No, it's not the next Guitar Hero game... but it should be.

Let me give you a bit of background before I give you my idea. Karaoke Revolution took regular karaoke to another level, not by adding the spiffy graphics, but by doing tonal recognition. It actually makes sure you're singing the right notes. Regular karaoke machines don't really do that. There's also an on-screen display of what note you're at and where you should be. That was brilliant. It really adds a "game" aspect to it (which is appropriate considering it is a game).

Now, if you can do that kind of tone recognition with a person's voice, doing it with an actual electric guitar should be a cinch. With Guitar Hero being so popular, why not release a new version for guitar enthusiasts where you actually play guitar, not just hit some buttons and flip a switch. It would measure accuracy by tone. You could tune your guitar at the start of the game, and have retuning sessions in between tracks (electric guitars tend to go out of tune pretty fast).

Instead of having the buttons come down the screen, you'd have either the musical notation or tablature coming across the screen horizonttally, moving from right to left. Musical notation would pretty well be fine on its own, but tablature would have to have time bars so you know how long the note needs to be played.

I guess you wouldn't really have difficulty settings, but rather different songs would be rated different difficulties. So, something like any Green Day song would be "Beginner", and then you'd have different categories for difficult so that people don't compare the difficulty of something like Classical Gas to a Megadeath guitar solo since they're different playstyles.

I would hope it would be multi-platform, including the computer. It could still work on the Playstation, just having a USB device that lets you connect your guitar cable to it, and then the menus would be navigable with the regular controller. On the computer, of course you could just use mouse and keyboard. Obviously you couldn't control it from the guitar, as that could pose several problems.

I think that these days a lot of would-be great guitarists are distracted by the many avenues of entertainment available to them. Hell, that's why I haven't improved. Making it more entertaining like this would generate a lot more interest in the instrument, as well as others (it probably wouldn't know the difference between a guitar and a piano), and would increase the level of skill in musicians who would otherwies not play so much (like me). Basically, I'm just saying this is something I want so that I'll practice guitar more. :P