Red Octane just announced their upcoming game “Rock Band” in which friends can play together as a band with one player for each of the roles of singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer. Needless to say, I am pretty excited about this game since I have been a music game junkie for a long time now.

Red Octane’s strength is that they made the rhythm game genre fun again. Guitar Hero was a masterpiece of execution, especially the way complexity increased by song within each difficulty level. I tried the Hard level when I first started playing the game and I was booed off stage. I went back down to Easy and played the game linearly through until I had five stars on almost every song – on Expert level!

Red Octane’s weekness is that they don’t have many original gameplay ideas. Guitar Hero was basically the Japanese game Guitar Freaks repackaged with an infinitely better song choice.

Now, Red Octane’s “Rock Band” is another repackaging – Karaoke Revolution plus Guitar Hero (x2 for bass) and DrumMania all in one. While I am sure it will be great fun, I also worry that it will be a whole lot of rhythmic clicking and only one person getting pitch training.

One of my lifelong goals has been to develop a pitch training game that is as much fun as Guitar Hero. While I am working on that in my spare time, I’ve also hacked together a pretty fun “Guitaraoke Revolution” game that is an amazing guitar and ear workout. Here’s what you need to do:

Splice your Karaoke Revolution microphone so that the microphone ends in a plug and the USB converter end has a jack like this:

I used mini plugs and jacks and then put a quarter inch adaptor on the mini plug jack to allow for plugging in a traditional guitar cable.

I don’t recommend plugging in the guitar direct for the following reasons:

• The guitar output level may be too low.
• The direct sound is lame, you want some nice effects!
• Karaoke Revolution has some inherent delay (perhaps as a feedback reducer for the expected microphone input).

So, plug your guitar into your effect processor / amp and send the Playstation the output from a headphone jack or perhaps a Send jack on your amp or mixer. There are many ways to do this and I won’t get into that.

Then, in the mic set up, get the volume within Karaoke Revolution’s acceptable range, and turn the mic output volume to zero so you don’t hear the delay. For game play, it’s up to you whether you want to hear the vocals (maybe you want to be reminded how the song goes) or if you want to turn them down (like in real Karaoke).

I think that’s about it.

YouTube Videos

Just so you know what you’re striving for, here’s “Guitaraoke” in action on YouTube:

Unchained Melody:

Every Breath You Take:

Note: The guitar is one of my weird guitars – with fretboard markers and colors defined by the ebony and ivory on a piano keyboard. The fretboard was designed by Aaron Wolfson but hasn’t really caught on, but I love it! The white and black guitar also has a Sustainer pickup in it and Bigsby vibrato for a nice vocal expressiveness.

I encourage other YouTubers to record their own performances and label it with the “Guitaraoke” tag and I’ll link to you.

Incidentally, you can hack together a Singstar guitar game even more easily than Karaoke Revolutions. Just get a mini plug jack that is small enough to fit into the Singstar audio to USB converter (or melt down a Radio Shack cable to fit) and plug your guitar in. The only problem is that Singstar does not give you the option to turn off the incoming vocals, so you have to hear your guitar coming through with a pretty long and annoying delay. Karaoke Revolution’s triangle showing real-time pitch is better than Singstar’s after-the-fact results display anyway.

Learning Guitar This Way

I think if you guitarists out there try this Guitaraoke exercise, you’ll really be surprised about how good of a training tool it is. There are so many people who have guitar muscle memory and a database of riffs in their head who might sound pretty good, but if you can’t make your guitar sing, then how good are you really?

I have to admit that while I LOVE Make Magazine, I never tried one of the projects until now. I made this:

which is a sensor interface that communicates with the computer via MIDI. This makes it ideal for working with MaxMSP and that part of the project was trivial. The sensor hanging off the left side is a photocell which is configured to send control change messages via MIDI.

Hopefully this will be the first of many more completed Make Projects.