GDC: Guitar Rising, Guitar Hero for real guitarists?

It is impossible to write about Guitar Hero or Rock Bandwithout some wiseacre telling you to just learn how to play an actualinstrument. At GDC I got some face time with Jake Parks from Game Tank,the developer of Guitar Rising, and I asked if he saw moneysigns when he reads those comments. He laughed and told me to expectthe retail product before the end of the year.

I strapped on an actual, honest-to-goodness guitar and took thesoftware for a test drive. There were a number of songs to play,including "Message in a Bottle" by The Police and "The Hardest Buttonto Button" by the White Stripes, although I was told these were simplysongs added to the program for GDC; Game Tank wasn't ready to announcewhat songs would be going into the final product. "Licensing is verycomplicated," Parks told me dryly.
The fascinating thing is that before and during the song when I playednotes, the guitar actually played them; this was a musical instrument,not a toy plastic controller. It was sometimes hard to tell if I washitting the notes at the right time without watching my score, and thefeedback for correct hits could be little more clear, but what wasamazing was that I could hear my actual guitar playing when I did well,and I was actually playing the song!
Well, I was playing the song badly, but I was certainly playing it.

You have a line for each of the six strings,and the number on the dot tells you what fret you need to be playing onto hit the right note (this is known as "tablature" to guitarists).This won't teach you the theory of guitar, but with some practice youwill in fact be playing the song. I'm way out of practice with my ownguitar skills, and I thought this would be a great tool to get myfingers back into shape.
While there are no big-name songs announced yet, and the feedback coulduse some tweaking, the overall experience at this early stage is agreat one. The complainers finally have something to call their own.
The Game Developers' Conference is only a few weeks away, and Frankand I will be flying out to beautiful San Francisco to cover the show.This means that we've been sorting through the e-mails and the scheduletrying to figure out who we'd like to talk to and when, but the sitefor an independent game called Guitar Rising certainly caught our eye.
The GameTank-developed title won the Developers' Choice Award at theAustin Independent Game Conference, and the premise is simple: this isa game that wants to help you learn the guitar. With a real guitar. Anyreal guitar. It's a neat idea, and the "Why don't you stop playinggames and pick up a real instrument" people will finally have a titleto embrace. The familiar interface from other rhythm games and theability to use any guitar could make this a very accessible way tobrush up on your skills or learn for the first time.
Take a look at the video of the game in action, which looks really slick. I'm excited about giving this a try myself at GDC.

Guitar Rising is an upcoming music video game developed by Gametank for the PC and Mac OS X. It is similar to Guitar Hero,only instead of a plastic guitar with buttons, a real guitar is used(by being plugged into the microphone jack) to play. The on-screenfretboard scrolls to the left, and reads much like a tablature, with the notes lying on the corresponding string showing the number of the fret on which the note is played.