News Ubisoft announces Rocksmith guitar game

stop thinking about ABCDE as notes, and think about it as an audio signal. middle "e" on a piano is an exact frequency of 440hz. this will show up if you play that specific note. if you play one e note higher, or one octave higher, it will be 880hz. if you play one octave lower, it will be 220hz. its all fairly simple to look at the output voltage of said axe to determine what sound is being generated. this is how tuners work fundamentally. instead the game would register what AC voltage is being input at the time the game tells you to play. its all very simple. take an oscilloscope to your guitar output and see what kind of sine wave you are getting with your different notes.

if this works without using a special pickup on a guitar - and they make it so you are able to use any guitar - then this game will have the ability to sell very well i think.

ill wait for the reviews - and if they are favorable - i will most likely learn to play a lot better than i am currently able!

 

If you could filter out all the harmonic resonance frequencies so that just the fundamentals remain then it could be possible, but even tuners get confused once you start playing more than one note at once even if a second string is vibrating inaudiably, and it tends to take a short time for them to reach the conclusion about what note you are playing.

 

The problem is that you have exactly the same note (read: same frequency) in multiple places on the guitar neck (in standard tuning the g on the 5th fret of the fourth string is the same as the g on the 10th fret of the fifth string). Couple that with the fact that one rarely plays just a single note at a time, and you've got a heck of a job trying to separate the individual notes played etc.

Of course, they could just compare the entire sound signature of the required chord etc with what is being fed in through the audio jack and not worry about separating the notes at all.

I wonder what happens if you just plug your mp3 player into the jack? Top of the leaderboard instantly?

 

MMMMMMHM!!! My 12-string has an on board tuner which is frankly a waste of space, if you pick a string too hard it alters the frequency and the guitar would have to be PERFECTLY in tune which, if you're just learning would be difficult (Hell I have students who have been playing 5 years now and still can't tune properly!).

As for playing notes here there and everywhere the assumption would be the game would use Tab in the same way Rockband uses notes, sure us more knowledgeable players could play it in other positions if we really wanted too, as has been said there's little difference, although the tone does vary between the wound and widdly strings. Anything that gets people into playing is a damned good thing though!

Oh and r3Q, I think you're thinking the A above middle C being 440hz, the only note worth knowing as all tuners, and orchestras tune off it (apart from those pesky transposing instruments!)

 

Thats just it, if you're getting carried away and strike an open E really hard it's going to sound slightly sharper until it settles down, likewise if you press the strings into the frets too far.

Even if they do a deal with Gibson to sell guitars along with the game that are perfectly set up so that each note is perfectly in tune all the way up the fretboard, once they are packed into warehouses the strings aren't going to be in the best condition by the time they get to the player so they will need changing to possibly another brand/guage of strings and the whole guitar is going to need setting up again.

 

I wasn't, go can play the same not at the same frequency on several different strings on a guitar, depending on where on the fretboard you are holding the string. for instance on a 24 fret instrument you can play the same note at three different frequencies.

 

That's a damn good point, would you HAVE to use one gauge of strings and would the effectiveness of the 'game' tail off as the strings get older and fingerpoo'd all over?!

Hmmmmm, be interesting to see previews and such like!

 

thers no point in worrying about if the guitar can pick up all the notes because it can. That tech has been around for ages. ive tried several guitars with the special midi microphones on them and they all work perfectly.

I played a Yamaha Acustic fitted with a midi microphone plugged in through a synth module and the damned thing sounded like a grand piano and it tracked everything perfectly from slow stuff, open chords to lightspeed shredding solos.

theese systems work with any gauge of strings and any guitar. The first system i tried was back in the 80s it was a Korg GR1 mudule with a midi mic and even that worked. I dont know how the damned thing keeps track of exactly every tiny thing you do including bends and vibratos and i dont really care either all i can say is that it does.

check out the Roland GR55 on youtube and youll see

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZBq5_aBGbU&feature=related

 

All that is fine and dandy, but from the article above, I got the impression that they would just use a standard audio output from a normal guitar, rather than actually using special pickups. (The gr55 looks awesome, though.)

 

Well there are systems like the Sonuus G2M that convert audio from a guitar to midi but systems like that doesnt even come close to the tracking of the Roland GK-3 special microphone that you use with the GR55. The sonus needs absolute clean notes and you have to adapt your playing to it. If the game uses that system it wont be worth the packaging it comes in since learning to play guitar on a system that forces you to play in a very unatural way will be useless.

 

I think for now we should stop shouting "that's impossible" and let them try. If it gets people playing the proper instruments then it's brilliant.