Wow, sorry for abandoning this thread; I just moved to Australia, so I've been busy with doing that... Thanks for the interest! Yeah, the strumming real notes thing does sound kinda strange.. But the the hardware figures out if you're strumming by just the contact of the wired pick to the strings, s...

So rather than just submitting an idea, I went ahead and built a device that lets you play Frets on Fire with a real guitar. Using the actual strings and frets, the hardware interprets the connections between the strings and frets as button presses and sends out the appropriate USB controller data. ...