Incident Technologies has introduced the gTar, a hybrid iPhone dock + music controller guitar that’s described as ‘the first guitar that anybody can play’.
The gTar uses digital sensors to sense your finger position and then the iPhone is used for sound generation.
The guitar offers three levels of difficulty/playability:
- If you’ve never played the guitar before, start with Easy, where you only need to play the open strings. This gives you the chance to start playing your favorite songs right away while getting a hands on feel for the strings. SmartPlay is in effect here, so if you hit the wrong string, you won’t hear anything.
- When you’ve graduated from Easy, you can move up to Medium and start playing the frets and strings at the same time. Smart Play is still in effect, so you can continue to play without the fear of messing up.
- When you’ve mastered a song and want to take it to the next level, try playing in Hard. Here, the gTar will continue to display the correct notes, but allows you to play whatever you want. SmartPlay stops working here, so every note you play will ring out.
Several aspects of the gTar may make it interesting for electronic musicians:
- The gTar is USB-MIDI compliant. Incident says that they’ll “be releasing some tutorials and hacks soon!”, if you’re interested in hacking the gTar to create/perform music.
- They also plan to offer an SDK in the future, for people that are interested in building apps for the gTar.
Intelligent Gadgets has released MIDI Mandala – a wireless Midi controller for iPod/Touch, iPhone, and iPad.
