21st-Centur y

Keytars

Make your own music with Guitar Hero controllers. By Owen Grace

The author unleashes “plastic bundles of star power.”

It’s all fun and games until someone turns those plastic Guitar Hero axes into real instruments. What musical possibilities lie hidden beneath those five rainbow-colored buttons?

Within a few years of the video game’s launch in

2005, millions of its guitar-shaped controllers were manufactured. Sadly, many are collecting dust in closets across the globe. In my closet was one such controller, leaning awkwardly between some dirty hiking boots and a deflated soccer ball. In 2007,

I pondered the depressing fate of this plastic bundle of star power. I sensed untapped potential, and

I noticed how my acoustic guitar got plenty of my attention, unlike my sad old controller. What if the Guitar Hero controller could make music?

^{I knew it was possible and I saw a means to make it} Read about Owen Grace and the Guitar Zeros in the profile happen. After months of programming, I successfully on page 54.

Photograph by Sam Murphy

repurposed the controller as a musical instrument. No hardware modifications were made — it all happens with software running on my laptop. I formed a band with friends, called the Guitar Zeros. We’ve got a singer and a drummer, and the other two of us use Guitar Hero controllers — one for guitar sounds and one for bass.

Here’s how to make music with your own Guitar Hero controller using the software I designed.

56 Make: Volume 15