Fretlight Interactive Guitar Learning System Review

Fretlight guitars are fairly good quality for the price.

By Jason Cross

The explosive popularity of the Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchise games has had a predictable ripple effect on the popularity of the guitar. Some players got enough of a feel of rocking out in those games to say to themselves, "I'd really like to learn how to play guitar for real," and instructors all over the world have reported a sharp increase in new students. Despite the abundance of guitar lessons online, finding a good teacher that understands how to keep you motivated, practicing, and learning important skills for one-on-one instruction is still the best way to learn how to play guitar.

Unfortunately, this can get expensive. After shelling out a few hundred bucks for starter guitar (and maybe amp), the lessons are going to run you $20–60 an hour, usually every week. A bigger problem for some people is time or location. There may not be a guitar tutor within easy driving distance, you may be restricted to public transportation, and house calls jack up the lesson rates dramatically. Maybe you work especially long or strange hours, and can't find someone to give you lessons at 10pm when you actually have a little free time.

The folks at Optek Music Systems have a solution: the Fretlight Guitar and software. This unique guitar works with PC and Mac software to light up LEDs beneath the fretboard, showing you where to put your fingers. It's in interesting product that has been around for a few years, and is starting to make a push into more homes thanks to the recent surge in interest for guitar instruction and some new software.

I personally am a rank amateur with the guitar. I know a handful of chords and a scale pattern or two, and I have had a couple of brief on-again off-again stints taking lessons. I simply have a hard time fitting lessons into my schedule well enough to justify their cost. In other words, I'm the exact target market for the Fretlight—a willing and able technology enthusiast that has no problem using my computer as a teaching aide. So I lived with the Fretlight and its software for over a month, and this is my review. Continued... The guitar I used for this review is the model FG-421 Standard, in "Renegade Red" color (other colors are available). It's a fairly standard Stratocaster-clone style—maple neck, two-way truss rod, one humbucker, and two single coil pickups. The company sells this model for $500, the same price as their Vintage model. You can pay an extra $100 for the "Jazzmaster" model, and $900 for the Pro model. Quality-wise, it's about what you would get if you went down to your local guitar megashop and spent $500 on a regular Strat clone. It's pretty good, and definitely all a beginner would need, but experienced guitarists might want to step up to the Pro model or something better.

The key difference is in the Fretlight plug on the bottom corner edge of the guitar. It looks like a MIDI plug, but it's not. It's a proprietary connection used only for the Fretlight guitar.

You plug the included Fretlight cable into this plug—the other end terminates into a USB and 1/4-inch jack that is used for a foot petal accessory (we didn't test that). Plug the USB into your computer and you're ready to go.

Note that this is strictly a one-way connection. The computer tells the guitar which frets to light up and when, but the guitar sends no data back to the computer at all. The only data going back into your computer would be from the optional foot petal accessory, which can be used to control the Fretlight apps (pausing, looping, etc). If you want amplified sound, you have to hook the guitar up to a regular guitar amp. Fretlight sells one, but there's nothing proprietary about it at all, and any guitar amp will do.

The concept here is simple. Fretlight applications help teach you how to play guitar by lighting up which frets you should be holding down. Of course, they're just red LEDs so you don't necessarily know which fingers to use, but it doesn't take long to get to the point where you sort of intuitively understand that. The LEDs are beneath the fretboard, so it's not like you can feel them or see them when they're not lit up, and they don't impact the playability of the guitar at all. The real strength of the Fretlight, therefore, is in its supporting software.

Unfortunately, the purchase of a Fretlight guitar does not actually include any software. What it includes are demos of all the software Optek Music Systems offers. You're going to have to buy one or more programs at $30–40 a piece, plus songs or lessons to use with them. That's the bad news. The good news is that you don't get gouged on the guitar. They're reasonably priced, and you don't pay some huge premium for the Fretlight technology built in.

