The Ultimate Guitar is an XBox 360 Guitar Hero X-Plorer controller modded to play over 900 Rock Band and Guitar Hero tracks, including every guitar track on expert difficulty from the following games:

• Guitar Hero II
• Guitar Hero III
• Guitar Hero Aerosmith
• Guitar Hero World Tour
• Guitar Hero Metallica
• Rock Band
• Rock Band 2

Once I had the idea for it, I had to make it.  Most of the songs are 100% FC, though it varies depending on the game – all of the GH3 and GHM tracks are 100%, but only about half of the GHWT tracks are 100%FC.  Maybe I’ll sell a kit for it eventually, maybe not.  If you offer me $2000, I’ll definitely make one for you.  Just throwing that out there as a ballpark figure.

One LCD to Rule Them All

The Ultimate Guitar has an LCD built into the neck for selecting songs for playback.  It can also optionally “queue” songs, so that once one song has finished, the next one in the queue becomes active – handy for GHWT and RB set lists.  Here are some videos showing it in action:

Record Songs in Practice Mode, Play Back at Full Speed

It gets even better, the Ultimate Guitar has 100 memory slots for recording songs in practice mode – at half speed – and playing them back at full speed, just like my Guitar Zero mod.  Video of this functionality in the Guitar Zero mod:

But Can it Play TTFAF?

Not only can it play Through the Fire and Flames, it can play it as Co-op Lead or Co-op Rhythm (both of which are different from solo TTFAF.   Check back soon for a video, but for now, here’s plain old vanilla TTFAF:

Instructions

I only made one Ultimate Guitar (plus an extra one for myself, naturally), but I even made an Ultimate Guitar Bot User’s Guide.  Also here is the file I used to generate the menu system, so you can see what songs it has and how they are arranged in the menu.

The interface works like this: hold (GRBO) for 2 seconds to enter Song Selection mode, strum up and down to scroll, (G) to select a folder/song and (R) to go back. Note, the strums and button presses are not passed through to the game when you are in this mode. You can select a single song (G) and exit Song Selection mode, or queue up to 100 songs using (YB). After selecting your songs, the LCD will display the current “active track”. Go to that song in the game and before it starts, hold down (GRYB) to enter Playback mode. Strum the very first note of the song and the Ultimate Guitar does the rest!