Guitar browser game with a real guitar | Hacker News Reader

Guitar browser game with a real guitar

makaroni4.github.io

154 pointsmakaronich43 comments

Nice, but a little hard if you don't yet have chords associated by name and I'm missing background music/tempo to keep track.

Personally I'm really fond of the Rocksmith game for learning guitar. It's like Guitar Hero, but with your own real guitar (and interactive lessons). I have no real ambition (or talent) for playing musical instruments, but somehow it lets me enjoy music interactively at my skill level while also giving the gratification of game progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDQ_U3lukAQ

Thanks for making me aware of Rocksmith. Wish there were more games which teach a real skill!

Check Synthesia for keyboard http://www.synthesiagame.com

Rockband 3 with Pro Guitar? http://www2.fender.com/experience/fender-tone/introducing-th...

I have the pro guitar and played with RB3 before Rocksmith - Rocksmith is an order of magnitude better for someone who is still learning (and I think that's 90% of the target market).

The only advantage of RB3 is the ability to play together with plastic instrument aficionados, but the unforgiving implementation of the real guitar experience just made it not fun for me.

Rocksmith is nice, but it's learning curve is too steep, especially for little kids. wish there was something more gentle I could use for the kiddos!

Maybe try Yousician, I used their Android App before I stumbled upon Rocksmith. Didn't play it for long but I think it will be more suited for kids. I believe you can get a half hour of free practice every day and unlimited when buying the Pro.

Error message tells me "You need to update your Chrome browser" when I'm running Safari. Would be more helpful to say "You need to use Chrome instead of Safari".

Didn't test beyond that as I don't have a guitar, was just curious to see what it looked like and thought I'd point that out.

Imo if you are using safari and you are playing a demo, you should expect the demo not to work. Safari is the new IE and most demos use advanced browser APIs that safari doesn't support. You shouldn't need an error message to understand that.

And at the same time it seems that Chrome is also the new IE in that developers write applications that only work in Chrome. Not so different than web apps using ActiveX back in day.

The list of APIs which Webkit doesn't support(at least in the preview version) is surprisingly small[1]

Chrome is a lot closer to IE in that it incorrectly implements standards to encourage developers and users to priorities it's platform(like a certain company[2])

[1] https://webkit.org/status/#?status=under%20consideration,in%...

[2] https://brattahlid.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/is-docx-really-a...

  Safari is the new IE

Is that meant as praise or criticism?

It's telling me the same thing in Firefox.

It needs getUserMedia but its slated to be in the next version of safari. Firefox and edge both support getUserMedia so there's no reason for the author to constrain the clients to chrome. If it were based on webmidi then that would be the case as only chrome supports webmidi but the author is only useing getUserMedia.

If you don't have a guitar, you can use a use a piano (or a virtual piano in the phone) or even sing.

I think it's not clear enough when you hit the note or when you miss it. It has some animation, but it's confusing.

Anyway, I need more lives :( Can I have a sandbox mode where I can try forever?

I found humming worked pretty good, or making a 'kazoo' sound, I found B at 12 bpm easiest, now, did I give permission for you to keep the samples ')

Thanks for the amazing feedback, when developing the game we were singing all the time! :)

Yep, I'll add sandbox mode today/tmrw!

Here you go, I've added Sandbox and Survival mode you can choose from. Is "Survival" the right word to indicate that game has "health"? (I'm so far away from gaming haha)

Neat tool. Would be nice to be able to set tuning as I keep my guitars in Eb.

Also I'll be "that guy": Can we get a tab mode - maybe with an option to display the note as well for us complete amateurs?

I suggest adding an explanation what what the game is about (or fix the "How it works" link)

Amazing fail by me, there is a little blog post with some details and visualizations: http://makaroni4.com/2017/07/10/guitar-bro/

This is an interesting idea to me. I'm also working on some web music-learning ideas so I thought I would check this out. I have played guitar for about 20 years but found this game to be nearly impossible. Granted, I don't know the fretboard well, I tend to be more of a chord-strummer, tab reader type.

I found that just when I was starting to succeed at hitting a note or two, the game ended. I tried using a lower tempo, but that did not seem to extend the duration of the game.

I also agree somewhat with a previous (controversial, deleted commenter) that the use of "bro" in the title of the game is off-putting. To many, the word bro may not register as negative, but when you live outside of the testosterone-fuelled brotherdom, it sticks out like an unwelcoming red flag.

Thanks for a good feedback! Btw I've added Sandbox mode where one can practice without restarting the game every time. I hope Sandbox and lower BPM will make the flag a bit greener :)

I like sandbox mode much better, it seems better for learning if you can just keep going until you are tired.

It seems like there's a bug, I tried changing the settings (different string, different tempo) and with the radio button still set to "sandbox" but it seems like it went into survival anyhow. (I had five hearts and the game ended quickly)

Just fiddling around with it, it seems like you have to let a note ring for a fair amount of time before it figures out what note you are on (just like any tuner I have ever used). I suppose it's just a hard problem to solve, but it seems like that would get in the way of playing the game at a higher tempo or trying to do a similar game that used more than one string at a time (having multiple notes ringing at the same time also seems to inhibit it from zeroing in on what note you just played). Is this why you restricted the game to a single string at a time?

I have not played Guitarsmith, Guitar Hero, or whatever the commercial games are which teach you guitar, but people who use them have told me that they are very accurate with recognizing whether you are playing the note or making a mistake. I'm curious if you have any sense of whether that's true. If so do they just have much more sophisticated algorithms for examining the waveform and extracting the notes?

A suggestion - Option to take out the lives so you can keep playing even if you make mistakes. This would be nice for beginners like me.

That's a very cool suggestion, added "Sandbox" mode (next to existing "Survival" one): https://makaroni4.github.io/guitar_bro/

Nice idea, a good way to learn the actual notes of the frets, which a lot of gamey guitar apps miss.

BPM settings seem a little odd. Some samples race along at 60 bpm.

Displaying the 12th fret instead of open string makes it unnecessarily difficult.

I'd love to see this grow and improve into a really cool app!

I feel kinda stupid - how is this supposed to work? Microphone input?

(Does it only work in Chrome?)

Only works in Chrome, from the looks of things (not very well explained on the page), and uses microphone input.

Yep, it works only in Chrome (it should show a note in non-chrome browser).

Problem is only Chrome allows tuning FFT precision now.

More details here: http://makaroni4.com/2017/07/10/guitar-bro/

> Problem is only Chrome allows tuning FFT precision now.

This is plain wrong.

Source: I maintain the Web Audio API in Firefox.

Sorry, my bad. I meant you can't set FFTSIZE higher than 2048 and we need at least 8192 to identify notes correctly (at least in Safari). Does Firefox allow higher FFTSIZE than the default?

Yes, up to 32768, per spec [0]. It's just that Safari does not implement this part of the spec, which has changed in early 2015 to allow for longer FFTs [1].

[0]: https://webaudio.github.io/web-audio-api/#dom-analysernode-f... [1]: https://github.com/WebAudio/web-audio-api/issues/375

Cool idea really !

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