When I received the hefty black case for the CRKD Les Paul Guitar and cracked it open (heh), a feeling of nostalgia punched me square in the gut. CRKD has done a fantastic job putting this together. After clicking the neck into the body, and doing some very brief set-up that is easily explained both in the manual included and YouTube videos if you’re confused, I sat down to play.
The gaming world’s rhythm genre has long been on the decline, after dwindling sales of both the main two franchises and the peripherals stopping appealing to the masses it felt like a short journey down a one-way road. However, With Fortnite Festival essentially giving the genre the much needed attention and love it needed, alongside Clone Hero keeping the genre on life support all these years, I figured it might be time to pick the plastic guitar back up and channel the ghost of Hendrix. Enter CRKD, a small company that has been making sure those of us who want to shred out have the best tools to do so.
First things first – if you remember back to those old times, you’ll be worried about build quality. These guitars take an absolute beating when you play, and it’s not like you’re meant to be aggressive. The faster you get, the harder you play, it’s just a fact. You can’t be gentle when you’re shredding out to Master of Puppets, but don’t worry; this guitar feels unbelievably well put together. It feels like it can take everything you give it and keep coming back for more, which is good. The guitar also features several different programmable modes, alongside built in ones for Fortnite Festival for easy set-up and play. There are also changeable LEDs all along the empty fret bars that change with your button presses. Funky.
The most impressive thing for me though, is the navigation buttons and ease of use. It comes with a small joystick and buttons you can use that match the system you’re using it on – in my case it uses an Xbox button scheme – and the setup is really easy to do. You can play wirelessly via a wireless dongle stored inside the guitar itself for safe keeping, via Bluetooth, or wired via a nice long cable. You’ll be pleased to hear that I never experienced any latency between my own presses and the game/guitar registering them in all three modes when I tried them all.
CRKD has very much impressed me with the quality of this guitar, something I have been using now for a while. There’s been an announcement of a new rhythm game franchise coming later in the year, and I’ve already got my guitar, so colour me a happy bunny!
You can find it here, along with lots of other options for Rhythm Gaming!