fret completes an electrical circuit. At first I thought the bridge had optical pickups based on the way it looked, but according to the description, the thing has no pickups.
There are some serious flaws with this design.
1) It looks like you can't bend strings, because the frets are divided into six segments. The string would get caught between the segments. If there's some kind of non-conductive bridge between the segments (unlikely), then it will probably wear differently. If you can't do a whole-step bend, then there's an enormous volume of music you can't play.
2) It's going to sound like trash. Without pickups, it has to synthesize the sound. I've gotten usable sampled guitar tracks before, but I did that by recording samples specifically for the song and manually tweaking each note.
3) It's unnecessary. You could basically take a stock Stratocaster, add a hex pickup and a LED neck, and you're done. The LED neck isn't easy, and of course it won't sound like a normal neck, but whatever. The guitar will still be a normal usable guitar.
If you want to divide guitar players into rhythm/lead and acoustic/electric, it becomes clear that this is a usable instrument in none of these four categories. Electric rhythm guitar strongly relies on palm-muting technique which you won't be able to learn without regular pickups. For electric lead, you need the whole-note bend and left-hand vibrato technique. The bend is impossible and the vibrato can't be taught without the pickup. Acoustic players want to be able to play and hang out with friends but the synth is just going to get in the way. You see the picture of that guy at the park with three friends (of course the two sitting next to him are girls)? He would probably be happier with an acoustic. Furthermore, if you learn on this guitar you'll be fairly hopeless on an acoustic since the strings are heavier (if you play electric and switch to acoustic, your left hand will give out fairly quick).
Incidentally, I paid about $330 for my first guitar, a Fender Stratocaster, plus amp. It's more like $400 with inflation since 2003. Never had lessons but it sure ain't hard to figure out "Smoke on the Water" or "Smells Like Teen Spirit".
This is probably a good tool for a few aspects of getting someone started on the guitar, but honestly I think it's the minority. Hitting the right string while holding down the right fret isn't that hard. The problem is doing it in such a way that you can raise your speed or start hitting multiple strings at once with different fingers. And doing that isn't that hard, but it requires good instruction and a daily investment of a small amount of careful practice by the student (about 10 minutes to start, 20 or 30 minutes a day later -- once the technique clean, then you can begin the long ramp up to being the kind of monster that can play 8 hours a day).
I taught someone the equivalent for violin in 6 months (and the initial learning curve on violin is absurdly long compared to guitar). That wasn't the limiting factor, though. The limiting factor was the music: timing, ear training, articulation, dynamics, how to shape a melody, how to read music, how to write music, a body of carefully studied examples to be able to work on...
I really dig the idea, and probly like many people here came up with it independently years ago (though using a smart phone as the brain never occurred to me). But it kind of leaves a sour taste in my mouth and heres why:
A decent sounding fender acoustic or electric will only cost you about $250 brand new. And then you have a real guitar, that will get better and more valuable with age. The GTar is a hunk of plastic that will end up in a landfill and be obsolete in 3 years.
It's tied to the most recent IPhone. Isn't that a huge red flag for other people? Unless the connector is modular, this thing will be useless when the next IPhone comes out.
People aren't going to want to hear you practice on it. Luckily your iphone can't get loud enough to annoy your neighbors, but the small speakers and digital sounds aren't going to be pleasing to your friends.
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That all being said, I think more people should learn to play music and really any attempt to simplify, or encourage the process is a net benefit to society. To me the GTar just doesn't like it would be as fun or rewarding as buying a real guitar.
This is a cool idea, but I'm skeptical about it being worthwhile for the majority of people. There's absolutely no new ideas here, or anything that hasn't been done before. It's just a slightly novel combination of them.
The "lights on the fretboard that show you what to play" thing has been done; and while it generally gets good reviews I don't think it's revolutionizing learning guitar or anything. Likewise plugging into an iPhone for effects, etc.
The hardest part of starting guitar is simply building up your hand/finger muscles and muscle memory. Having lights on the fretboard makes it nominally easier to place your fingers, but reading tabs isn't hard to begin with (this is essentially just tabs on the fretboard anyway) and learning to look at a tab (or sheet music) on paper/a screen and translate that to finger positions is an important skill to develop as a musician.
This will encourage beginners to look at the fretboard when they play, which is a bad habit to get into.
I also have concerns about this feeling and responding like a real guitar. This doesn't operate like a normal guitar, so there will probably be a lot of little areas where it differs so someone who's played this may pick up a real guitar and find that they are making all sorts of horrible squeaking and finger noise, aren't used to the action of a real guitar, etc etc.
If it was a choice between this and a real guitar for a beginner, I would go with the real guitar no question. If you happen to have ~300-500$ that you can just blow on cool gizmos, sure it'd be fun to play with.
If you've never touched a guitar before, this might get you from 0 to "Smells like Teen Spirit" slightly faster than otherwise, but I doubt by much. I think the returns will diminish over time, and this might even ultimately hurt you.
The main neat thing is using it as a midi controller/ to make cool sounds but there are plenty of other options in that area already.
I dunno, I wish them well, cause i used to drag my guitar to Dolores and Duboce parks just like him. But they don't get my $. This looks like it'll teach one critical skill, fretboard knowledge, and then... folks will try to play real guitars.
I don't think playing guitar is that hard, but i was one of those kids that got signed up for 14 years of music lessons, band and orchestra, on at least 4 instruments, so it's hard for me to say what's hard.
As analogy, if somebody learn to play keys on a cheap unweighted MIDI controller /digital piano(M-audio, yamaha, casio, one of those), and then tries to play acoustic piano, they have a devil of a time trying to play with feel.
