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.
I believe you are under estimating the 'early reward' effect. For those who don't know it, the theory behind early reward is that you create a teaching system which rewards early and often and gradually ramps and you can get more people taught. The thought is that lowering the threshold to success gets you more participants. Its used a lot in game play to draw you in.
That being said, when Guitar Hero came out for the Wii I got a copy, realized that they had captured some of the 'feel' you get when you are playing for real (my nominal instrument is trombone but not a lot of call for that :-) and found it fun. So I took the open source bluetooth driver for the Wiimote and created an app that basically let you play a song and pace it with the 'strumming'. Its great for kidding around but not as satisfying as having to work the frets etc.
So here we have a guitar that can do a bit of both, play 'fake' where only the correct notes play, or play 'real' where all notes play. Cool idea.
The price though. Ouch. Lets look at that for a minute.
After they build their first batch, guitars will be $450 each. And they need an iPhone to work at all. So a used iPhone is maybe $100 so you are looking at $550 all up. A student guitar is $60 and lessons are like $100/month so call it 5 months of lessons.
I'm guessing that if you don't even know if you like to play the guitar its going to be too much of a 'risk' to invest in it. That will greatly limit the market. If they are successful I hope they come out with a dedicated built in compute unit.
I think it's fair to say that one reason guitar is so popular is because of the early reward effect. For this sort of price a beginner can go buy a pretty decent electric guitar and amplifier with some built in effects. Give them an hour or two and they'll be belting out a recognizable Teen Spirit in a few hours. Seriously.
Meanwhile:
> "...detect exactly what you're playing in real-time and relay each note to your iPhone, which then produces the actual sound."
I think it's also because guitars are relative cheap and portable. That and tablature - which basically takes away 1 pain point of learning an instrument - that of having to learn to read music at the same time as learning the physical skill.
Given what looks like a resonant cavity, and the 'short' battery life of the guitar body, I'm guessing they have an audio amplifier built into the guitar and they pick up the signal from the docking connector.
> "Since the gTar is entirely digital, it doesn't care whether the strings are in tune or not."
I can't even see any pickups, so I'm guessing it simply checks what fret you're holding and detects strumming/picking some other way.
That seems to be supported by "...cannot be retrofitted onto a traditional guitar...". So, basically, you're stuck using your iPhone as the only interface option.
All up - isn't this just a solution looking for a problem?
for < US $250, you can buy playable solid body electrics from Yamaha, Ibanez, Peavey or Axl, new. For $100 you'll find something that's tolerably playable on Craigslist in most large markets.
There aren't other "real" instruments that can be mass produced like this in a few factories in China and Indonesia.
An oddity of guitar is the way a cheap guitar affects one's ability to learn.
In most any endeavor, it's true that working on your skills is much more important than upgrading your equipment: practice is the way to improve, you can't buy your way into being better.
But this is significantly less true at the bottom end of the guitar spectrum. Cheap guitars really are worse -- not just in the quality of their sound or their durability, but in their playability. It is much more difficult to get a really cheap guitar to work right. A $100 guitar is going to be much more difficult to play than a $500 one.
That's primarily due to the "action" -- the height of strings above the frets. On a cheap guitar, the (im)precision of the components -- the bridge and its springs, the neck tension bar, etc., conspire to make it so that the higher frets have much higher action (or else the lower ones buzz). That forces the player to squeeze the strings harder to the neck, which is painful, and is less forgiving about finger placement within the fret, requiring that fingers go closer to the fret rather than allowing more space behind it.
The end result is that a new player, not wanting to invest too much money in something that he doesn't know if he'll like, is more likely to be discouraged and give up. If he'd had a better tool from the beginning, success would have been more likely.
This might have been true about five or ten years ago, but CNC machines have really revolutionized the cheap guitar industry. The cheapest Squire strats today are on par with what you would have paid over $600 for ten years ago.
I've owned a lot of cheap guitars, starting with a plywood no-name electric, and I wish the stuff that's available today had been there 25 years ago.
You are correct. I've spent a lot fo time in instrument shop, craigslist and pawnshops (California, Seattle, Ohio, Wisconsin), looking at pianos, fluets/sax/clarinets and double bass/cellos, in addition to guitars and bass guitars. I'd consider Ebay if the seller has refund policy
Most of the cheap guitars are not worth buying, especially for fretwear, warped necks, wonky trussrods or poor neck routs in the body. I also tell people to avoid cheap Floyd Roses, active electronics and 5 string basses (poor tension on low B
Addendum: i have a Korean Squier strat ($79.95) and a Samick fretless bass ($220) that I'm very fond of. I have another cheap guitar and bass that are just meh.
Also i'd add Squier Classic Vibes to the list of mfrs with at least passable QC but not their Affinities
When I started with guitar, I said to the guy "I'm not sure if this is a phase or not, let me try the cheapest guitar in the store". He tuned it, walked all of five meters around the counter to hand it to me, I strummed it, and even with my unmusical ear, I could tell it was already out of tune. "I think I'll try your second-cheapest guitar!"
