Ever tried to learn how to play the guitar only to give up after strumming a few strings, realizing it's harder than you thought? Well, a new iPhone-powered guitar called gTar might just help you play a tune in no time.
The all-digital gTar promises to make it easy for anyone to learn how to play, regardless of their current musical prowess. Simply drop your iPhone 4 or 4S into the gTar's built-in dock, load up an accompanying app, and an array of colored LED lights along the fretboard will guide you through a song.
The company behind gTar, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Incident Technologies, posted the project to the crowd-funding website Kickstarter this week, and has already raised upwards of $160,000. The company said it has fully functional prototypes of the gTar, as well as a supply chain lined up, and is now seeking funding to produce the first batch of units.
The gTar is expected to be released this summer, and will retail for around $450. The first 200 backers who pledged between $350-$399, however, were offered one white gTar. That offer is now sold out, but those who pledge between $399-$450 can still nab one.
"If you're ever picked up a guitar for the first time and tried to play a favorite song, you know how discouraging it can be," Drew Houston, Dropbox founder and CEO, wrote on the gTar Kickstarter page. "The gTar completely changes that."
The gTar has sensors to detect each note you play and relay it to your iPhone, which produces the actual sound, Incident said on its Kickstarter page. The app comes with a library of songs, with more being added each week.
The gTar has three settings: easy, medium, and hard as well as a feature called SmartPlay, which mutes out incorrect notes as you play, and helps you get through difficult songs. In the Easy setting, designed for those who have never played the guitar before, you'll only play the open strings. Medium has you start to play the frets and strings at the same time, and Hard disables SmartPlay, so you'll hear every note you play.
Kickstarter has had some rather noteworthy successes lately, despite a recent API glitch. The team behind the Pebble smartwatch recently sold out of the 85,000 watches it plans to make, and raised more than $10 million to become the most-funded Kickstarter project ever. One of the previous records was Double Fine's new adventure game, which hit $3.3 million in March.
For more on Kickstarter, see PCMag's recent Q&A with co-founder Yancey Strickler.
For more from Angela, follow her on Twitter @amoscaritolo.
