MIDIGH

     The goal of this project was to take the famous plastic guitar and turn it in to a real guitar. I realized that since a Guitar Hero controller functions as a generic xbox controller, I could write a program to take those inputs and do what ever I wanted with them. The core idea of the project was turning button presses on a controller into MIDI events, which is a standard way computers express music. That way you could plug your guitar into any virtual instrument or music software. I also wanted it to be flexible enough to work in a live setting, so it needs to have low input latency.

     To control it, you can use the directional pad present on the guitar hero controller to change what musical notes are played, while using your fret hand to actally play notes. You can also pitch bend using the whammy bar, and raise and lower volume by activating star power. (raising the guitar up or down) Since you only have 5 buttons, the musical notes you play have to be completely preselected. I liked the pentatonic scale, since it's made of 5 notes and is easy make sound good.


     The first prototype. I already had controller input and MIDI routing working in a couple days, but the GUI and controls were very limited. At this point the numbers represented the raw midi codes for each of the frets instead of actual notes.

     I choose to write it in Processing 3 which had three things I needed: easy GUI development, a joystick library, and a midi interface library.


     The final version of the program.

     I used the instrument in a few percussion ensemble pieces in college, here you can see me setting up with real instruments. See below for the recording taken shortly after this photo.