But.. But.. Now i can't say "play a reeeal guitar fagetzz" in the comments of every Guitar Hero video on YouTube. FUCK.

THat sounds pretty cool. When playing does it still sound like the real thing?

Wait, but does that mean you have to play the actual note or can you fudge it? If you have to play the actual note, then wouldn't it be too hard for the vast majority of ppl...and if you can fudge it, then won't your crappy note playing conflict with what you hear from the song?

So now I can play my fake guitar on my real guitar.............Anyone else see something wrong with this?

This is wrong, we have reality turning to a videogame, then the videogame trying again to turn into the reality it was originally imitating.
It would be like me imitating Tom Cruise and the Tom Cruise imitating me imitating him.
Wrong in many different ways...

@That Girl Hates You: From your TV, yes. From your guitar, no. But if you have a guitar you may as well learn the actual song while you're at it too... XD

This simply detects whatever note you set whatever button to. If I play a C note, I can set that to the red button, etc. I could make D yellow, and so on. This does allow you to play the note on several different strings though, as you could play an A note on the fifth fret of the E string or play an open note on the next string up (which would be A). Almost sounds fun. I think the best thing about this device would be the ability to set green notes to an open E. OPEN NOTES FTW!

@Furious_Liver:TF2 name i_have_fleas. Frag me!: To be more clear, it detects sound, not what fret you're pressing.

I don't know how to feel about this weird life imitating art imitating life. But let's be clear, playing actual guitar is easier than most of the ridiculous crap they throw at you on expert in either GH3 or RB. At least the note and chord progression make some mathematical sense.

This just seems unnatural and creepy

Sounds cool in theory but in application it will be a mess. What you play/program in the guitar will not sound anything like what's going on in the game. It's basically turning a guitar into a pretty sweet (and freakin' noisy) premium controller.

@Furious_Liver:TF2 name i_have_fleas. Frag me!: OPEN NOTES FTW!, indeed!

Sounds more like a cool idea in theory then in reality. What's the point of assigning a note to be "red button" when the red button already exists on the controller. The only benefit would be that the feel and weight of the guitar would be much more accurate.

Even so, you look like a dork enough when you play guitar hero. Having some special attachment just to show you can actually, kinda sorta play guitar seems even worse.

@Dead Air ummm Dead Air: The most help I could see from this thing would be to set the notes to some simple 5 notes scale. And if you wanna make the game extra hard, you could put all 5 notes very far apart from each other! :D (but then again you could find the note somewhere nearby on the fretboard anyway)

What if you put it to recognize chords instead? Even easy would be terribly hard.

And what if the guitar goes out of tune?

hmm interesting, but why use a guitar for only 5 notes. I wrote a program that takes sounds from the guitar through your mic and matches it to moving tabs on the screen. That's more like what people would want. Once you've played a song through the program a few times, you actually know the song and dont need the program. Of course the hard part in advancing something like this is getting permission to use the popoular songs, even in tab form.

I'd rather use my real guitar to play real songs and get frustrated in my real guitar crappiness.

super cool. but why do people insist i play gh/rb because i either A. want to learn how to play, or B. can't learn how to play a real guitar? i play cuz it's fun. D'=

Mr. Ashcraft, I hate to be a pedantic asshole, but as a guitar player, I think you mean the 'Bottom String' not the top one (the thickest string is the bottom string due to it being the lowest note available). Don't kill me :D

Regardless, I think this is a really fun idea, and I'd like to assume that my guitar hero playing would improve dramatically if using the real thing!

@SPni: I was just about to say the exact same thing!

...Wait a sec. How would you do "chords"? Y'know, like hitting the green and red frets simultaneously? If I understand the description of how this device works correctly, there is no way for it to differentiate between hitting one fret or two; it'll only register the note highest up the fretboard. :\

I think that might be the most hideously awkward concept in gaming control so far. A lot of the songs are actually easier to play on a real guitar than a guitar hero controller. Also the patterns in GH/RB are usually way off the same kind of notes you'd play on an electric guitar.

I suppose if you *really* wanted to pretend you could play, it'd be a step up from plastic button bashing.

