“Perseverance, trial & error and walk before you run” are the kind of concepts that seem to be lost on people today who want instant gratification and don’t want to invest much time into learning how to play to an instrument the old-fashioned way. Even though gimmicks like the Guitar Hero series got some of these lazy bums learning how to move their hands across fret board, there still are some people who just cannot be bothered with perfecting their guitar playing with practice and want to be able to play like a pro even if they’ve picked up a guitar for the first time. Created by Incident the gTar is touted to be a learning tool that pretends to teach you how to play the guitar though it ensures that you’re never hitting a single bad note.
The gizmo comprises of an electronic guitar that can be embedded with an iPhone on which you can download an app that will illuminate the fret board and let the player “see” the chords that he wants to play. With three learning levels-easy, medium and difficult- the gTar promises to help hasten up the process of learning how to play the guitar. However, what makes us a little skeptical of this claim is the fact that the electronic guitar is pre-programmed not to let the player ever play a bad note. At the ‘easy’ level, a player only gets to learn which strings to play via illuminated LEDs, at the ‘medium’ level, both strings and frets are illuminated to help the player improve further though its Smart Play function only plays the correct string at all times so you never really get any real audio feedback on whether you’re playing the right chords and notes.
Fitted with a bunch of sensors, the gTar nannies a player through the traditionally hard to learn art and at best helps you develop a muscle and visual memory of strings and guitar chords. Since the gTar is programmed to only let you hear the correct chord and strings at all times, you feel like a pro from the moment you pick up the thing though the absence of real time audio feedback may fill you with false confidence and lead you into making a total ass of yourself in front of people when you pick up a real guitar and learn firsthand what your guitar playing really sounds like.
Any who, the project is currently on track raising $100,000 in funds to get the gTar into the manufacturing process and when the company does reach its goals, they promise to retail the gTar electronic guitar for $450 as well as a free app for you iPhone that comes with a pre-loaded library of guitar hits.
Via: Kickstarter/ Tech Crunch