Lately, my family and I have been playing a lot of RockBand, and my wife and I have been discussing whether playing RockBand can help you play a real instrument.

In the case of the OpenChord V1 guitar, the answer is yes. You can watch the video of the player in action after the jump if you don’t believe me.

It appears that the guy in the video has just attached a normal Wii to a normal guitar, but I am certain that it is much more. It also looks like playing his guitar is a bit more complicated than hitting some multi-colored frets. This guy is doing some real guitar chords here.

So if you’re good at Guitar Hero or RockBand, don’t expect to be good at this. At least not on the first try, at least. It is about time that video games taught us how to play instruments in real life, and I’m not certain the Maestro is good enough. The PC music tutor from US Music and Disney looks like about the closets I’ve seen to the OpenChord V1 so far.

If you are interested in purchasing one of these guitars for yourself, feel free to try it out for about $190. However, the source code is available for download, and if you know what you are doing, you can build one of these things yourself.

Source