Power Tour Electric Guitar
© 2007 Tiger Electronics (Hasbro)
There are no strings to break on Hasbro's $70 Power Tour Electric Guitar. Instead, your fingers glide on a glassy, light-up fret board that picks up the electrical capacitance of your fingers—not unlike your computer touchpad—to sense the pitch. Strums are detected by sensors that track your thumb speed and direction and you can shake the guitar to bend a note. Tuned in the key of A, the songs sound reasonable through the single internal speaker. If you want better quality sound, you have to use Hasbro's $50 Power Tour Amp. Regular speakers provided mixed results, due in part to static caused by unshielded wires. Keep in mind that this guitar runs on miniscule electromagnetic fields. You can toggle between free play or tutorial modes where you can learn the 12 onboard songs, a few bars at a time while the guitar judges your progress. Our tester noted that this judging can be a bit harsh, with either boos or cheers. Even at the easy levels, it can be frustratingly hard to master a song. We would have liked to see a few more beginning titles for younger children. The idea of applying these technologies to a mandolin-sized guitar came from Hasbro's Steve Unruh, an electrical engineer, educator and avid guitarist who can play the hardest song: Edgar Winter's Frankenstein on this very guitar. Not bad for a toy. Our testers of all ages found the guitar fun to play and hard to put down, creating a playful introduction to pitch, finger position and rhythm.
$70, Smart Toy
Teaches: music, the mechanics of playing the guitar, fine motor skills, rhythm, rock classics, creativity
CTR Rating: 90%