There are a lot of various ways you can learn to play the good old guitar. Back in the day I just used to sit in front of someone and try and follow their fingering as they ran through a well known song of the day, and after a while it was pretty easy to pick up. But if you want to do it properly, without picking up bad habits, you really need some proper instruction.

This new Easy Guitar system is actually quite cool. It consists of a specially built USB connectable acoustic guitar with LED lights embedded in the frets, and the really clever part is you plug the guitar into your laptop or desktop computer, and then play your song video of choice on-screen.

The system will then trigger the LED lights to show you how to play along with the song in real time, and thereby learn the fingering and general playing stuff. It’s cute, and is definitely better than just sitting there like a dork trying to see what’s going on from 7 feet away.

The website also offers some free tools like a tuner and metronome, and if you can’t afford to buy the actual guitar, you can use the service anyway, and just follow along with the guitar tabs stuff. Unfortunately there’s a bit of work involved in setting up the guitar/computer link, which will put some people off if they are thinking about buying the whole kit, but once you’re over that hurdle, the rest of it seems to work OK. The website is not the best we’ve seen (where’s the back key response folks?) but we suspect that’s because they’re using a framed URL site. Bad idea.

Apart from those quibbles, we’ll give it 6 out of 10 for effort, and with a bit more attention to detail we would expect that score to rise significantly. Good effort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d54m9Gj-r8