There sure are a lot of talented people out there with a lot of time on their hands. Owen Grace is one such gentleman, who decided to turn his Guitar Hero controller into something that could really play music, and taking it to its ultimate conclusion by forming a band (The Guitar Zeros) that plays gigs.
Owen didn’t electronically/electrically modify the guitar itself (although he put a cool Eddie Van Halen design on it), but mapped out the signals from the various buttons and then wrote a computer program that would interpret the keys and send them through a synthesizer to produce the sounds.
Take a look at this video where Owen explains how he did it and demonstrates playing. Obviously, he’s expanded the capability of this seemingly simple device a lot. In this picture, he looks like he’s playing some hammer-on/hammer-off or other advanced guitar technique.
Oh yes, if you want to do this yourself, Owen has put up complete instructions on the Web and made the software (called FretBuzz) open source.
Technorati Tags: guitar zeros, guitar hero, hack