Guitar Hero Is Big Hit With Bands

Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "An unlikely but growing group of rock stars are also avid players of Guitar Hero, a PlayStation title that uses a miniature plastic guitar to let gamers pretend to be, well, rock stars, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Michael Einziger, the 30-year-old guitarist for the hard-rock band Incubus, says he was "shocked at how hard it was" to play the videogame's version of his song "Stellar." He admits he was handily beaten by his then-14-year-old sister, Ruby Aldridge, when the two of them squared off earlier this year. "It doesn't have anything to do with playing guitar," Mr. Einziger says. "It's all rhythmic." When the four members of the punk-pop band the Donnas got together to play Guitar Hero last week, guitarist Allison Robertson took some good-natured ribbing from her bandmates, says drummer Torry Castellano. That's because Ms. Robertson had a hard time playing along with the band's own song "Take It Off." "Expectations for her are pretty high because she's the guitar player and because she's so good at videogames in general," says Ms. Castellano.'"

I Don't Understand

I'm an electric bassist and personally, I care not for Guitar Hero.

I mean, I've got a freaking bass & a computer with Linux & audacity [sourceforge.net] in my living room ... why play guitar hero? To play with the bands? If I want to do that, I strip the low end out of an MP3 on my computer and just play along with it.

I find it odd that someone who probably has their pick of basses/guitars & effect pedals would prefer the not as rewarding feeling of playing Guitar Hero. Well, to each their own I guess. I think the guitarist of Korn should go buy some Rickenbacker guitars ... I can't imagine ever getting tired of those.

The funniest thing is that my friend wants to play guitar ... so he buys Guitar Hero. Which provides you with no guitar skills whatsoever. This summary hits it right on the head that it improves your rhythm but does nothing for your melody or style of playing.

PS2 + Guitar Hero = $300. Decent acoustic starter Yamaha guitar is about the same. Take your choice. I suspect Guitar Hero would be a great toy for working on your sense of tempo ... but it's still a far cry from the coordination to play any other instrument.

Re:I Don't Understand

Yup, it would be like learning to race by playing video games, or thinking you should be on the anti-terrorist teams because of your K:D ratio in Counter-Strike. Games are just that, entertainment. You may learn somethings, but its no substitute for real life.

Re:I Don't Understand

Guitar Hero is totaly fun to play, that's why you play it. I think that anyone who plays it because they want to learn to play guitar a deluding themselves, It's a game, nothing more. It's kind of like playing DDR to learn to waltz, just not going to happen.

Re:I Don't Understand

The point isn't to play along with the band, the point is to play along with your friends and have a good time. If you have friends who are musicians then you could probably all get together and have fun playing real music. Otherwise I think the majority of people (who are most likely not very musical) would prefer the video game version. Also I think it's a bit easier having one person carrying a slim PS2 and a couple of fake plastic guitars to your friends house then everyone hauling around heavy equipment... and then worrying that the neighbors will complain.

Re:I Don't Understand

why play guitar hero?

Because it's a fun game? Rhythm games are popular for a reason, because it's an extremely easy concept to grasp but can be extremely hard to pull off perfectly. Doesn't matter if you're a musician or a mill worker, if it's fun, there's no reason not to play it.

It in no way threatans or diminishes "real" music production, it's simply binding together two popular activities: Being a rock star, and playing video games.

Re:I Don't Understand

I play electric guitar, electric bass, and drums. I love guitar hero. Why? Because it's fun to play. It's skillset is also wildy divergent from the skillset required for actual guitar work (because, well, it's a rhythm game for your fingers, not a melodic instrument). Some songs are indeed much harder to play in GH than in real life (mostly due to the fact that you can't move vertically from string to string and all chording is lateral).

Whenever there's a GH post anywhere, there's always some pretentious moron who has to point out that he plays guitar/bass/kazoo in real life, and that people who play GH are wasting their time. I dunno what motivates their need to do this, but it always happens.

Re:I Don't Understand

Well, Mr. la-de-freakin-da-know-it-all, I am a world class Jazz Kazooist, have been for the past 62 years, and I for one find Guitar Hero to be complete and utter crap!

