The Tabber LED guitar sleeve makes learning guitar as much fun as singing karaoke

When I was at SF Music Hack Day last month there were a few projects that jumped out at me. Some of them were software based and a few were hacks of hardware. One project that instantly caught my eye was a projected called “Tabber”, which is a contraption that hooks onto your guitar to teach you how to play.

Yes, I’m attracted to bright blinking lights, but as I watched one of the developers hacking away on it alone in a room, I could tell that this thing might actually work. What Tabber does is stream guitar tabulators to a device and lights blink up on the next note of the song. You can tweak the speed of the song so you can keep up with it until you’ve mastered it, which makes this thing an incredible learning tool.

The team behind the Tabber has finally launched its Kickstarter campaign to bring the device to the masses. To make it a reality for all, the team of three passionate music geeks are hoping to raise $45,000. Check out the Tabber in action:

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Along with looking super neat and potentially helping you to become the next Van Halen member, the team wants to keep the project hackable and open-sourced:

We believe that music is every bit as much about people as it is about notes in a song. Our goal is to create a community of not only music lovers, but creative people who like to build things that others can use. What kind of things will get built? We don’t know yet, but that’s the point. Should our project reach it’s funding goal, both the hardware and software will be hackable to people and we’ll be able to share all of those ideas on www.tabber.co!

If you’re a music fan or a hardcore gadget fan, this is a project that you should really get behind. I can attest to the fact that the team is hardworking, believes that everyone can learn how to play guitar, and are more than passionate enough to see this project all the way through.

With Kickstarter blowing up with activity lately, I see no reason why the Tabber won’t see similar success.

➤ Tabber on Kickstarter