Here’s my story. I learnt to play the guitar for about 6 years. I was 10 when I got my first ever guitar, and honest to god, it was massive for me. I struggled for a year and a half just adjusting to the guitar’s size, my fingers barely making it across the weirdly long fret-board. Passion fueled me to conquer the instrument, but the wrong kind of guitar for a beginner meant I wasted a lot of time overcoming the barriers of an advanced instrument. The same logic applied when I learnt how to ride a bicycle, but it’s much easier to find a small bicycle for kids than it is to find a small guitar for young musicians-in-making.
The Loog Guitar is already a kickstarter success story, having given children the ability to learn real guitar techniques (unlike Guitar Hero that just teaches you to push buttons), albeit on a smaller scale. Sized like a ukulele but with the sound of a real guitar, the Loog Mini and the Loog Pro are brilliant instruments for not just kids, but adults too. Designed to ergonomically size down a regular guitar, these instruments come with Maple Wood fretboards, a cut-away shape making it easier to hit the higher notes, beautiful candy colors, and the electric guitar comes equipped with a single-coil pickup that gives it a great sound! There’s even a clear Lucite version of the Loog Pro Electric that looks like pure rock heaven.
The Loog guitar is designed around a 3-string layout (one less than a ukulele). The strings however come with standard guitar tuning, making it simple to learn music principles and transition to a regular guitar when the time is right. The Loog even comes with its own mini-ecosystem of flash cards to make the learning process easy, and an app that teaches you how to play the latest and most popular songs. Besides, isn’t it just lovely to see a kid pick up a musical instrument with passion, rather than have them spend hours aimlessly in front of a smartphone screen?
Designer: Joaquín Uribe
The new Loog app for iOS and Android has video lessons, a tuner and a songbook so you can learn to play guitar by playing Beatles, Stones, Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars and more. Guiding you through the learning process is this friendly monster, whom you can customize to be a bit pop, rocker, mod, or whatever you like.
The Loog app rewards you as you learn: play a couple chords, and you will unlock Let it Be, by The Beatles. Play a couple more chords, and you will unlock another song. You can even record yourself playing and post those videos online. Both the Loog Pro and the Loog Mini give you full access to these tools.
Also new is that we now include a deck of flashcards with chord diagrams with every Loog. This is a simple but quite effective way of learning how to form chords on your Loog, or any guitar.
