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GH 3 Guitar as a Real Instrument?
fearsomepirate
I ate a pickle once.Registered User regular
I ate a pickle once.Registered User regular
I thought it was weird that Tycho thinks that the GH guitar, with its five buttons, could make a serviceable instrument. Problem is, you have 13 notes in an octave, and I assume you wouldn't be using hammer-ons and pull-offs to make different notes on the scale, as that would be grossly counter-intuitive. 5 buttons for 13 notes just isn't going to work. Using button combos for different notes (which would give you just over two octaves--a 24-fret guitar has has four) would be extremely unwieldy.
5 buttons with hammer-ons, pull-offs, and both down and up-picking might sound like a lot of combinations (you could model that as 7 states per button including the off state, and that gives you 2401 states), but when you consider that a real electric guitar has as many as 120 fret positions with even more possibilities per fret when you include bends, barre chords, finger and sweep picking, palm muting, and so on, a real instrument offers many orders of magnitude more possibilities.
I'm not one of those snobs who thinks people who play GH should take guitar lessons any more than people who play Burnout should drive race cars. Just don't kid yourself that playing Guitar Hero is any closer to the real thing than Burnout is.
5 buttons with hammer-ons, pull-offs, and both down and up-picking might sound like a lot of combinations (you could model that as 7 states per button including the off state, and that gives you 2401 states), but when you consider that a real electric guitar has as many as 120 fret positions with even more possibilities per fret when you include bends, barre chords, finger and sweep picking, palm muting, and so on, a real instrument offers many orders of magnitude more possibilities.
I'm not one of those snobs who thinks people who play GH should take guitar lessons any more than people who play Burnout should drive race cars. Just don't kid yourself that playing Guitar Hero is any closer to the real thing than Burnout is.
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PSN ID: fearsomepirate
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You do realize that he wasn't saying that Guitar Hero is "playing an instrument," he was saying that such devices could have the capability of being instruments, in which case he is totally correct. People didn't think turntables were instruments once upon a time.
Anyways, this could have easily been in the Rock band or GH threads, and Gabe / tycho generally don't read these forums.
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Let's play Mario Kart or something...
It would limit the range of notes you could play in succession unless you 'mapped' octave or not changes onto the d-pad or something.
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Yes you are, and you totally missed Tycho's point.
Circuit bending is a way of producing music. So is banging on pots and pans. Using the guitar controller with appropriate software could absolutely be.
Each of the five colored buttons represent a different 3-note chord (perhaps I, IV, V, and either ii or vi in a given key, or maybe some arrangement that allows for all 12 notes to be hit). While you are holding down a button, a note is playing. One of the three notes in the given chord is played based on the state of the strum bar (up, neutral, or down).
Or you could do the MIDI thing and program different combinations of buttons/strums/tremolo to do all sorts of different things w/ a sequencer.
Although I think that's a Guitar Freaks controller, but the point stands.
Just because he said the controller is an 'instrument' doesn't mean he said it was a 'guitar equivalent', or even a 'guitar' at all. He said it was an instrument. Which is true - or, it CAN be true.
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Indeed, there's already a thread for this topic, should probably be locked.
go here,
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=43524
RE: the controller as an instrument, discussion started around this page:
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthread.php?t=43524&page=5
There ya go.
Thread solved.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Macs/PCs with Bluetooth can communicate with the Wiimotes. The Wii GH3 then must also be capable of acting as an input device for a Mac/PC.
There are a number of Mac and PC soft-synths that are playable using either MIDI controllers OR the keyboard on the computer. In fact every one I've ever seen has supported programming by "playing" the computer keyboard.
So if you use the Wii GH3 controller as a HID and boot up a soft synth, it IS an instrument.
Someone with Wii GH3 needs to try this. If I had it, I'd be playing with the possibility right now.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Of course, you are missing the slight flaw in the argument. Once turntables were recognised as instruments, they were still turntables. Then they became more advanced turntables, and so on. At the moment, a GH controller isn't an instrument. At the point that it becomes an instrument (possible), it will be...er, an electronic guitar of some kind. Never seen those before.
I rarely if ever comment here or on frontsite newsposts which tend to be amusing enough, but that really was a load of utter bollocks. Democratization of music? Please oh please be irony. If not, I have to assume that Tycho somehow isn't aware that real guitars are actually already available & affordable (might even cost less than a copy of GH), and has missed the past 20 years of increasingly mass-market recording equipment and software.
me too. ha
I agree. Like I said on the other thread, what everyone is talking about it basically turning the GH controller into a funnily-shaped harder-to-use synthesizer.
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YEah I made the same point in the other thread. It's pretentious bullshit.
Youre kidding right? I believe its casio that makes something almost similar to a GH controller, albeit somewhat more advanced, with a synth built right in.
Here it is right here actually:
http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2007/09/1983-casio-dg-20-electric-guitar.html
There are other ones too, that are basically midi controllers, that do nothing unless theyre hooked up to a synth of some sort. That one actually will make noise plugged right into an amp.
So suggesting that the GH controller could be used as an actually instrument is not far fetched at all, infact im surprised this thread isnt already filled with links to people using them as such. Even suggesting that it will be something new is somewhat flawed as there are already tons of similar things available, albeit those things were not video game peripherals at one point in their lives.
I think the most analogous thing has already been posted though, using a keyboard as a midi controller. Keyboards were not originally intended to be a functioning instrument when they were designed, built, and marketed. But people have transformed them into fully functioning instruments through the use of software.
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The point is that it would simply imitate (badly) something that already exists. It wouldn't be a 'real' instrument, in that it wouldn't be anything new, just like a Casio keyboard is a shitty Casio keyboard, not a piano. The turntables example was a bad one because ironically turntables provided a new sound capability (though I question whether they are really an instrument). Synthesisers don't do that - they are simply an electronic mechanism to play pre-created sounds. You can twang a guitar in an infinite number of different ways; you can't do that by pressing a synth button.
Yes, it would be a functioning instrument that you can make sounds on, but then so is my desktop. Bang bing boom slap. See?
Oh, it is, it is.
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I agree. Using a GH controller to play music doesn't make them a new instrument. It's just another synthesizer. Albeit a funnily shaped one.
Turntable is an instrument, and thanks for posting that. It reminds me of the "hello nasty" infomercial. Such awesome and hilarious stuff.
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I know people have already adapted the wiimote as a computer input device; the Wii version of Guitar Hero just plugs the "guitar" into the wiimote's expansion slot. An interesting idea would be the development of the "guitar" as a midi input device in some way. But then again, that would make the "guitar" only as much of an instrument as a computer mouse is right now.
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So that's not so much a limitation of the equipment but one of the software, and IIR Harmonix has said they'd like to eventually have a way to make your own songs in their game.
Anyway, it IS a limitation of the hardware, not the software. Because the software is the actual instrument. That's what's making the sound. The controller is just that, a controller. It's as much an instrument as my Wiimote. Using the GH guitar is just mapping keys from a synthesizer onto a different piece of plastic with buttons.