Dave's Ideas

Time For Music Games To Let Users Generate Own Music

March 1, 2011

A few years ago, Guitar Hero World Tour (Guitar Hero IV) had a Custom Songs feature, which allowed Users to create their own music. However there were limitations with the instruments, and vocals were not permitted. Still, it was an interesting feature that allowed for User-created content that could be shared online.

Now that Guitar Hero has bowed out, and with Rock Band looking for some innovation, I think it’s time to create an experience where people can fully create their own music.

Thanks to Rock Band’s recent release of a keyboard and a guitar loaded with chords (my guitar is simpler - sorry for repeating myself!), Users can better generate music directly, rather than work with a measly few buttons and attempting to improve the music in mix software after they finish recording.

Vocals are the key ingredient though. With microphones available, you’d think this would be easy to implement. I’m guessing GH had issues with speaker feedback. One way to go would be to play the music back on game headsets, so you can hear yourself recording in real time. The other roadblock probably being storage space on the console, though today’s consoles have beefed that up over the years.

And this doesn’t have to be like the Custom Songs feature, where you had to fashion your recording into a playable song that can be shared. I think the end result should be an MP3 file you can download off your console hard drive.

As long as the game included studio software to edit and remix music (maybe a bit of Auto-Tune for the singing impaired - see above image), to help patch things up.

This feature would be truly appealing to so many people who would prefer to create - as opposed to ‘playing along’ - which may have contributed to the demise of the music genre.

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Entry filed under: Dancing, Music, Video Games. Tags: Music, Video Games.