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Comment by colings86 | Hacker News Reader

If you want a game that realistic why not actually play a six string guitar?

A system like this provides visual flashes and feedback, virtual fans, fireworks, and all the extra bonuses that you don't get when you're just playing the guitar by yourself. It also guides new guitar players through the process of learning specific songs of increasing difficulty, all of which can easily be accessed from one location, rather than forcing them to look up tabs themselves.

In short, it makes the learning process easier from the start, and less boring for younger ones who might not have the patience and stick-to-it needed to master a normal guitar.

Because if you're a beginning guitarist you don't get any feedback. The game could be more useful for learning guitar than anything else.

What kind of feedback do you need? It just seems to me that console games producers are under the impression that console games are the answer to everything when in fact its much more impressive when someone can actually do something like play a real guitar or cook a real meal then if they do it on an XBox or a DS especially when they charge so much for things like guitar hero. It would be better if they provided an interface for you to plug an electric guitar into your console and learn to play using the software, then when you've learn you can 1. play a real guitar and 2. have a real guitar without the non standard socket they will inevitablely put on it.

Initially it would be "you didn't hit that string cleanly, try again" which would move to "you played that progression well, nice job!" Then it could move to "You nailed 80% of those chords and your timing was AVERAGE." I'm assuming that the game guitar is very close to an actual guitar. I agree that it would be ideal if you could use a normal guitar and get the same feedback.

Indeed (though technically you do of course get aural feedback, though if you're a beginning musician you might not be able to interpret it.)

I'm not sure what the interface will look like, but imagine the possibilities of displaying tablature along with musical notation along with what notes you're actually hitting, perhaps even with a photo of the desired hand position for a chord, all simultaneously (or easily accessible).

Then, add training modes, (like guitar hero but with a full metronome range), technique exercises for scales/arpeggios, etc... and you have a powerful training system.

Objective feedback -> faster learning.

Because this way I don't have to throw out 11 years of work and practice on the actual guitar in order to play one of those Rock Band games.

You don't actually have to play the entire song note for note to play the song. This would give the player a sense of playing the song and I would bet more people stick with learning the guitar from playing the game then playing the actual guitar.

Practicing in the form of a game makes practice more fun, and, therefore, makes it more likely that you will practice. Those of us would-be casual musicians may need an additional motivation to practice other than a pure love of the instrument.

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