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YmMot | 13 years ago
The "lights on the fretboard that show you what to play" thing has been done; and while it generally gets good reviews I don't think it's revolutionizing learning guitar or anything. Likewise plugging into an iPhone for effects, etc.
The hardest part of starting guitar is simply building up your hand/finger muscles and muscle memory. Having lights on the fretboard makes it nominally easier to place your fingers, but reading tabs isn't hard to begin with (this is essentially just tabs on the fretboard anyway) and learning to look at a tab (or sheet music) on paper/a screen and translate that to finger positions is an important skill to develop as a musician.
This will encourage beginners to look at the fretboard when they play, which is a bad habit to get into.
I also have concerns about this feeling and responding like a real guitar. This doesn't operate like a normal guitar, so there will probably be a lot of little areas where it differs so someone who's played this may pick up a real guitar and find that they are making all sorts of horrible squeaking and finger noise, aren't used to the action of a real guitar, etc etc.
If it was a choice between this and a real guitar for a beginner, I would go with the real guitar no question. If you happen to have ~300-500$ that you can just blow on cool gizmos, sure it'd be fun to play with.
If you've never touched a guitar before, this might get you from 0 to "Smells like Teen Spirit" slightly faster than otherwise, but I doubt by much. I think the returns will diminish over time, and this might even ultimately hurt you.
The main neat thing is using it as a midi controller/ to make cool sounds but there are plenty of other options in that area already.
louis058|13 years ago