Saturday, March 1st, 2008
I’ve been musing about and hoping for this one for a while. While Activision’s Guitar Hero has been gaining greater and greater popularity out there, making gamers of people who previously thought an XBox was only for 35-year-old bacherlor’s in their parents’ basements and 10-year-old kids, I’ve been lamenting that there isn’t a game that actually helps you learn how to play a real guitar. Given that my own current guitar rig can be plugged directly into my PC and I can even get a tuner to pop up on my monitor, I knew that the technology already existed to make a computer able to tell what note you were playing. Now all that needed to happen was that someone had to take the scrolling notes of Guitar Hero and merge them with the real neck of a bonafide electric guitar.
And hooray: someone is doing it. The name of the game is “Guitar Rising” (guitarrising.com). You’ll be able to plug any electric guitar into your PC with simple USB to 1/4 inch interface. You’ll get 30 rock songs to play along with, at five levels of difficulty, and even with variable tempos so you can learn at your own pace. The first release is due out in time for this Christmas, and I’m sure if it’s successful, you’ll see expansion packs with more and more songs.
So for all you guitar heroes who wish you could translate your gaming skills over to actually performing real songs for your friends, get excited. This game is for you.
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Sunday, October 21st, 2007
Recommendation 4:
Pandora
Pandora.com is one of the coolest websites I’ve run into on the internet. If you don’t know about it already, just go to the site and follow the instructions. Pandora has you name a song or artist you like. It then goes through a massive library of music to find other songs that are similar to what you have specified. Then it just starts playing them for you.
It’s like a radio station that you yourself get to program. You can even specify different “stations” for different moods you might be in (in other words, if you’re not in an Ozzy Ozbourne vibe, you can always make a new station and put in “Luther Vandross” as the artist that Pandora will find similar music to). When you hear a song you like, you can give it a thumb’s up, and it will be added to the station as an indicator to the system that it should find more music like that one. If you hate a song, you can thumb’s down it so it will not play again.
If you work in front of a computer all day, especially doing work that’s repetitive or mindless, this might be the website for you. Just plug in your earphones, and run Pandora in the background. You’ll hear old favorites as well as new stuff you’ve never run into before.
http://www.pandora.com
As a side note, Pandora’s days may be numbered. The US Copyright Royalty Board raised license fee rates recently to the degree that many online radio stations can’t make enough money to be able to pay for the songs they play. So far Pandora lives, but it may not last.
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