Guitar technology

I have heard something about it but have no interest and really see no advantage for me.

For me (NOTE: I am NOT speaking for anybody else here!!!!!), any gadget of this type would be a crutch because I needed to always see the guitar fretboard and learn to see what I need on it, just as piano players do on their instrument. For me (see note above...), all those charts that show the names of the notes on the fretboard, how to construct chords, etc. are similarly crutches.

I needed to learn the notes on the fretboard and be able to see them as clearly as I can on a piano keyboard as well as being able to spell chords just as I am spelling words here, and then apply that to the fretboard.

I learned an exercise from Ted Greene's "Chord Chemistry" quite some time ago, that explained a very quick and easy daily exercise to learn the notes on the fretboard, a little each day, so that within a couple of weeks, I had it solid. Chord spelling was simply a matter of understanding the logic, and then it is simply a matter of practice to start finding chords all over the fretboard any way I want to voice them.

For me, that is fretboard "freedom", and it certainly costs less in terms of money than any one of those gadgets.

Each to his or her own, but that is what worked for me. I am now enrolled in a course that teaches how to hear a tune played on other instruments and arrange it on the guitar as a fingerstyle or classical solo.  The first lab involves taking a relatively simple new age style solo piano piece, figuring it out on the guitar by ear, and making the necessary adjustments to arrange it so it sounds natural on the guitar. I am keeping up, and I could not have done so unless I had spent the time prior to this really learning my way around the fretboard.

Tony

Very true.  I think Casio had the lighted keys to show you where to put your fingers to play some built-in songs.  Maybe the keys lit up to midi input too, since midi tells what notes to play along with how loud, when to stop, etc.

Unfortunately, my personal view of them is the same as what I expressed above FOR MY USE.  I much preferred learning to see the keyboard and look for what I needed on it without any special aids.

Tony

i am really uncomfortably with having others show me where to put my finger...

Here's (one of) my problems with the lights on a fret board or a keyboard. I have a GPS unit in my car. Love it, it's saved me many times in strange places. As you know you program the destination and it tells you in detail every turn etc along the way. I'm fully aware though, that if I needed to follow the same route at a later date I probably couldn't do it. I haven't really paid any attention to where I'm going or the turns or anything, I'm just doing what the voice tells me. I wonder if it would be like this with a lighted instrument, you're just doing what the lights tell you without giving much thought to what you're actually doing. Is that learning? I'm thinking that a chimp could probably be trained to do that.