Hannah Montana may be able to get through life with a plastic guitar but you'd better believe any daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus knows how to at least form an E-Chord. I just spotted this story from earlier in the week, but Disney has new product called Star Guitarist that uses real guitars in a Guiter Hero-style environment. It's pretty easy to dismiss a rhythm game by Disney, especially when it's only available on PCs and Macs, but at least they are committing to using real guitars in a commercial product. It even looks like they've paired up with Washburn to include an actual guitar, ableit at 3/4 (Disney fan) size, which maybe justifies the $200 price tag.
I've seen some noncommercial projects out there trying to do this same thing, but I think this is the first retail product to use real guitars. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you I'm excited about this, but I do think the technology is interesting. Rock Band and Guitar Hero are games, while this definitely seems to be more of the "learning can be fun" experience. I always thought it kind of absurd when people would play Guitar Hero and bemoan the fact that it's not like playing a real guitar and then proclaim how many years they have been shredding away. Yeah, it's true it's not like playing a real guitar and it's also not like sitting alone on the edge of your bed playing the first four bars of Sweet Child of Mine over and over again for two weeks.
I think it's a pretty cool piece of tech, and I would even be interested in using something similiar to practice with, but I don't think Harmonix and Activision will be including six strings in their next batch of hardware...yet. Is this the shot in the arm the genre needs or is it just too much to ask people to really learn to play guitar for a game?
Check out the full piece on Wired.