My Existence

I am under 30, I have a great job, I have real insurance now, and a roof over my head with a little bit of credit card debt.  Why am I here you ask?  Because my story is just as important as the others who are in trouble right now.  I’m going to single out one group:  The people and businesses who lived outside their means.  I sit hear listening and reading the news and I wonder why this group is being given training wheels, is being hand-held - for their mistakes?  I sit here, wondering why exactly we need to help this group of people, with no consequences for their past actions and no guarantee their future actions will be any wiser.  My life IS going to be affected by this crisis, but the effect is going to be cause by an improperly implemented stimulus package that isn’t even going to help the people who really need it - People who have lost their jobs and the companies that aren’t making any revenue because sales are poor.  Sales paid for predominantly, knowingly or not by the company, with credit.  I think a very large percentage of companies “forecast” sales and base their business decisions on that - This model doesn’t work, this crisis proves that.  A company, and even people themselves, need to operate going by worst case scenarios, all the time.  When they want to expand, instead of putting it on CREDIT or EXPECTED sales, it should be done and paid for up front.  If it is done any other way, you leave yourself open if someone bad happens, again as this crisis proves.

This crisis is going to hurt me, and I feel for everyone who has lost their job during this time.  Those people, and people who are aware enough to see the true problem, need to direct their anger and disbelief at the people responsible for this current crisis.  There are a few groups on the list, all but one are talked about:  The people who live outside their means.  You were the start of this problem, with your credit cards you couldn’t pay off and loose spending habit, the $400k+ house you didn’t need.  You gave companies reason to expect sales, you gave false forecasts.  You gave this recession its start.

I want to thank you, for ten years from now I will be paying off your debts and I won’t have a say about it.  I will be unable to do anything, and I’m going to be punished because you didn’t know how to show a little restraint.  I also want to thank the companies that jumped on the credit bandwagon who helped instigate this problem by making credit so easily available and building your entire company based on sales from fake money.  I thank you, and at the same time laugh at you, for your bad judgment.

Ok, I have recently gotten into a band.  A virtual one, of course.  Drumming has always been one of those idle interest’s of mine, you know how it goes.  Some like singing, others guitars.  Well I have been playing the drums through Guitar Hero and / or Rock Band the past week since first really playing it at the last Nor’Easter LAN and then at a long time friend from HS and current co-workers place!

As I was driving into work this morning and was beating on the steering wheel to some song that was playing and I thought to myself “How cool would it be if I could play with a band LIVE while they were playing at some concert somewhere!!!!

Think about it - with technology the way it is, don’t you think it would be possible to take the music they are playing and stream it live to a PC or console and have the game display the notes, simplified more than likely to only display the ones that are available or to make it more “real” it could be done so that all the notes are displayed and the playable ones stand out like in current games.  Maybe the non-playable notes could be in the background or something?  A redesign of how the notes are presented to the user could be in order.

I think this idea has real potential personally.  There is no reason that I can think of why this wouldn’t be technically possible.  Latency wouldn’t be an issue.  It would be like live TV, you would just stream the audio and synch it with notes from the source.  You wouldn’t have to be “real-time” with the band.  They would be about 5-10 seconds ahead of you but you would be playing with them, so to speak.  I think it could even work for audio singing, though that may be more of an issue as there is a lot more with vocals to decode and change up than with just notes.
In terms of a pricing model, there are many ways this could be handled.  If there was one game package or service that the bands went through, that would be best.  After that, I figure you could sell “shows” or “songs” and also have the songs you are about to play as DLC songs, of course.  And of course, songs I would hope would be a part of the product when you purchase the right to sit down and play with them.

Since everyone would be networked, a service could display stats after the song was finished, give out awards and track users details like how many notes they hit, streaks, etc.  On the 360, they could get achievements for example, or their information could be viewable in their profile to see how well they did and all that information could be tracked.

Could be turned into a good service to find new music talent?  Who knows.

Man, I really want this to be a reality now, LOL…