As another analogy, Yamaha used to make MIDI controllers that looked like soprano saxes, except you didn't have to develop an embouchure, you just blew into them any way and they played.
Paused the video when it showed the iPhone being docked into the guitar and a certain interesting use cases came to mind. Imagine having beats as you play your guitar along, or maybe a strumming pattern to pick a lead on or to be even more ambitious, you could even think of sampling music live, a la Zoë Keating.
From a beginner's perspective, I could see some immediate wins, a built-in metronome, an auto-tuned guitar, an intimate yet digital "teacher" etc. These are things I'd definitely have loved when I started out learning.
Its great, the barriers to entry into creative fields are being lowered. Its happening well with programming and this could really encourage people to get into music. Even if it does not churn out professional musicians, just the joy of playing your own music is worth it.
PS: Been playing/learning on my humble acoustic guitar since 5 years.
I'm well up for more people learning to play an instrument. I am a musician myself (though less proficient with a guitar than with my drum kit), and inspiring others to learn is a good thing.
That being said, you also want to encourage people to play and write your own music. If all this does is teach you how to play your favourite songs (by other artists), that is all you'll learn.
I notice it has a 'free-play' mode, where it turns into what looks like a Kaoss pad. This is also good, but I'd hope it'd have some sort of learning mode where you're taught chords, and basic chord progressions, and barre chords.
I'd see more value in that than the Guitar Hero, 'mash out epic rock and roll guitar solos' style of game it shows at the start.
Edit: I suppose the form of this will make parents a lot happier than they would be if they bought their kid a Strat and a 300W guitar amp.
Neat idea for that initial feel-good phase. I can see this being an interesting toy to take on a camping trip or similar. Pass it around and people can have some fun. I get it.
On the other hand, I echo some of the sentiments expressed by others who have experience actually playing guitar. I play classical guitar and have been teaching my kid the same.
Once you get past what I call single-note-at-a-time pieces progress into more interesting music requires real work. On the guitar, just like the piano, fingering is of paramount importance. Without developing an understanding for this you'll twist your hand into a pretzel and simply will not be able to advance. Then there's proper right hand technique, which is different between and electric with a pick and classical or finger-style.
The guitar has weird and difficult simultaneous left hand finger motion that one must drill and learn. I suppose they could include such drills in the app. My favorite source of pain for both left and right hand training is "Pumping Nylon" by Scott Tennant. Most who know the subject would probably agree.
Reading written music is, in my opinion, very important and --I'll venture that far-- the only way to go. Tab is cool, but why go there if reading actual musical notation isn't that hard at all. As someone mentioned, there's a ton of information in a score. Scores written for guitar, particularly at the beginner level, include right and left hand fingering as well as all sorts of other notations. All of my sheet music has copious notes on pencil as I learn the pieces.
A neck full of LEDs just can't take you very far at all. I'm sure I could be fun, but there's a real brick wall that'll make the fun stop pretty quickly.
That said, if something like this inspires the player to move up and learn the right way then I am all for it. I might actually get one just because I'm a sucker for gadgets, but it will be just that: a fun gadget to bring out, show off and possibly take camping. I believe that because of this, they have a good chance of becoming the next million-dollar-plus Kickstarter project.
I think the price could be a problem. I know lots of people who 'wanted to learn to play guitar', bought the equipment, and gave up within a month or two. They didn't really lose out as you can get a second hand guitar and amp for under $100. This is around $450 (not to mention the cost of the iPhone) - not really in the price range of someone who wants to learn guitar. You can get some nice 'real' guitars for that price.
They need to tilt the iPhone holder more towards the user, being flat against the guitar face seems like a horrible viewing angle to me.
Is it true that kickstarter changed their slogan from "fund & follow creativity" to "accessories for your iphone"?
Reminds me a bit of the Eigenharp: http://www.eigenlabs.com/
I'm curious how playable and hackable it will be. The Kickstarter page says it's MIDI compliant, but MIDI is a terribly restrictive protocol not really suited to the range of expression you have on a guitar.
The second anybody can play it it looses it's score factor.
Playing the guitar is "valuable" because not everyone can do it.
How does it work more precisely? For example, can it correctly detect strumming and flageolets?
Related: http://www.fretlight.com/
Cool gadget, dumb sales pitch.
Heh, nice little cameo of Drew Houston at the end of the video
As cool as this looks - and don't get me wrong, it looks like great fun - what happens when the iPhone 5 is too big to fit in the guitar dock?
Would have been a good idea to give more examples of how the guitar actually sounds. The vid at the end makes it sound like a $10 synth...
How about a video where we hear the actual result of playing the GTar, instead of some terrible clip-audio crapola?
This looks really cool. What if you strum too vigorously and scratch the iPhone's screen?
psssst.... there's already "a guitar that anybody can play". it's called the guitar.
"All you have to do is dock your iPhone..." Stopped reading there.
I think they should relocate where the iphone goes.
It's simple, if you cannot endure the frustration and sometimes physical discomfort that is required to learn the guitar then you never will. These toys that make you sound great from the start, never miss a note, and play like a rock start from day one will never truly prepare you for learning the guitar. It cannot replace hours of monotonous practice. Or replace playing bad notes which can force you to clean up your playing. Or replace the feeling of connecting with the strings and fretboard, which help define your personal sound. Lots of people would like to play the guitar but the truth is there are no shortcuts and many people don't have the patience for it. It takes dedication and no cool toy can bypass the very kind of effort it takes to learn the guitar or any instrument. That tenacity to learn despite the frustration is what separates those who'd like to learn to play and those who have. gTar is just a toy.
Just another roudnabout way of supporting Chinese sweat shops.
Enjoy the 'fruits' of your labor.