For those players who have already dominated the button-pressing chords or are tired of memorizing songs they cannot play, a real guitar has been effectively transformed into a compatible controller for games such as Guitar Hero® and Rock Band®.

Whereas before it was necessary to memorize chords by pressing colorful buttons, players can now learn how it feels to play a real guitar while rocking out in front of their TV. Eventually, they could even learn to play the songs without the guidance of the game.

The motions of the “real guitar controller” are simple and just as easy to pick up as the former controller. Players just strum along to the song while associating the colors with a particular fret and chord.

Real guitars have been used for a few years now, but one company in particular, has been determined to bring the best cutting-edge technology to its customers.

OpenChord.org is a young company that prides itself on making the “guitar-based video games a deeper and more fulfilling experience” while keeping their products all open source.

According to Alan Chatham, the lead developer and founder of OpenChord, open sourcing allows anyone and everyone access to the game’s codes.

“Instead of having one company behind this product, why not give everyone access to this code so we can make it even better?” Chatham said.

Currently, OpenChord sells a V1 Kit that lets customers build their own guitar controller. The kit includes all of the necessary hardware and instructions on how to make a real guitar compatible with a gaming system.

However, if some customers are not as confident with their technological skills, OpenChord is in the process of creating premade guitars to distribute.

“The word soldering is a pretty big barrier to a lot of people,” Chatham noted.

Besides being able to use a guitar with the games Guitar Hero® and Rock Band®, another game called Frets on Fire is available for free online. Frets on Fire is a downloadable program that is also open source. It allows its players to use tutorial songs, or they can create their own originals.

All in all, the development of the real guitar in association with guitar-based games has sparked much interest and has some people wondering how it will affect the music industry in the future.

“We’ve gotten a lot of interest from music educators” Chatham said showing his product at the PAX East convention. “We’re actually starting to map the colored notes in the games so you can assign notes to buttons.”

Even though the guitar is considered one of the easiest instruments to learn, this new technology makes playing it a more gratifying and entertaining experience.

“The way I see it is that our current state of technology takes the tedium out of the every day practicing,” Chatham said.

For more information about OpenChord.org and their V1 Guitars and kits, please check out the website: OpenChord.org