Let's describe the Fretlight software. Continued...
Fretlight Lesson Player (included)—The one piece of truly included software is the Fretlight Lesson Player, which is the oldest piece of software in the lineup, and in some ways the worst. The interface and function feels like a piece of mid-90s shareware, a bit clunky and full of hypertext links. The lessons themselves are very much like reading guitar lesson books, only with clickable samples that pop up a little tiny player window (eww). The exercises light up the guitar as you play them. It's not really much more fun or engaging than reading one of the many guitar lesson books out there. It comes with a bunch of free beginner lessons that show you basic chord shapes and strumming exercises and stuff, but you have to buy intermediate, advanced, or "style" lesson packs.

Improviser ($39.95)—Even pros will get some benefit out of the Improviser app. You can load up specially formatted files that will light up all the notes in a particular key, mode, or scale style along the whole fretboard. If you're a beginner, it's a good way to "jam" along with songs until you get a feel for the scale and mode shapes. If you're experienced and want to play a Spanish Phrygian mode style in F#, it's a handy way to light up all the valid notes on the fretboard. The app comes with 125 styles and modes, each of which can be transposed into any key. It won't teach you how to play guitar, but it can be one of the most effective tools for those who already know how.

M-Player ($29.95)—This is one of the most fun apps, and for intermediate guitar players it can be one of the best ways to progress. The app uses specially coded MIDI files that include the fret position info for a variety of parts (usually rhythm, lead, and EZ Chords for beginners). They're bookmarked into sections, and you can set A and B loop points anywhere you like. The MIDI sound is kind of awful, of course, but you're not meant to actually perform with the MIDI track as backup. It's relatively easy, and fun, to loop one section of a song, set the speed down low, and bit by bit learn to play it by following the lights on the fretboard. There are seven basic song demos included (Carolina In My Mind, Down Under, Every Breath You Take, Evil Ways, Landslide, What I Like About You, and Wild Thing), but the rest you need to buy from a quickly growing library on fretlightstore.com. Tracks cost $1.99 each, which seems like a lot for MIDI tracks.

For Mac users with GarageBand, there's a Fretlight plugin for $29.95 that lets you pick scale, chord, and position and light up the guitar to play along with Garageband tracks. You can even make sequence lists and cycle through them if you have the footswitch accessory. Continued...
Video Player ($29.95)—The newest and best application from Optek is the Fretlight Video Player. It's a basic video playback application that plays special Fretlight video lessons (and soon, jam sessions) that light up the Fretlight guitar along with the video. As with M-Player, you can set up A-B loop points and adjust the playback speed. Unfortunately, if you play the video back at anything other than 100% speed, the audio from the video is replaced by MIDI, which sounds terrible. Optek says this is because it isn't possible to slow things down very far without the recording becoming distorted, but I've heard great things from the Amazing Slow Downer and from the Melodyne products that seem to handle dramatic speed changes just fine. When you buy a Fretlight guitar you get a pair of basic lessons, and intermediate lesson sampler, and an advanced lesson sampler, for free. But you still have to buy the program, and further lessons have to be bought from Fretlight.com for $14.95 each.

Axmaster ($29.95)—For expert users, there's the Axmaster program from JCS Automation. This is definitely not an app for beginners. You use it to place notes or chords on a fretboard and create diagrams. You can print out fretboard diagrams to use on Web pages or in other programs, and build HTML-based guitar "lessons" much like what you see in the Lesson Player software. If you're really into teaching guitar to others or run a guitar lessons Web site (of which there appear to be hundreds), this could be a cool tool. But it does require some time and effort to navigate and create content, and none of that is particularly useful for those learning to play guitar. Continued... After playing around with the Fretlight guitar and software for a month, what do I think? It's generally a cool idea with some nice features, and unique in what it does. But there is definitely room for improvement. If you want to learn to play, you could do worse than buying a Fretlight guitar—they're not prohibitively expensive and some of the software is genuinely useful. I don't think the Lesson Player is going to get a "never touched a real guitar before" beginner off the ground any faster than a regular book is, but the beginner lessons in the Video Player may be the next best thing to real lessons.