The skills and nuances of the Kazoo are leaps and bounds above a silly plastic guitar. I mean when you have the stage lights on you, and the upright bass and cow bell are hitting that sweet spot that makes the ladies swoon, THAT is what it's all about. Not strumming a chintzy red toy!

Get a clue!

Re:I Don't Understand

Did you actually read the article? It mentions some musicians who have songs in the game, but also other musicians who are not affiliated with it whatsoever, and they are all obsessed with the game. I'm sure that your $300 starter guitar won't sound anything like Black Sabbath, even if you did take years practicing Iron Man. With Guitar Hero, you can spend a short amount of time practicing, and feel like a lead guitarist on tons of classic songs. Maybe I don't want to spend years learning to master the guitar. Maybe I just want to play for a while, feel like a lead guitarist, and then get back to my life. What's wrong with that? As to why a real guitarist would play this game, it's the same reason why my pilot friend plays flight-simulator games in his spare time: because it's fun. You might as well ask why someone would play a fighting game, instead of studying martial arts and becoming a black belt, or play a first-person shooter, instead of learning to operate a real firearm. No matter how long I practice, I will never fight hordes of enemies in hand-to-hand combat, single-handedly repel an alien invasion, or flawlessly play the entire solo to Free Bird in front of a packed arena audience. But like many others, I play video games as an escape, to do things I could never do in real life. And apparently, even Real Musicians agree with me.

Re:I Don't Understand

Once again, I wasn't saying no one should play this game, I was just confused why a musician with unlimited resources would play it.

Because no matter what your resources are, it's pretty hard to get 3000 people to come to your living on a whim so you can play rock star.

Re:I Don't Understand

It's like saying you could go out dancing, so why play Dance Dance revolution? It's fun for completely different reasons then actually dancing. The same thing applies to Guitar Hero, it's almost completely different from actually playing guitar, but it's still fun for some people.

Hi There

Hi, and welcome to the world of marketting.

This article was not written to talk about the bands in question and their love of playing a video game. It was written to give exposure to the Guitar Hero franchise of games, and bring attention to the impending release of the game's sequel, which is now an MTV property (who incited the writing of this article to generate sales).

Now that you realize your error for even giving it attention, please take your haughty "Hi I'm a real musician, allow me to tell you how much better I am than you" attitude elsewhere. It's really worse than the brainwashing corporations responsible for this kind of media in the first place.

Thanks.

Re:I Don't Understand

I agree. It's like when I bought DDR to learn to dance. No chicks come flocking when I bust my moves on the real dance floor, but I score 100% every time. Weird.

Re:I Don't Understand

I'm an Air Guitarist and personally, I care greatly for Guitar Hero.

I mean, I've already got a PS2 and a HDTV in my living room ... so why play guitar hero? To play with the bands! I want to do that, while jumping off my sofa and falling to my knees like I do when listening to Van Halen MP3s through Winamp.

I find it odd that someone who has an appreciation for powerful guitar music would not enjoy to play an adrenalin-pumping video game. Well, to each their own, I guess. I think amateur guitarists would rather just sit in an empty room playing with themselves than dream of being in a big-name band like Korn...I can't imagine ever getting tired of that.

The funniest thing is, I've got several family members who play guitar. They've tried to teach me, but I have no guitar skills whatsoever. This summary hits it right on the head that you can still feel like a rock god and skip the blisters and the arthritic knuckles and angry neighboors.

Fender Strat = 1399. PS2 + Guitar Hero + 40" DLP HDTV is about the same. Take your choice. I suspect a real Stratocaster would be a great chick magnet ... but it's a far cry from the thrill of finishing Crossroads on expert.

ha, the donnas

male guitarist often make jokesabout women not being able to play guitar (we know it's not strictly true, it's just about a one to ten ratio in comparison to males) but the donnas couldn't play that song with real instruments anyway so they were bound to be at a disadvantage. (christ girls, there's more to the guitar than power chords)

Re:ha, the donnas

> there's more to the guitar than power chords

that's like saying there's more to a steer than savory, delicious beef - there's also tripe, lips and hooves. I mean, sure it's true, but [i]so what?[/i]

Hmm

It seems like the implementation might be a bit strange/broken when the person who wrote and played a song can't get a good score. Or is the controller too different from a real guitar?

