My Existence

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…