Hands-On With gTar: How Does the iPhone-Powered Guitar Actually Play?

Hands-On With gTar: How Does the iPhone-Powered Guitar Actually Play?

Andrew Moseman

6 Ağu 2013

The gTar by Incident Tech, the funky instrument that began life as a Kickstarter project last spring, certainly looks the part of an electric guitar. Our white test unit echoes the iconic shape of a Fender Stratocaster, complete with strings, tuning pegs, and even a pick guard. But the similarities end with the appearance. This is no traditional axe, but a hybrid of an electric guitar and a purely digital device—something you play like a guitar but that makes sound via MIDI processed through an iPhone. It's a clever new way to learn the instrument and a flexible way to record digital music simply by strumming away. The question that remains to be answered is: Just who is it for? 

To see the differences between a guitar and the gTar, start with what's missing. There are no pickups under the strings to capture the notes played, as in your dad's Les Paul. Instead, gTar creates signals via MIDI that your iPhone—which plugs into the face of the gTar—translates in actual sound. As such, the gTar doesn't have to sound like anything. At the push of a button a player chooses a clean electric guitar sound, distortion, delay, acoustic guitar, and other tones. 

Activate gTar and the other cool component comes to life: its psychedelic fretboard, a grid of LEDs that illuminates to show the player what notes to play. With your iPhone 4, 4S, or 5 plugged into the instrument's face, launch the gTar app and choose one of the songs or scales from the growing library. Then start shredding. 



First Licks 

The first time I play, I start with a song as simple as possible—"Yankee Doodle Dandy." As the app moves through the notes of the song, the LED for each one lights up on the neck (if it's an open string, meaning you're not supposed to hold down the string anywhere, that entire string illuminates). Meanwhile, on the iPhone screen, the notes appear on a set of six lines representing the guitar strings, moving right to left until they reach a perpendicular line that tells you when it's their time. One can't help but be reminded of Guitar Hero here, or when the app gives you a points score for how well you played. 

The gTar works because the fretboard is made with touchscreen materials that can tell where the fingers of the player's left hand are placed. The bridge, found down at the other end of the gTar, can tell when the player plucks a particular string. Together, they know whether or not you played the correct note. To make this easier, gTar comes with a smart pick—its metal tip is connected to a plastic covering with a wire that runs into the gTar. Playing with the smart pick completes a circuit every time you pluck a note, which aids in the machine's accuracy. However, gTar co-creator Idan Beck tells me, most players put it away and play with an ordinary plastic pick. This is no great surprise: After picking and strumming with the smart pick in the PopMech back room, I can tell you that the feel of metal isn't quite right, and having a wire running out of your pick is annoying. 

Still, gTar is a blast at first shred. Especially with simple songs like "Yankee Doodle Dandy," I found it easier to play through a tune the first time than it would have been to sight-read the notes from guitar tabs or written music, or to memorize it. That instant gratification jibes with Beck's vision of a gTar user—a casual player looking to have fun with the device, or someone who's never played guitar before but could peck through a simple song with the colored lights to illuminate the path. And for a truly breezy jam, players can put the gTar in easy mode. The audio will progress through the song as long as you keep strumming even if you miss every single note. (On medium mode the LED indicators won't progress until you get it right.) 

Free Play is where the gTar hit some snags. As the name would suggest, this is the mode in which you simply play gTar on your own with no flashing lights. But as I try to strum through a chord progression with a little gusto, gTar can't quite keep up. There's just enough lag to be incredibly frustrating—timing is everything in music. Talking to Beck later, I find out that the problem may not be the gTar or the pick but my smartphone, which has to act as the instrument's brain. The way gTar is built, all the processing happens inside the player's iPhone. My two-year-old iPhone 4, with its weird bugs, limited processor, and other symptoms of old age, can't quite keep up. 

One more thing about gTar that takes some getting used to: The feel isn't quite right. The gTar is strung with real guitar strings, but they don't need to be in tune because of the way Incident designed the instrument. Eliminating the chore of tuning is a time-saver to be sure, but it presents a new problem. The strings make a little bit of sound—as much as any electric guitar that's not plugged in—and it can be distracting to hear them play faintly and out of tune while the correct notes emanate from the iPhone. To defeat this problem, gTar comes with a soft plastic mute that holds the strings in place. While that solves the tuning problem, it gives the instrument a strange feel because the strings don't have the give you're accustomed to. 



Looking for Players 

So let's get back to the big question: Who is this thing for, anyway? At $400, gTar is pretty pricey for a toy, something that will give momentary "look, I can play guitar!" satisfaction. 

Is it for students trying to pick up guitar? The education element is certainly there, Beck says. The app's library includes songs and scales of varying difficulty that gTar's lights can help you to learn. But, he says, "Our app doesn't teach. Our app shows." There's a big difference here. The gTar can show players the notes to play, but that's it. It can't tell you the proper way to hold a pick, or which fingers to use to play which notes. Select a song like Savage Garden's "I Knew I Loved You" from the library and the notes flash on the fretboard, but the app can't tell you that it's much easier to pick them if you hold the chords as the song moves through its chord progression rather than hitting each note one by one. 

Beck's response: Developers are already coming up with way to harness the gTar's teaching potential. But "it's hard to attract developers when you only have 1000 users." 

What about experienced players? "We knew we would get a lot of hate from purist guitarists," Beck says, and some predictable derision has come his way. Still, he envisioned gTar as a way for experienced musicians and especially electronic artists to use a guitar-playing interface rather than, say, a MIDI keyboard, to do new things with music. 

The path to getting the tool into the hands of pros is basically twofold, Beck says. First is to cut latency to imperceptible levels, and there are multiple ways Incident wants to achieve this. It certainly helps for players to use the newest-model iPhone they can. Beck, however, imagines moving away from the smartphone-as-brain setup completely with a future version of gTar that would do its processing through the Web, eliminating even the need to own an iPhone. 

Second: the gTar needs to do tricks that a normal guitar can do, such as bending notes (at the moment it can't detect that). Here, Incident is pursuing a few tech solutions. One would be a new way to detect the extra tension on a string, which would tell the processor that you're bending a note. That's not an ideal fix, though, because it would require players to go without the mute, and the extra sound of the untuned strings could be distracting. A better hack would be to replace the processor that lives in the gTar's neck for a more sensitive future version, and to that end, Beck says, the module was built to be swapped out. 

Today, Incident is just finishing up fulfilling the last of the Kickstarter campaign orders. Beck says they're working out the manufacturing kinks, hoping to get gTar from something you have to preorder and wait for to something you can simply order—hopefully by the time the holiday season rolls around. What's next? Maybe a pro model that takes gTar into the realm of serious, and seriously cool, musical instrument.