@eleventeen: Sorry for the double post, but I had to point out my agreement with you eleventeen. Playing GH or RB is in some ways harder than playing real guitar. Half the notes on the Dragonforce song on GH3 on Expert don't even make a sound. xD

@Furious_Liver:TF2 name i_have_fleas. Frag me!: Ooooh you could setup a minor pentatonic scale (in the song's key), play that via the 'notes' displayed on screen while recording the output. Then later play back the output and see what kind of solo GH/RB has created for you :D

if you can actually play guitar and still suck at guitar hero, you're not alone!

@gtc: agreed.

This isn't going to work. From what I've seen of Guitar Hero III, the colors do not correspond to real notes: a red is not always a C-sharp or whatever. (Especially when you have a five-note progression up and down.) I can't imagine how you could program something to translate C-sharp into red and have it work consistently. I thought this would be obvious.

This isn't going to work. You would need different tuning setups for each song and chords wouldn't work. Forget about using the whammy bar, too.

This is the stupidest thing I have ever seen. I play guitar professionally and try not to be one of those people who hates on guitar hero/rock band because I know a lot of people have a lot of fun with it but this is ridiculous. So you are taking a real guitar and effectively nerfing it and making it act like a fake guitar with 5 'frets' and no strings. Seriously, if you can really play guitar why would you want to do this? Just play the fake guitar that comes with the game for the games sake or play the songs on the real guitar the way they are meant to be played. This is epic fail.

Step 1: associate the buttons with a scale you suck at
Step 2: play game
Result: actual improvement in real guitar technique from playing this damn game. In theory it should be what all the GH haters wanted. So why are they all bitching about it? It seems to me it's a decent tool to help with technique and *gasp* actually be able to play along with music. I play guitar and the games and I see no problem with this device.

I'm really curious to see this in action, as it sounds fun in theory, sort of like the Line 6 boxes you can run through your computer. As long as you don't confuse it with your iPhone. :P

Why would you want that? With all this "make the drums quieter" nonsense, why would we make the guitar louder? Also, the notes will rarely ever match so everything will just sound horrid and off tune.

good, this isn't the idea I've had for a "real" guitar hero. I've been wanting to make a program that lets you play along to a midi of a song with your guitar or bass plugged into the line in on a computer and rate you based on you hitting all the right notes at the right time. I play bass and I am a computer programmer. It's just hard finding c++ libraries that make it not a bitch to get a stream of audio from a sound card and then analyze the frequency to figure out what note is being played. /screw it, I'm never going to do it.

Playing the 1st 5 frets on the top string of a real guitar would not only sound awful but be much harder than just using a RB guitar.

(By the way, I've done this before on Guitar Hero. Put it in practice mode and play the song on the first 5 frets of a string on a guitar. It's even more awful than I could have imagined.)

@stevemkrenz: Rock Band does this with the vocals, as do other karaoke games. It's definitely possible. (But could it recognize several notes played together as a chord I wonder?)

I hope they make a similar device for converting acoustic and/or electronic drum sets into Rock Band notes.

Many amateur RB fans have already begun to do this on their own, but it would be nice to see in a mainstream peripheral.

I kinda want this.

My God, this I must have.

Bla, seems pointless. Pressing the first 5 frets of one of the stings doesn't do anything for me. At that point I would rather just play the damn thing.

thats dumb, you wont really be playing anything on the guitar, and if you own a real guitar, youd probably get more satisfaction out of playing it yourself

That's dumb, if you just set it to the first five frets of your real guitar, whatever's coming out of your real guitar would sound like crap, something completely different from the song in the game, even if you are hitting all the notes in the game correctly.

Um... that's gay, Mr. Marsh.

This is a bit gay. You know what we've got in my lounge room? A marshall stack+guitar, a behringer bass rig+bass, and a drum kit. Ten GH3 in the middle of them with two guitars. When we have a bunch of people over, at any point during GH-ing there's generally at least 2 or 3 people rocking out on the actual instruments along with the game. The people who can't play actual instruments get the fun of jamming and playing along with people and then there's something for the people who aren't playing to do as well.

As for me, i'm an avid multi-instrumentalist (as evidenced by presence of a full setup in the lounge) and I think GH/RB are just great. And I just passed Dragonforce on hard haha.

I love Rock Band and Guitar Hero - I am not musically inclined but playing these games has introduced me to music I thought I would never listen to, and I have decided to learn to really play the guitar!