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High-Tech Custom Guitar Inlays
These custom guitar inlays are SO cool… but first let me lay out the $5,200 math… There are 52 weeks in a year. If we assume you take one guitar lesson a week, at an average cost of $20 for a conservative 30 minute lesson, that adds up to $1040 after just one year! Take guitar lessons for about five years? That’s a grand total of $5,200, not including five years worth of transportation to-and-from those lessons. That’s more than enough to buy that Gretsch White Falcon you’ve been oogling over for so long (and the Falcon doesn’t even have cool custom guitar inlays!).
Well, Optek Music Systems hopes to change the way your children and your children’s children will learn to play guitar by automating the part of the Instructor via a mega custom inlay setup. Enter Fretlight.
What is Fretlight?
Fretlight is a two-part guitar education system. The Fretlight FG-421 guitar itself is a real-deal Strat copy with two single coil pickups and one humbucker near the bridge. With the bolt-on neck and other hardware, it’s probably in the same league as a mid-level or entry-level Strat. So what makes the guitar special? Very, very fancy fretboard inlay. The custom guitar inlays on the Fretlight are LEDs, six per fret to be exact, and they magically light up in real-time to show you which notes to play. The second part of the system is the control center and the brains of the fretboard magic: The bundled Fretlight Studio software.
How Does It Work?
The short version: You plug the guitar into your computer and the software plays back a song while simultaneously lighting up the custom guitar inlays on the fretboard, showing you exactly where your fingers should be in real-time.
The longer version: You plug the guitar into the computer via a USB cable and the software talks to the custom guitar inlays and lights them up where appropriate based on instructions from the software. You can load your own MIDI songs, deconstruct lessons, speed them up, slow them down, loop sections, and more. It’s even compatible with Guitar Pro 6!
Other Features
The Lesson Player allows you to download lesson packs from the Fretlight website that cater to specific things you want to learn. For example there are packs for rhythm guitarists, lead guitarists, even different styles like rock guitar, and all lessons come in Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced bundles with more being made everyday. The guitar even ships with a 30-lesson general beginner’s pack that teaches strumming patterns, scales, chords, music theory, and also includes a glossary of music terminology. The software can even be networked over the internet in such a way that an instructor in, say, Omaha, can teach multiple students all over the world by controlling the Fretlight software on the students’ computers and, thusly, controlling the custom guitar inlays LEDs on the guitar! HOW COOL IS THAT!?
Problems
The main problem I see with this system is that Fretlight took a bit of a shotgun approach on the software side of things. Rather than adopting one central piece of software to control them all (smirk), there are several separate bundles which include:
- Song Player
- Improviser
- Lesson Player
Combine that with the Lesson Packs and it can be a little intimidating for a Fretlight beginner to know how to get to where he wants to go. That said, I’ve managed to hunt down this fantastic two-part video tutorial that walks you through some of the features and modules of the powerful, if somewhat scattered, software.
In Conclusion
Radiohead once said that Anyone Can Play Guitar, and it looks like Optek is making Thom York’s wishful lyrics come true. I definitely recommend the Fretlight FG-421 in all it’s epic inlay-glory to players of all levels, but especially to beginners and intermediates. It’s a really fantastic tool for learning and improving your skill.
For more videos about how the Fretlight works, check out Optek’s YouTube channel.
Let me know what you think about the Fretlight system in the comments! I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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