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?

The other highlight of my Cambridge trip was staying with some new friends from MIT's Media Lab, Cati Vaucelle and Adam Boulanger. Cati is a disarmingly beautiful yet razor sharp grad student in the Tangible Media Group and Adam is part of the Hyper instruments group and is the most low-key super genius I've ever met. They're both MaxMSP wizards already so it was great to be able to work on my beginner apps and get their help. I showed them both my old Guitar Games and Piano Games applications and they were very enthusiastic about my efforts. It was extremely encouraging for me to watch them try the games out and make very insightful comments about what they liked and what could be improved. One of the big problems I had when developing these applications is that I got very little feedback. My plan now is to create a web page where people can download my creations (free and open-sourced) and get involved in the improvement of games by testing the games, making suggestions for game ideas, and even reprogramming them!

After the workshop was over, I visited Cati and Adam's groups at the Media Lab. I had followed Cati's work from her blog but half of the time I was uncertain if her projects were just ideas or if they were actually real-life creations. Well, as you can tell from the group's name "Tangible Media" most of what Cati blogs about are real things. She demonstrated various "experiments" for me like perfume bottles that play music and her video editing system for children. Adam's lab was an amazing place as well. There I met Craig Lewiston who is creating a glove / keyboard system that helps teach piano by forcing your hand to play the piano with magnetic fields that at first repel your finger and then attract your finger down onto a key. I showed him Piano Games and I hope he can use the graphics from it in his project. Adam showed me some very advanced MaxMSP programs he created in which a P5 gaming glove could be used to generate lush sounds. These sounds were created by Csound, the book for which was written/edited by Adam's father Richard. The next day Adam gave us a Csound tutorial and now, in addition to MaxMSP, I have Csound to explore. The Csound book looks like it will be a great way for me to learn about synthesis techniques and effect processing.

I really didn't want to leave Cambridge, but I had a meeting with my publisher. Plus, fish and guests stink after three days... and it had already been six days!

I feel good. I just came back to New York City after a week in Cambridge in which I had a great time.

The MaxMSP/Jitter workshop was very useful, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn multimedia programming. It was taught by the energetic and knowledgable Gregory Taylor and the audience was a mix of programmers, musicians and installation artists. Greg surprised me by saying “you’re the one who wrote the Rails book!” – he had looked up each of students online to get a sense for his audience. Of course, I had to correct him in that I wrote “a” Rails book, not “the” Rails book, which could only be DHH’s book. Greg thought I might be too advanced a programmer for the class, but he accepted me anyway. I’m glad he did because I never did the kind of graphical programming that MaxMSP uses.

Plus, without this workshop I probably would have kept procrastinating and never worked through the tutorials. The first day and a half of lectures were excellent, but because MaxMSP can do MIDI, audio, and video, Greg’s attempts to cover it all led to a bit of a fractured presentation. To be fair, this was the first time he was doing a workshop that covered all three types of media at once (usually Jitter, the video component is a separate workshop). Anyway, the good news is that after a couple of years removed from doing my music game programming, I built my first new music trainer in MaxMSP. It’s a simple little application in which two notes play, one droning sound that is constant, and one that you control the pitch of using a Playstation type game pad. Once you make the two notes match, the drone note changes and the sequence repeats. I call the game “Tone Deaf” invaders and I think it’s a good exercise. As I get more experienced with MaxMSP I will make it more fun, more of a game. Details on that should follow in this blog, time permitting.

A few months ago I got a notice from the Norah Jones fan club about a contest to attend an upcoming "intimate" rehearsal she was having in the Los Angeles area. Of course I submitted my email address, but I also submitted the email address of my co-author, Michael. I meant to tell him I had done so, but forgot about it and one day Michael calls me and says "You'll never guess what I am about to tell you" to which I responded "Did you win Norah Jones tickets???" It didn't take him long to figure out what happened and it was pretty great that Michael chose me to go to the show with him without knowing I was responsible for him winning the tickets. He knows I'm a big Norah Jones fan, so it makes sense, but what if he had told me "Hey, last night my Mom and I saw a free Norah Jones show" - that would have been trouble!

Anyway, we went to the show and were nearly the first ones in line. Ahead of us was a childhood teacher of Norah's and her daughter who is the girlfriend of the drummer for Norah's half-sister Anoushka Shankar. Once we got in we realized just how intimate this show would be. The tiny rehearsal studio probably had around 50 chairs and since we were front row, Norah would be singing within a couple of meters from us. When Norah walked out it was very clear that she remembered her teacher as Norah's face lit up and she gave her the "call me" and hand gesture. The rehearsal was comprised of every song from Norah's new album, "Not Too Late" which comes out today. (We were sworn to secrecy about the album, which is one reason I am only blogging about it now.) I don't think the song order matches the album order, so I can't really give precise first impressions of each song, but I remember that the show started off with some sleepy songs that bordered on boring until she got to the first song that I really loved with I now know is called "Not My Friend" which warmed me up enough to enjoy all the remaining songs she performed. All in all, I'd say this probably will be considered a weaker album than the previous two, but still there will be several must-haves and the whole thing will be listenable straight through.

One thing that was kind of funny though, I don't know if it was our proximity to Norah, or the fact that we were talking a lot in line, but when Norah would ask the audience a question, Michael would basically answer her very specifically in a very clear voice. I thought Norah might be annoyed (maybe some of the audience was) but she actually seemed to appreciate having more of a dialogue. Instead of asking "How you all doing tonight?" and having a response of "rah!" she would here a distinct and well enunciated "Doing great except that we were in line for quite a while but we met a lot of interesting people." Part of me cringed, but I realized that Michael's attitude is the correct one - he's the star of his own world, and plus, he got to talk to Norah Jones!

In any event, you can see us both in the front row on videos from Norah's new Special Edition release of "Not Too Late" which includes a DVD of some of the songs from the rehearsal.

Even though the book isn’t done, I had to take the day off to attend the NAMM conference down in Anaheim today. Roland Corporation announced their VG-99 V-Guitar system at the show and I was invited because my website, VG-8.com served an important role in the development of the new VG-99. My web site and its mailing list is for users of the Roland VG-8 and VG-88 hexaphonic guitar processors, devices which Roland released many years ago. None of us in that group thought Roland was ever going to make a new VG, and in fact Roland didn’t have any plans to, but I posed the question “What would you like to see in a new VG?” When the response was too great to manage using just email, I set up this wiki page:

http://vg-8.com/wiki/Next_Generation_VG

to collect ideas and allow others to edit them. Secretly, back in Roland Japan the topic of a new VG device was brought up and someone (I think I know who, but I won’t say because I don’t know for sure) found our wiki page and it was used as a starting point for new development. Roland never let us know about it though, which is probably smart corporate policy.

Now, at NAMM we got to see the fruit of this virtual collaboration. The VG-99 is most of the important items from the users wish list plus more that we didn’t even dare to imagine. It feels great to be part of its creation, thank you Roland, and thank you fellow users of VG-8.com.