THANK YOU OMAHA, GOOD NIIIIGHT!

Even though I've hemmed and hawed about it for at least six months, I have yet to purchase either Guitar Hero or Rock Band. The primary reason being that I know if I do it's just going to make me feel guilty about neglecting the six real guitars I already own.

So I was thrilled today when I saw that a company called Game Tank announced a game called "Guitar Rising" Basically, if you ever playing Rock Band or Guitar hero and thought "This would be cooler if I could use a real guitar." than this game is for you.

The way it seems to work,from the video, is that you will have the familiar "piano roll" type of interface you get with guitar hero, except instead of just having you press a specific button it shows you which string and fret combination to hit. You will be plugging your guitar into the computer somehow (sound card? USB interface? MIDI interface?) and the game will let you know how accurate you are.

To me, this is more than a game, it's a powerful teaching tool. It's more effective than sitting in a practice room with a metronome, and easier than getting a whole band together to practice whenever you want (what do you mean sleep, I wanna jam!).

Some things that I think would be great in this game:

• Amp modeling. Presumably you are going to have to plug your guitar into this thing somehow. Line 6 has already show that PC based amp and effect modeling is possible. It would be cool to be able to not only practice the songs by your favorite band, but to do it with the same "rig" that they are using.
• Composition mode. Basically, a type of "musical notepad" that would allow you to "dictate" notes into a song WHILE showing you the piano roll of what you have played. A lot of players try to do this with tape, but lack the "ear" to be able to figure out what they played afterward.
• I have a small mountain of sheet music I have collected over the years. A great feature would be the ability to somehow transcribe the sheet music into songs in the game. This would make practice much more rewarding!

Suffice to say, unless there is some HUGE barrier to this game (huge price tag, need to "mutilate" one of my guitars, requirement that you wear spandex while playing) I am TOTALLY getting this!

Codemash Day 1 part 2

After my "Ask the Exports" time, I headed over to see Keith Elder talk about Microsoft Workflow. The meat of his presentation can be found here. It was an bit of an entry level talk, which I think is desperately needed. There are still a lot of misconceptions out in the Enterprise community about what Workflow is, how it works and how it fits in with things like the .NET framework overall and Biztalk. He's doing an more "advanced" talk later today "custom activities" which I'm looking forward to.

After that I went to see Dustin Campbell do some F# stuff. I was playing with F# a bit before my laptop died (Note to Dell, you actually have to plug the fans in for them to cool the laptop down.) I haven't really had time to re-install and get back into it. Dustin's talk was almost SRO; functional programming, F# in particular, seems to be something that has gathered a lot of interest.

After dinner, I got to play a lot of "Rock Band" with Keith Elder and Scott Hanselman. Keith is scary good at the "Guitar Hero" type games. Scott claims he's never played the game before, but he did a great job on the drums! As for me... well, have I even mentioned how much "Guitar Hero"is NOT like really playing the guitar...

... speaking of playing guitar, the "CodeMash jam session" also happened last night. I didn't feel like dragging my rig up (I already got enough shit from Kaufman and Wingfield about my "larger-than-necessary suitcase) and I'm kind of glad I didn't. Most of the group seemed to be older guys with acoustics play country and CSN stuff. I doubt any of them know any "Iron Maiden", "Helloween" or even "Limozeen!" I'll track Dustin down later and make him a deal for next year; if he brings his stuff, I'll bring mine.

OK, drink now, more writing later.