AiRGUITAR

PKT-8 (a drum machine from one prompt), then GBX·4 in 3D on my real table. Playing that in the headset gave me the itch: I want to be on stage, in a band.

One day, 14 prompts. A ghost guitar between your hands, and real underground bands from Audius, by genre, in swipeable rows. Each song gets its own chart, worked out from the audio: the game finds the beat, hears the bass note and moves five power chords into the song's key. Notes roll down a highway, and you strum the chord in their lane. It plays on a phone (swipe the coloured lanes, or swing your phone like a pick) and on a desktop. Quest 3 VR and mixed reality are in testing.

The prompt

1 · Start Lab project #1 (the whole first build)
2 · The song menu's overwhelming: loop it till it scores 9/10
3 · How could you play it on your phone?   4 · Both options
5 · If you've never heard the song, how do you know the chord?
6 · Can we filter out songs we can't analyse?   7 · Yes, build it
8–11 · First real play: a bust. Wrong sounds, notes didn't match, now nothing plays
12 · A punk track worked! But it's repetitive
13 · Make the songs swipe like Netflix   14 · Swipe the chord itself

What broke, what we decided

• The first real play on my phone was a bust. You mostly heard our sound effects, the notes didn't match the song, and then nothing played at all.
• Why: Audius's tempo drifts up to a quarter of a second by the end of a song, and a D chord contains an A, so the chord-finder heard the wrong chord. Our strum sound also drowned out the band. iPhones pause web audio when you switch apps.
• The fix: the game now tracks the beat through the whole song. Notes land where the song actually hits, with up and down strum arrows. The strum is a quiet palm-muted chug.
• Claude reviewed its own song menu and scored it 5.5/10. Six rounds of fixes later it scored 9/10.
• If you've never heard a song, how do you know which chord to play? Guitar Hero charts songs by hand; this charts each new band's song itself. It's a chart that fits the song, not the band's real chords.
• Then the doubt: the spark was being on stage in a band. Have I just built a poor man's Guitar Hero instead of an air guitar simulator?
• Looking back, prompt 5 is where it turned. "How do you know which chord?" got a Guitar Hero answer: a highway that tests you on every note. The game became about hitting the right note instead of performing.