Kickstarter – the world’s largest crowd-funding source – continues to act as a great platform for those looking to get their ideas out onto the market, and gTar is just the latest in a series of projects to take advantage of the service which has reached its funding goal, before its 38-day internet-ran campaign has had chance to reach its end.
In fact, gTar has already raised $126,221 of its original $100,000 goal.
Created by Santa Clara-based start-up Incident, CEO and Founder of the company Idan Beck explains that he once taught guitar to kids in both his town and who attended his school, which spurred him on to follow electronic music as a passion moving into his college years.
This lead Beck to begin experimenting in electronic music and how he could create and produce electronic music using a computer.
Cue, gTar. gTar is a guitar which takes advantage of Apple’s iPhone as a way to electronically produce the sounds on a guitar. It’s “a fully digital guitar that makes it easy for anybody to play music, regardless of experience.”
It does this by having the user dock their iPhone into gTar’s main body.
This is the first hardware product we’ve built, but we’ve been working on the gTar since 2009 and have continually refined our designs into a finished product. Before starting this journey, our engineering team spent time working at large companies (Microsoft, Cisco) and have extensive backgrounds in building both hardware and software projects.
From the projects description:
“You may be asking yourself what it means for a guitar to be ‘digital.’ While most guitars have pickups to amplify the sound of vibrating strings, the gTar has none – instead, we’ve designed the gTar with sensors that detect exactly what you’re playing in real-time and relay each note to your iPhone, which then produces the actual sound. This makes it possible for us to do all kinds of exciting things [...]“
What’s particularly interesting about the gTar is its ability to appeal to both the person who has never picked up a guitar in their life, to a person who plays the guitar on a daily basis. Rather like the introduction of GarageBand for iOS, this is adaptive music creation.
It adapts to you, your skill set, and your drive to learn new things. The thrill of playing a real musical instrument without the steep learning curve for those looking to get started, and a musical instrument with built-in, professional electronic sound effects for the more advanced.
Forget about worrying which bars and frets to play, as gTar’s fretboard includes Incident’s “SmartPlay” technology which, “mutes out incorrect notes as you play and nudges you along as you play through difficult songs.”
We think that everybody should be able to have fun playing music, regardless of how long they’ve been playing or how much time they have to practice. That’s why we built an intuitive feature called SmartPlay, which mutes out incorrect notes as you play and nudges you along as you play through difficult songs.
$399 (or more) will get you on the first rung of gTar’s Kickstarter campaign, securing you one White gTar in the firm’s “Early Bird” offering. As previously mentioned, the project is already funded, meaning that you can essentially back with confidence knowing the project will – at some point – enter mass-production.
Estimated delivery for the gTar is currently set at September 2012.
/ 9to5Mac
The guys over at Engadget have a hands-on with the gTar, (for those interested).
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