News Ubisoft announces Rocksmith guitar game

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/03/15/ubisoft-announces-rocksmith-guitar-game/1

 

Intriguing. I'd quite like to see how this will work.

 

Now this I'd be interested in!

 

Woot! A great reason to get my guitar out again!

Now, will they be bringing this to the PC?

 

125GBP for a real guitar and a game? I'd like to see that happen... but I have my doubts...

 

Let's hope for some metal. Also... A drum kit expansion?

 

Pfft you would have thought it would at least come with a free air guitar for your Kinect.

On a serious note, very interesting to see what they can do with this but can't see it selling.

 

Errmm.. rock band 3, anyone? They are already doing this with their Pro-Mode and Fender are due to release a proper electric Stratocaster which will work with the game.

 

now this i would happily purchase and play and learn. Never saw the point of previous rockband sorta games aside from party toy.

 

As someone who plays ze real Axe Rockband was great to be able to rock out with your friends who AREN'T musos, and good fun to play around with musos. It's a great idea but as Eddtox said, RB3 has the Pro-mode stuff.

And £125 for an *ahem* Gibson guitar and game?? Yeaaaaah that's not gonna happen unless it's made of 2% MDF and 98% air!

 

But will it go up to 11?

 

I have serious doubts about the quality of the experience if they are only going to use a standard guitar output to control the game. How will they determine whether I'm playing an E on the 6th, 5th or 4th string, just from the acoustic signature? Probably not the best example, but I doubt they will be able to detect the input as well as the Midi Squier Strat that Fender is making for Rockband 3.

 

Arguably, does it matter if you play an E on the 6th, 5th or 4th string? It's the same note and sounds pretty much the same.

I'm interested by this - although I'm sure single notes will be much easier for the system to distinguish than chords. How on earth would it work out what strings I was playing with a full six string open chord?

 

I found that when using midi pickups you had to be exact with your notes or they didn't register properly, this means that any subtle nuances and personal vibrato styles that mya be part of your style as a player would interfere with the sound you were trying to generat.

Hopefully it will come with an audio based pickup or even be able to plug straight into the line in with a looser range of what is 'correct' or not.

 

Hehe, yeah I love that picture.

This could be good, if only to get more people into music. You can't beat being able to actually play an instrument in RL.

 

Which is why I said it might not be a very good example (I'm a novice guitarist), but I worry about the usefulness of merely taking an audio feed from the guitar and trying to interpret it well enough to be used in a game.

 

They will have to find a way of analysing the fundamental notes so that no matter what kind of guitar, whether it's a telecaster or a les paul, that it can detect the individual notes accurately.

I presume if you plugged straight in then the game would emulate the sound in terms of distortion and effects for you.

Latency will also be an issue, unless i switch my X-FI to Audio creation mode then there is quite a delay when going from line in to speakers.

 

Hexaphonic pickups would work great for something like this and allow for string & note detection, but I can't imagine a guitar with hexaphonic pickups hitting the pricepoint mentioned here.

 

It matters a great deal if you are actually learning to play the instrument as an E note on the three different strings is in wildly differnent posistions, and so would mean that you couldn't play E minor open without using the open 6th string for the E for instance.

It would also cause major problems for solos if you suddenly had to leap up the fretboard to play a note that could have been played much more easily on the next string over.