http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUyWYF6CGFU
At the 2012 NAMM Show, Ion introduced Guitar Apprentice, a full-scale, electric-guitar-style controller that transforms iPad into multi-touch guitar. Is it déjà vu?
Guitar Apprentice is Core MIDI compatible – so it should work with dozens of iPad music apps, including GarageBand.
Features:
- Full-scale guitar body with strap pegs
- Fitted iPad holder with 30-pin dock connector
- Lighted fretboard and free guitar-teaching app* teach you basic guitar skills
- App includes built-in effects: distortion, reverb, flanger delay and more*
- Built-in speaker with volume control — play anywhere!
- Access to iPad headphone input for silent practice
- Works with GarageBand and dozens of popular iPad apps
- Core MIDI-compliant
Pricing and availability are to be announced. See the Ion site for details.
I find it preposterous to think that this will teach much of anything usable on a guitar. You might learn some fingering positions and how to construct chords/scales on the neck, but you won’t be building any strength or dexterity in the fingers since there are no strings, and you won’t be learning how to actually strum since, again, there are no strings. Furthermore, you won’t be learning any of the many things that are key to playing a guitar, like damping/muting strings, strumming only some strings instead of all of them, different pick techniques, harmonics, resonance, proper fingering to get good tone, sliding, bending, vibrato… and on and on.
any version for lefties?
How much you wanna bet sometime during production of this goofy thing, the developers realized (too late) it was useless as an instrument, and changed marketing focus to ‘educational aid’.
Kids, do yourselves a favor and buy a real guitar to practice on. Trust me you’ll never get laid playing this thing.
OK, the madness has to stop! Has synthtopia become The Onion?
Just supposing for a moment that they might possibly be deranged enough to develop such a device – what precisely would be the point of putting an iPad right where you can’t see the screen that you’re scratching uselessly with a guitar pick?
Imagine you had an iPad. You gotta put it somewhere, right? And out-of-sight and rarely-used are ideal places.
I don’t get it. Why not just buy a real guitar?