iPhone-Powered gTar Teaches You How to Play the Guitar [VIDEO]

?If you?ve ever picked up a guitar for the first time and tried to play a favorite song, you know how discouraging it can be. The gTar completely changes that,? says Drew Houston, Dropbox founder and CEO.

The gTar is an iPhone-powered guitar that boasts itself as ?the first guitar anyone can play.?

Designed by the California-based Incident Technologies, the guitar includes an app and a piece of hardware to connect to your guitar. Once you dock your iPhone on the hardware and load the app, integrated LEDs on the fretboard will illuminate ? thereby allowing you to follow and learn how to play the guitar.

Unlike a standard guitar, the gTar doesn?t use pickups to amplify the strings. Rather, sensors detect the strings as you play them in real-time and send them back to your iPhone. The phone then produces the actual sound.

The free app comes with a collection of songs from which you can choose to play. As you attempt to follow along with it, a feature called SmartPlay will mute out incorrect notes and ?nudges you along to play the sound correctly.?

GTar comes with three different levels ? easy, medium and hard. The easy level is designed for the user to only play the strings on the guitar; the medium level graduates the player into playing both the strings and the frets at the same time. SmartPlay will mute the incorrect notes on both of these levels, but once you get to the hard level, all of your notes ? good and bad ? will ring out.

The gTar also has a ?Free Play,? option, which allows you to choose from guitar models, keyboards, synths and drums to add more music to your playing. Since all the sound is produced on the phone itself, you can also manually tweak the sounds to create effects like a chorus or echo.

With 30 days to go on its Kickstarter campaign, the gTar has already reached its $100,000 fundraising goal ? in fact, it?s more than doubled that amount. It?s expected to sell in retail for ?over $449.?

Would you be interested in learning to play the guitar on a gTar? Tell us in the comments.

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