New Guitar Gadgets Previewed At The 2008 CES
Jan 12th, 2008 by Guitar MX Admin
The 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) finished this past Friday in Las Vegas. CES is an annual trade show, not open to the public, which showcases new consumer electronic products. This years CES featured some cool and fun products for guitar players. Here’s some of the highlights:
- eJamming is recording software that uses peer-to-peer technology which allows musicians to jam together and collaborate over the Internet in real time. Here is a video of eJamming in action with Smash Mouth lead singer Steve Harwell.
- Guitar Wizard is a program that helps kids of all ages learn to play the guitar and read music in a very short period of time. The learning game was developed by the Music Wizard Group, developers of the popular program Piano Wizard. The program will be available for both Mac and PC, and comes with a Washburn guitar with MIDI pickups. You can also use your own guitar, and add a MIDI interface.
Here is a video of Guitar Wizard in action.
You can read more about Guitar Wizard here.
- The Gibson Robot Guitar wowed the crowds at the 2008 CES. If you’re a regular Guitar MX reader, then you already know about the Robot Guitar, which tunes itself automatically using tiny servo motors. Here’s a video of the Gibson Robot Guitar in action:
You can find out more about the Gibson Robot Guitar here.
- The Air Guitar Rocker combines the popularity of Guitar Hero and Air Guitar into a single product. Air Guitar Rocker comes with 10 songs that are played at various skill levels. The game is stored in a device with a built-in speaker, that is attached to a belt. Songs are played from the speaker as the guitar pick is waved over the Air Guitar Rocker belt buckle. At $30, it’s a poor mans version of Guitar Hero. Here’s a video demonstrating how it works.
You can read more about Air Guitar Rocker here.
These were some of the popular music products at the 2008 CES. It should be enough to wet your palette for the Winter NAMM show, which starts on January 17th in Anaheim, CA.
Alan Glueckman (the guy in the eJamming video above) here. Thanks for the write up, but I need to clarify one thing: eJamming is peer to peer jamming and recording software, but we don’t provide a virtual world with avatars (that came courtesy of other demo companies). At least, not yet. Right now we connect musicians over the Internet so you can play together, create, write, arrange and teach in real time and in sync, on both audio (acoustic/electric guitars and vocals) and MIDI-enabled instruments. Plus eJamming’s Overdub mode creates a worldwide Virtual Recording Studio, where you can add tracks with near-zero latency for the musician recoding that track, while everyone else in your session hears the track in sync with any previously-recorded tracks.
Thanks Alan for the comment and for clearing that up. I have made the correction in the post.
Thanks! One more thing: there’s a much more current explanation of eJamming technology in depth to which you might prefer to link the second “here” link about eJamming above:
http://www.cnet.com.au/software/music/0,239025669,339285017,00.htm?feed=rss
The whole concept of air guitar is strange but this guy took it way beyond it
I love Slash and his loose style, but the above video just sounds sloppy. I thought he’d quit drinking, but maybe not?
That Guitar Wizard is a waste of time. It doesn’t actually teach anything. Why not just learn through lessons or online instruction?