I also had a 'guitar god' friend with me that day, and I thoroughly recommend taking a friend who can play along to buy your learner instrument.
Having a knowing friend is the only real way to shop for a guitar. I was lucky at the time when I was starting that I had my brother-in-law help me choose between the cheap guitars and we found something for under $100 that sounded "good enough". Straight away he told me: "start with this, if you don't get bored in 2 months sell it and buy a $300 guitar".
Failing that, you can head to a small music shop where the guys selling (sometimes they have an in-store technician) can give lend you a hand at choosing something worth your money. Never buy your first instrument from a big shop where the guy behind the counter doesn't know shit.
I've only played acoustic and I'm still a beginner, but I believe I've encountered this with my (cheap) guitar - after trying a friend's higher-grade guitar I was shocked at how much easier it was to play. I've found that a capo mitigates most of the pain, as well as making it sound less "muddy", if that makes sense. Also, now I have giant finger callouses from pressing down so hard. :)
This was my first reaction, then I realized that for people who are trying to teach themselves guitar, this would be way easier than learning to read tablature, and even easier than watching youtube videos (since the mirror effect can be tricky at first).
On the other hand, you risk becoming a guitarist who struggles to read tablature or learn by watching other guitarists, so the trade off is arguably high. At the very least, one should learn these things after getting off the ground with gTar.
Of course, you're right that there's more to guitar than putting your fingers in the right place, but at the very least I think we can say that for learning individual songs, this would be a big improvement on tabs.
For learning individual songs, learning to read real music would be an improvement over tabs.
The problem with arguing that the GTar is easy for learning songs (and it is) is how much information is lost. Sheet music contains a ridiculous amount of information. Tablature does not. Lights on a wooden stick contain even less. At what point are you doing a disservice to the aspiring guitarist by taking away information?
Reading music is a valuable skill, but not one (evidently) that aspiring guitarists are inclined to tackle, even now. I know a lot of amateur guitarists, and the only ones who can read music are the ones who learned to do so while learning some other instrument. I read music, but almost never apply this skill to guitar, because it just isn't how the (non-classical) guitar community communicates.
Which isn't anything to be happy about perhaps, but does seem to be the reality of the situation. I'd put reading music in the same category as tabs etc: "You should really learn this, sooner is better than later, if you're serious about guitar". But a lot of people struggle to get off the ground with guitar at all, so I can still see value in something like gTar. Though I do see it as a niche market (musically struggling, iPhone owning technophiles).
It depends really. For someone learning an instrument for the first time, reading music isn't the problem - guitar tabs are really easy to read anyway. The issue is learning to co-ordinate hand and finger movements.
Once you're more comfortable playing the guitar, you can move onto more complex things like reading sheet music, or composing, or whatever tickles your fancy.
Think of it like programming: we recommend beginners start on languages like Python, Basic or Pascal to ease the mind into that way of working.
I disagree with you on sheet music vs tab. GOOD tab is more informative than sheet music. Specifying which string to play a note on isn't something sheet music is very good at, and from a tonal perspective, it _matters_. A 4th string 5th fret "A" on a bass is VERY different from the same note played on an open 3rd string, for instance.
You're clearly not familiar with actual guitar sheet music. There's a lot of notational conventions for string indications. Along with fingerings, positions, barres, etc.
But, this is exactly what learning programming is like. And, from what I've read, learning code and learning music is cognitively similar from a didactic standpoint.
Programming tutorials force you to physically type examples in verbatim to get a specified result. The result is a compilable program. Put your hands in the right place on a GTar, and at the end you're that much closer to learning a song.
This device seems to make it easier to learn where to put your fingers to get your result. It's illuminated tablature transferred directly to your fretboard.
I agree, music and programming really aren't that different. Just for fun, consider this analogy:
Staff => C++
Tabs => Python
gTar => codeacademy
Staff, like C++, can be quite flexible/expressive, but is loaded with historical baggage and redundant nonsense, and is not easily portable (it was clearly designed with piano in mind). And it has been the defacto standard for a long time (ok, this is a bit might be slightly less analogous).
Tabs, like python, are clear, practical, concise and to-the-point, but lack some information and rigidity (dynamic typing), and need certain requirements in order to be useful (a python VM / fretted instrument)
meanwhile, the gTar looks to be more of a learning environment like codeacademy: it guides you through step-by-step and lets you pick up the basic idea of what it's like to play/program, while still giving you a slight sense of freedom. But of course, it is still just a specialized learning environment, and not a 'real' guitar/programming-environment.
I reckon this has mostly come about through the shift of guitar being seen as an instrument and more as a faux artistic accessory of a person's identity. Like those people who have guitars hung on their bedroom/living room walls, or on a stand but never play.
I'm also a guitarist and at first I agreed with your sentiment, but then I realized: it's a toy. Forget the positioning as a guitar learning tool, it's not a guitar. It's advanced-guitarhero for your iphone.
I saw these guys present today at TechCrunch disrupt NYC (which is why I think the link made it here) and they seemed to have a vision for bringing the learning curve of guitar down to the masses and providing some area in between guitar hero and the real thing.
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.