Then again, there are tons of beginner video guitar lessons on the Web. YouTube alone has more than you could possibly sit through. So why pay $30 for Optek's app and possibly $15 per lesson/content pack thereafter? Simply put, seeing the frets light up in real time as you're supposed to play them is definitely a boon to those learning how to play.

There are really two main problems with the whole Fretlight system, right now. First, the computer can tell the guitar what to do, but the guitar doesn't tell the computer what it's doing. Ear training is all well and good, but without the computer knowing what you're doing on the guitar, there's really no interactivity possible. If you really want to keep people hooked on practicing, you have to make a game out of it.

You want to give people the excitement of Rock Band or Guitar Hero, and that's not even technically possible with the current Fretlight guitar. We're told that a future version will incorporate a MIDI pickup and two-way communication with the PC, which will allow the PC to judge if you're hitting the right notes/chords, strumming in time, etc. This ability to "close the feedback loop" will be invaluable for truly teaching people how to play.

Second, the software is a bit of a jumbled mess. Improviser and M-Player look the same and do similar things, and don't need to be separate apps. Lesson Player needs to be re-written from scratch (the window isn't even resizable!). M-Player's song should be real recordings, with better technology for playing at a slower pace.

When I use The Amazing Slowdowner, a very cool app for slowing down and looping sections of audio files, I can't help but wish it lit up the Fretlight's fretboard like M-Player does, or that M-Player used TAS's slow-down tech to play real songs. You can only listen to so much basic MIDI out of the average computer without going insane. Frankly, these apps should be included with the purchase of the guitar, since they're selling you content piece-by-piece.

If all the apps were rolled together into one, with an integrated store for buying content, they'd really be on to something. As it is, buying the Video Player is probably a no-brainer, and M-Player may have value for a lot of people. Doing so is still cheaper than paying for weekly lessons. Continued... I'd have to say the Fretlight guitar and software is certainly more than just a novelty, but it still has a way to go before realizing its potential as a computer-assisted way to teach guitar, and more importantly, keep them motivated and having fun doing it. The key missing ingredient is interactivity, which just isn't possible with the current hardware in any meaningful way.

Fortunately, the folks at Optek seem to be well aware of their current limitations and room for improvement. I spoke with them, and heard about some very interesting ideas on the horizon. A "two-way" guitar with MIDI pickup is one idea, but how about their own lesson site? Imagine if people could encode their YouTube-style homemade video lesson with data to light up the guitar. Now you have brought the power of the community to provide free lesson content to everybody, while working with the Fretlight's major selling point.

There are many such ideas floating around at Optek—it appears the company has all the necessary ambition. But to grow into the business and product they envision. Optek needs to stop thinking of themselves as a guitar hardware company and start thinking of themselves as a software company. 90% of the stuff they need to make this product truly great is about software.

Future prospects aside, the Fretlight guitar is still a pretty cool kit, and some of the software is worth the price of admission, too. As much as it's easy to see unrealized potential, they're still doing something here that nobody else really offers, and it can be genuinely useful for those learning to play guitar, or to experienced guitarists looking to further broaden their understanding of theory. A fully interactive Fretlight 2.0 with a single well-integrated, well-designed piece of software would be the ideal home guitar learning tool. While we wait for that to happen, the current offerings are still worthwhile.

Product:	Fretlight Guitar and Software
Company:	Fretlight
Price:	Starting at $400
Pros:	Reasonable quality guitar at a decent price, light-up fretboard is a genuinely useful tool, a couple of the apps are great teaching aids.
Cons:	Too many separate apps, some of them are old and have poor UI, too much reliance on MIDI.
Summary:	This is far from the idealized vision of a "real guitar" interactive teaching system, but it's still a unique and useful tool for students.

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