Air Guitar Toy by Mannak

Ronald Mannak, a former colleague, is now developing toys at his own 1uptoys. His toys at hand are the SilverLit V-Beat AirDrums, AirGuitar and BoomBox. This week our university's 'newspaper' has an interview with him: Luchtgitaar met Geluid. And here he is in a video demonstrating his AirGuitar: Still a long way to go before he can try for world champion airguitar, I think. But the product is interesting to consider. At first I thought it looked quite nice and cool. But then I wondered: why would anyone want to actually have an AirGuitar? Isn't the point of playing air guitar that you don't have to have the damn thing? If I am going to buy something to play guitar I might as well, or even better, buy a real (toy) guitar, right? Is this going to be cheaper than a real guitar? I would guess that the additional electronics will not be cheaper than the bits of extra wood, metal or plastic needed for a physical guitar. But then again, microelectronics can be cheap if they are sold in large quantities. So, is this going to provide a better experience? I think that by definition that is impossible. The point of playing air guitar is to imitate the actual playing, to go thorugh the motions and almost 'feel like' you are really playing. In other words, it can never be better than the real thing, or can it? Maybe it can. Maybe it can help people who can not play guitar 'feel more like' they are playing guitar. Maybe the AirGuitar can take care of the difficult stuff like putting your fingers in the right position on the strings and remembering the chords and licks, and leave the exciting stuff to you, like strumming wildly, creating vibrato or smashing it. That would be neat, Ronald if you read this, can you make it so it can be smashed?

Lead Guitar Body Language

Here is the Air Guitar World Champion 2007, Ochi "Dainoji" Yosuke (Japan) performing at Air Guitar World Championships 2007, Oulu, Finland: What a nice gesture performance: the pantomime, the gestures, the emotional expressions, the mimicry of the actual guitar play, and of course the dramatic gestures of a lead guitar player on stage. It makes me realize that a language may be found around in every hidden corner of human activity. In this case Dainoji shows a hilarious command of the body language of lead guitars. It also makes me wonder what exactly would remain of 'musical gestures', when all of a musicians 'body language' were hidden to the audience? I guess something would remain, and that would then be the real musical gesture.

Tags: guitar, body language, play, music