How in the name of all that is holy have I not seen this before now? A company called Inspired Instruments is in pre-production on something they’re calling the You Rock Guitar. It’s a fully electronic guitar controller that just happens to be controlled via strings. Six of them.
As far as I can tell, this is the deal: The neck is separated into two sections; over the body is a set of what appear to be nylon strings. On the neck, all the way down, are raised ridges simulating six strings which presumably have some sort of sensing mechanism in them. You strum the strings and fret the ridges, you know, like you would with a normal guitar.
It appears to be pretty much a game-focused adaptation of Yamaha’s EZ-AG electronic guitar, only without the individual light-up buttons on the neck. And it’s basically exactly what I was picturing when Dhani Harrison started blabbing about Rock Band 3 teaching you to play for real.
But the reason I’m so desperate to try this thing out is that controlling music games is only part of what it’s supposed to do. It looks like the neck is marked with the appropriate colors and all, and the company claims it’ll offer individual plug-in cartridges to make the guitar compatible with each console, but that’s only part of the story.
Apparently this thing will have a suite of onboard sound samples and a standard output plug, meaning it can be played through an amp pretty much just like a regular guitar. And it’s also supposed to feature USB and MIDI connectivity — meaning you’d be able to just go ahead and plug it into a Mac and record right into GarageBand using Apple’s pretty decent library of MIDI sounds. (The results would certainly not be production quality, but for bashing out a quick demo it sounds like a pretty nifty tool.)
The company is also talking about a “You Rock Mode,” which apparently only lets you play notes in the correct key — which of course would be counterproductive to actually learning to play for real, but would no doubt still be a hell of a lot of fun for kids and anyone not interested in actually learning.
Here’s the kicker: They’re claiming this thing will be sold for $179. Given the price of other premium music-game controllers, and the extra stuff this thing is supposed to do, that seems almost suspiciously reasonable. Combine that with a sort of slapdash product site, a hilariously tone-deaf product video, and what appear to have been several production delays, and it starts swinging the needle from “cautiously optimistic” toward just plain “cautious” for me.
On the other hand, they do have a few fairly legit-looking videos of real guitarists trying this thing out. And that Yamaha device does seem to retail for around the same price.
So color me very interested. Luckily we shouldn’t have to wait long to check it out; it’s due in February, and it sounds like Inspired will be showing near-final product at CES in January, so hopefully we’ll get some hands-on reports. (Not, alas, from me — I won’t be making CES this year.) Until then, I’ll just hope that it’s not too good to be true.
[Read, via Absolute Gadget]
I usually hate when people say this, but just buy a real guitar already. I don’t see the point of this.
I have a guitar (well, several) — but I can’t use any of them to play Rock Band. For me, with regard to the game-controller aspect of this thing, the big attraction is strumming on strings as opposed to wiggling a lever. It seems like it’d be a lot more natural.
Then to also have this be something you could actually use to tinker with — songwriting, practice, adding synths to recordings, whatever — that is exceptionally intriguing to me.
I have seen and played the You Rock Guitar – it’s gonna be HUGE . . .
Where did you play this thing? And how similar was it to an actual guitar?
dudes it’s clear that ,that kinda device is nothing to be pesimistic about…after a while computer technology lets us to tackle with lots of different instruments registry and just and after 80′s there is no so much width about optioning the control of this different sounds with a controller which is based on a guitar physics… i am still not accurate of the capacity if this tool requires us on controlling digital signal routing but im sure soon this kind of productions will have their peculiar character besides of all other tech freak necessity based equipments and will have be gained back the marketing rate they’ve lost becouse of being late in front of midi keyboard controllers..so rock’n roll is still an option but why not rock’n rave…thx…by the way there is more important issues than comparing this kind of production with a real guitar about the matter of the similarity..there is an issue of correcting the fretting angularity just for the true intonation of the notes which is being played on the fretboard… the guitar producers still looks this work as making furnitures instead of an tone acces devices.