Wednesday, December 30, 2009

What songs can you play on a ThinkGeek electronic rock guitar T-shirt?

One of my Christmas presents was an Electronic Rock Guitar Shirt from ThinkGeek. It's a t-shirt with an electric guitar on it that you can actually play. Turn on the included mini-amplifier, turn it up to 11 (yes, it really goes to 11), then press on parts of the guitar neck with one finger while strumming with the included magnetic pick, and the shirt belts out power chords recorded from a real hard rock guitar.

(The one problem: strumming with no fingering plays an open E, which means if your finger misses, you don't get nothing, you get a very wrong chord. This is far too easy to do. It'd be better if an open strum did nothing so you could be sure what you play will sound like what you want to play. I know this shirt is never going to be played on stage at Madison Square Garden or anything, but it's a bummer trying to show it off only to hit a desperately-wrong chord.)

To my surprise, not only does the guitar-shirt not come with any suggestions for songs you can play on it (despite the claim that its limited range can play many real songs), I can't find any lists of songs people have played with theirs, on ThinkGeek's site or on the web in general. If such a site exists, Google doesn't even know about it.

So I'm going to collect them here. Hopefully this title will jump out at people on Google. If anyone reads this and has any they know, post them here and I'll add them to this page. As of this writing, I've only had time to play with it a little so I only figured out one song-bit which works, the intro riff to Smoke On The Water, but it works brilliantly, sounds very authentic. I bet there are a lot of others I just haven't had time to figure out.

Smoke On The Water intro riff: A C D, A C D# D, A C D, C A
Communication Breakdown intro riff: open E (x9), D A D; the entire rest of the song is these three chords
Rock You Like A Hurricane intro riff: EEE, CC, AA, C, DD, repeat
I Love Rock And Roll intro: EE EE G AA BB G EE (thanks to Sarah Antonelli for that one)
Crazy Train (not yet tested): F#F# AA EE F#F# DD EE F#F# C# F# D F# C# F# B A G# A B A G# E

9 comments:

Sarah Antonelli said...

Yeah, I'm having a hard time making any work, too haha. But I've been working on it...

Crazy Train(intro I think?)- F#F# AA EE F#F# DD EE F#F# C# F# D F# C# F# B A G# A B A G# E

I Love Rock and Roll(The song from the shirt's promo)- EE EE G AA BB G EE

I hope people come up with more =]

-Sarah A.

Hawthorn Thistleberry said...

I can't get that I Love Rock and Roll to sound right at all.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the song riffs. We just got one for our son and he is practicing Smoke on the Water. We will work on the others as he masters each one.

Anonymous said...

Iron Man
E-GG-AA-CBCBCB-G-AA

Anonymous said...

Heres an easy one.


Hot Cross Buns: B A G B A G AAAA GGGG B A G

Sebastian Cirjoi said...

Rock You Like A Hurricane is wrong. These are the correct chords:
EEE GG AA C DD (Repeat).

Also, a slight alteration on Iron Man:
A C CDD ED#ED#ED# CCDD (Repeat).

Note: The E for both of these songs is the one on the neck, not the open strum.

Anonymous said...

TNT: E GA GAG

Anonymous said...

the opening riff of metallica's sandman


EE (open strum), E(neck),A#A.(do that sequence 3 times)F# E(open) F# E(open) F# G F#(start from very beginning and repeat.

Kamira said...

Hey, could someone say if it's possible to play this song on this shirt-guitar xD ? Coz I have chords (http://tabs.ultimate-guitar.com/s/snow_patrol/chasing_cars_crd.htm) And thay seem right with chords on shirt, but when I play it, it doesn't even resemble this song. ^-^'