So if you’ve looked at a Guitar Hero game and thought to yourself “man, this isn’t nearly simplified enough,” I’ve got something for you. It’s called the TabStrummer guitar and it will let you play entire chords with the press of a single button. That’s right, you only need one finger to play guitar now. Okay, well, one finger on each hand. The TabStrummer is its own standalone device, so you can bring it camping and play crazy cyber-tunes around your electronic fire, or something.
TabStrummer has a whopping 12 buttons, each of which can be set to finger any chord you could finger on a standard guitar. Then, all you have to do is press down the right button, strum the little strummy area and bam, music. The strings look pretty responsive and definitely support all kinds of interesting strum patterns, but there aren’t videos of anyone trying to do any kind of finger-picking or soloing on it, although I guess the whole chord thing would actually make soloing harder.
While the TabStrummer is totally taking some of the hardest work out of learning guitars — the part where you do the same thing for hours on end and occasionally bleed from your hands — it’s neat to see how it could give the user an opportunity to explore interesting chord progressions and other advanced theory without having to memorize all the chords first. Also, you naysayers will be glad to know that, while it’s functional, it’s not going to replace a regular guitar any time soon. There are some videos that back that up. I definitely want one though, just to mess around. Also, I totally want to start a cyber-punk band.
(via DVICE)
- Video filmed from inside a guitar is pretty sweet
- Music played on an edible chocolate record
- Band logos for scientists
