We let you play Frets on Fire, Guitar Hero®, and Rock Band® with a real guitar
The V1 is a regular electric guitar, only it has an extra cord coming out of it that connects to a Nintendo® Wii® remote or to your PC/PS3® via the USB plug. Inside, we’ve added all the necessary hardware, so all you have to do to play the guitar is plug it in. You then can play your favorite games using notes and chords. Of course, you can also plug it into a guitar amp and play it like any other electric guitar.
Currently available in a small kit package, our current technology allows you to play guitar games in 3 different modes -
Fret Mode – Play the guitar like a regular guitar controller, where pressing any string on the first fret is a Green button press, any press on the second fret is a Red button press, and so on. This mode is the easiest to use, and helps you build your finger strength and gets you used to the fretboard.
Note Mode – Map individual notes on the fretboard to the colored buttons and use the V1 to practice learning note positions. The default mapping assigns the buttons cyclically to the notes on a B flat scale, but each button color can be user-mapped to up to 6 notes, so you can program in whatever notes you want to practice.
Chord Mode – With Chord mode, you can map each button to a separate chord fingering, so you can use the rhythm and challenge of a guitar game to work on learning chord transitions naturally and fluently.
Moreover, the OpenChord guitar controller is a 100% open source development platform. We encourage you to take what we’ve made and modify it to your heart’s content. We’re currently looking into a simple MIDI side-project for turning the OpenChord technology into basically the world’s cheapest MIDI guitar kit, but there’s a whole range of possibilities out there.
There’s more info available over at the Buy and V1 Guitar pages.
If you’re looking for the perfect game to play, we also highly recommend Frets on Fire, an open-source guitar-based rhythm game. Free to download, play, and make your own songs with, we think it’s just about the best way to play out there.
For current details on our development, check out our blog.
