New Samsung smart guitar with light-up fretboard will help you learn guitar fast
Image Credit: Samsung
Samsung hopes its new ZamStar instrument and app will help you learn guitar songs in no time.
When you first teach yourself the guitar it can be hard to know where to start, and motivating yourself to keep playing is trickier still. Samsung aims to make learning guitar easier with its new smart guitar, featuring helpful LED lights on the fretboard.
Samsung has named the guitar ZamString. The idea is to make the learning process more engaging for beginners, and, Samsung says, bring a fun new element to veteran players too. The instrument will be bundled with a ZamStar app that lets you record and play along with other users.
The smart guitar features at the CES 2022 tech exhibition. Visual learners will appreciate the LED lights on the fretboard that show the player where to place fingers, making chords and patterns of scales clearer.
Learning guitar is really rewarding, but it does take time and effort, and it’s easy to get disheartened and abandon ship. Anything that makes the process a little easier will help new students who are trying to contort their fingers into unnatural-feeling shapes and get their heads around an alien-looking fretboard.
More details such as public release date and price aren’t yet available. ZamStar is on show at the C-Lab consumer technology exhibit in Las Vegas.
What makes the smart guitar so special?
The concept of a smart guitar isn’t a new one – existing guitars with light-up fretboards include Edge Tech Labs’ Fret Zealot. But the linked app and the involvement of Samsung, better known for innovative electronics, could set this smart guitar above previous inventions.
Lockdowns during the pandemic saw an increase in people picking up the guitar, but how many of those new players have stuck with their new hobby? Even with the added light show on the ZamString, players would still have to contend with everything else that makes learning a new instrument tricky. That’s why the ZamStar app is interesting.
The app sounds similar to BandLab, the music making app that encourages users to share their tracks to its inbuilt social media platform. BandLab is hugely popular – if a similar social element is integrated into the ZamStar app, Samsung could be on to something.