The world needs another instructional
guitar tool like it needs another hole in the ozone layer, but in all seriousness, this one is stupendous. Er, it exhibits remarkable potential, considering that it's not yet beyond the concept stage. Designer Eugene Cheong has dreamed up the Maestro, an attachment that can supposedly be adapted to work on any guitar (of the electric variety, we presume) and teach you what frets to mash in order to actually become a halfway decent player. Put simply, the device accepts MP3 files via SD card, and then it breaks down the tunes into tablature which can be displayed via lasers. Once you see the beams lighting up your fretboard, you mash / strum in order to keep up and "learn" the songs. We can only hope this thing adds a slowdown mode should it ever hit store shelves, 'cause even the amateur probably doesn't want to tackle select Dream Theater tracks at full speed.
[Via
DVICE]
posted Feb 5th 2009 2:33PM
shoop da whoop.
pew pew......twang?
IMMA CHARGI-- my guitar strings?
This is awesome, but how does it know if the song is down-tuned into another key or not?
Drop-D!
Tenacious D!
finally i get to master dragonforce on real guitar
Why bother? Even they can't play their songs.
I'm assuming that he wants to learn the solos in the album.
I guess Herman Li will be the first customer.
a) It'll never leave the concept stage. How's it going to take an MP3 of a song and convert *just* the guitar tracks to legible tabs?
b) Dream Theater > All
There are only certain audio frequencies that a guitar can make. I would assume that the thing would scan only these frequencies and make tabs from that. Although, a huge problem that I see arising is, what if a band has both a main guitarist and rhythm guitar? How would it determine which tabs are coming from which guitar?
Audio Surf did a good job taking music apart.
I'm pretty sure they'll figure out how, especially if it has a little time to search through the song before playing it.
Where's the preorder page?! ;)
Seriously though, I have a lot of trouble learning things on my guitar.
I love it to death but it's very hard for me to learn new concepts / music.
I'm legally blind (That means I have horrific vision, not that I can't see at all) so I can't see.. say printed off tabs clearly enough to read them and play them at the same time. So I have to memorize a couple tabs at a time. And when you're new at playing it at all, that makes it that much harder. (Am I playing it right? *check tab* It still doesn't sound right.. Did I retune correctly? *check tab* .. 5 7 9 .. 9 9 12.. what?)
Sadly, I'm not sure how far this will get since it's still in concept but I'd definitely roll for it. erm.. buy it :)
But they don't say that is going to be a original mp3 track, it can be a modify one with the structure already define like Guitar Hero or Rock Band songs...Any way I'm in!
It even plays vocals courtesy of kidz bop.
software cannot accurately convert a fully mixed song into guitar tab. And if you think a guitar is "limited to certain frequencies", you're right, like all the frequencies above 100hz.
This thing would make more sense to just load tab straight into it, maybe wifi/bluetooth. let a real musician reconstruct the music because machines do not understand feeling and subtlety. software can barely read an email out loud and it still is not any better than a 5 year old dyslectic child with poor eyesight.
@Tes
Have you tried printing with larger text? How about not printing and zooming into the tab on the screen.
Music requires having a good memory and if you're having trouble and whining about it, then maybe you should look into taking up other hobbies.
If you're still reading this, here's one good tip...
Don't whine about tabs and learn everything step by step. It might be slow and troublesome at first, but it will get faster if you try. Also, not all tabs are created equal, try going to ultimate-guitar.com.
an answer to a question nobody asked.
a pessimism in a Blog that nobody want.
a snide remark that disappoints.
lol.
http://www.fretlight.com/
Admittedly, laser beams are cooler..They won't make you any better a guitar player though.
Dream Theater rules!
p.s. this guitar enhancer not so much
yeah but as hard as they would be, i would still try. buckethead, now that's a challenge. petrucci is good but he's nothing compared to buckethead.
Id love for this thing to try and show some Pink Floyd riffs that go on forever.......
Umm, if you have your fingers on the frets, won't they block the lasers?
That's why it will look completely different by the time it's done. ;)
Since your fingers aren't too far from the strings, I don't think it will be too hard to tell where the lights are going to fall.
Essentially you have three cases (per finger of course):
Your fingers are above the fret the light is going to --> Light lands on proper fret
Your fingers are on the fret the light is going to --> Light lands on fingers
Your fingers are below the fret the light is going to --> Light may hit fingers instead of fret ... not centered so should be apparent where the light was going to land
Of course you can have your hand so far away that there will be no interference (similar to having your hand above the fret it's going to land at)
Dream Theater... amazing talent, boring ass songs!
True. I got all their studio albums from torrents and i only kept 2 songs. Forsaken and Constant Motion. So...
Opeth > Dream Theater
The auto-decoding thing will never work for anything halfway complex. Real tabs require a human ear to not only discern one guitar track from another, but also figure out how it can be played using the four fretting fingers. Not to mention that most chords can be played a number of different ways at various spots on the neck-- will it really be powerful enough to figure that stuff out?
I could see it working decently for stuff like cleanly-played arpeggios or maybe power chords, but beyond that seems unlikely. And good luck getting it to work with any track that features heavy effects.
i figure it would have no problems with songs like seven nation army by the white stripes but if you tried a buckethead song, it would probably explode.
Time to take your Guitar Hero skills to the next level :)
What if there's more then one guitarist in the band of the song you give it?
I'd like to see how it handles 2-handed tapping, string bends, and harmonics.
Well, its a neat concept, but completely unrealistic.
Even tech that can pull notes from a midi file, where all the pitches are specifically designated, cannot even begin to transcribe them in a playable way, let alone transcribing pitches from a song, then assigning frets to them in a playable fashion on the neck of a guitar. The only way this system would reliably work would be to accept pre-configured data and display that.
I don't think there's any particular reason that this would be limited to electric guitars. Electric guitars have the same number of power sources that acoustic ones do -- none. (aside from the odd active pickup, usually an after-market attachment anyway).
@ vander I wouldn't expect this thing to take generic mp3 files and turn them directly into playable tab either - it's just too difficult. Some combination of mp3 and MIDI data is more likely.
Some of us that play have no aspiration to become musicians. We just like our fischer price facsimiles.
do not look directly into the bridge!
And if you turn up the amp, it shreds paper too!
Is the theory that someone too lazy to bother to learn to read tab will be able to pick, strum, and finger with enough skill to actually play a song realtime? This device literally will make learning guitar harder because it would encourage you to ignore theory and knowledge, and just place your fingers where it tells you.
Black magic!
Black Magic Woman by Santana.
"Maestro"? isn't Gibson guna get mad about that?
Ok...Dream Theater seriously kick ass!!!
cool now we can get cancer of the fingers
i don't feel that learning other people's songs off by heart contributes towards the creativity of a player. The best players come from learning the basic scales, then chopping and changing between them, altering pitch, dynamics and speed; then expanding onto more complex and often blues-based scales.
being able to play a song by a certain artist all the way through is very credible and something to be cherished, but when it comes to improvising with a band you've never played with before, or those rare occurrences when you find yourself thrown in at the deep end with nothing to go by and a song you've never heard before, the guitarists that know what chord is being played, and the relative scales to accent and complement, always seem the most naturally talented players - more versatile and more creative. My two cents, but from 6 years of playing, learning other people's songs isn't the way to a personally satisfying guitar experience. THERE IS MORE TO IT!!
regards
But will it go to 11?