So, I should probably just have gone and gotten a new camera, but after struggling with things for a week or two, I’ve finally gotten some videos taken and edited so the sound doesn’t sound TOO bad.

Here, we’re showing off the ability of the V1 to practice chords -

And here’s a a video showing off how you can map individual notes and scales to the guitar -

Although we don’t show it (since we got that code working after we took the video…), there’s another fret combination (first 3 strings on the 4th and 5th frets) that allows you to change between the original “play with the frets” mode, chord mode, and notes mode.

There’s still some updating of the software we’d like to do, since right now, you can re-assign the chords or notes that you play as color buttons, but they reset to the default when you restart the controller.  It shouldn’t be difficult, but right now, we’re using 97.7% of the current chip’s memory, so we’re going to have to upgrade our hardware first.  Still, that’s just a simple swapping of a better chip, so things are coming along!

Part of the OpenChord project is a commitment to open source and do-it-yourself hobbyists.  In this light, we’ve always planned on putting together kits to let you easily make your own OpenChord guitars.  As it stands, it seems like we’re in a position where the basic assembly of the guitar has been mostly figured out, leaving most of the updates on the software side of things.  Right now, we’re in a position where we could get a bunch of circuit boards printed out and start packaging them together as kits.  However, when you buy a circuit board, the board itself costs only a dollar or two, but the set-up costs are around a hundred or so.  Therefore, it only makes sense to go and get some boards if there’s enough interest to buy a large order of boards.

So we’re asking you, the person interested in OpenChord, would you like to buy a kit to build your own OpenChord guitar?  Drop us a line in the comments, or e-mail us at buy@openchord.org, and if we get enough interest, we’ll go ahead and get a run printed up!

So this week, in addition to not having a camera to take new video with, we’ve been working on expanding the abilities of the V1, including the ability to play scales and chords.  While before we were looking into ways to connect the controller via USB to reprogram it, allowing you re-map the buttons on the controller, now we’ve incorporated a method of re-mapping the controller in-game, allowing you to pick which chords you want to correspond to which buttons in the game.  This afternoon, we’ll try to get the camera working, and hopefully we’ll get a better video out soon…

So after a weekend away, we’re back tonight with some cool stuff.  Basically, some thinking, some re-writing of some code, a few added functions, and now we’re able to use the V1 to play Guitar Hero using either chords or notes on a scale for the buttons.  Of course, the notes you’ll be playing still won’t be the actual notes of the songs on the game, but it will help you work on note and chord transistions, hopefully in a way that’s more fun/motivating than just having to play a lot of chord transitions.

I have to admit, once you start using chords or notes, it makes playing the game a lot harder. When testing it out, even playing easy with chords mapped G Major to the green button, C Major to red, and E Major to yellow, I still failed shockingly quickly… Of course, I’m just about no good at the real guitar, and I’ve been doing a lot more guitar engineering than actual guitar playing this summer! Maybe this’ll start me practicing the guitar again…

Well, I’ll try and get a video up in the next few days.  The only camera I’ve got around here is having some problems with the sound quality, so I want to be able to take a nicer video than I can right now.

So here’s another video for the V1… It’s pretty low-quality, but it shows how the V1 sounds when it’s not plugged in, that is to say, it doesn’t make real sounds.  We took this one a few days ago, but thought the other one was better quality.   We also tried to take one tonight, but the sound quality on that clip is amazingly horrible, so we’re not posting that one….

Thanks for watching!

A clarifying note – While we left it plugged in to the amp in this video to demonstrate how it’s both a real guitar and a working controller, if you unplug the guitar, you don’t really hear it, and if the slight sound is still too much, you can just tap the pick against the strings instead of a full strum.  You see that happen in the first few notes that are hit in the video..  Yeah, what an embarrassing mistake!

Anyhow, we’ve got a new video up on the blog, and we’ll try to have a more in-depth video up soon.

We finally got a video taken!  We’re still offering the Beta Version of the V1 for $169; for more information, check out the ‘Buy’ page.