/wonders whether to suggest being able to plug in a real or midi electric... at the moment my housemate, who is a little tone deaf, is attempting to learn the guitar. Apps on every platform can register a midi signal, and a real signal can be fouriered into played notes. Much of the implementation must be there in the code; would it be difficult to create a more... professional version? I for one would not be averse to my housemate being able to see where and what he was doing wrong!

No joke.

I tried it out in a store once. I am a classical guitar player, and have been a musician for over 13 years now. Picked the thing up, and discovered that I sucked :P

There aren't too many similarities to actually playing guitar, though. I'm used to working with scale patterns spanning the entire fretboard, using techniques such as sweep picking, finger picking, etc. Kinda hard to do that with the few buttons the thing has plus a switch/lever/whatever it is for picking :)

Staggering

What a staggering coincidence. All these bands that happen to have songs in the game happen to like the game, and don't mind talking about it to reporters.

-Peter

Guitar Hero: not about playing guitar

"It doesn't have anything to do with playing guitar,"

Finally, someone admits that Guitar Hero is not about playing guitar. It's just DDR played with your fingers.

Re:Guitar Hero: not about playing guitar

"It's just DDR played with your fingers."

And DDR is just Simon played with your feet. It seems we've come full circle.

Well duh...

Just because you're an expert at Fight Night doesn't mean you can take out Mike Tyson in a real fight... or vice versa.

It's just mindless fun. I don't think it was written anywhere on the box that it would turn you into a guitar god overnight (or if it did, you're an idiot for believing it).

Incubus?

As much as I love Incubus, I'd hardly classify them as "hard rock." When I think hard rock, bands like Metallica (Black Album era) and ACDC come to mind. Maybe that's just me, though.

It's a video game, y'know.

The only relation Guitar Hero's controller -- with its five coloured plastic buttons, in single file, to be pushed when the correctly coloured circle is shown -- is that they're housed in a casing built to resemble a guitar.

You can play Guitar Hero 24/7, practicing until your fingers bleed, but at the end of the day, you still can't play guitar. It isn't Guitar Simulator, it's a video game with a miniature plastic guitar for as its controller. It has nothing to do with actual guitar playing skills.

GTA won't teach you the skillz to be an archcriminal, and America's Army isn't a replacement for boot camp.

Re:It's a video game, y'know.

Personally, as a long-time self-taught hack guitarist, I find that it improves my guitar playing-- it really has increased my finger speed, and can't hurt my coordination or sense of timing.

Re:It's a video game, y'know.

>GTA won't teach you the skillz to be an archcriminal, and America's Army isn't a replacement for boot camp.
But, Jack Thompson said it would. He wouldn't lie would he?

Of course it is....

They get royalties.

" Guitar Hero Is Big Hit With Bands " ????

Awww. Guitar Hero's such a good game... how come anyone could be so upset about this game as to grab an entire band, and smash a Guitar Hero game box to pieces with each member of the band...

Oh, wait.

I gave up trying to get through Guitar Hero

I went out and got a real guitar instead... it's far, far easier...

Oh the pain...

I remember the first time I tried the game. And every other time. I refer to the game by its TRUE moniker, "Carpal Tunnel Hero."

Guitar Hero != Guitar

I'm a guitar player and I also love playing Guitar Hero. Having some finger dexterity probably helped a bit when I was getting started but pushing 5 buttons is not the same as playing a guitar. It's fun and thats all it's supposed to be. Guitar Hero is to guitar playing as DDR is to dancing.

This isn't SUPPOSED to be a guitar substitute!

It's just a music/rhythm game! An extremely fun and well produced one, nonetheless. Seriously, these games are popular for a reason. It's a simple concept that anyone can grasp and become good at. It is FAR easier than actually becoming that good on a guitar, and that's precisely the reason it resonates with so many people. Easy to learn, hard to master, fun to play. And it's great fun with a group of people. Hell, I'm having a party with friends for the release of the second game because we all love it! Only one of us can actually play guitar, and it doesn't matter. This is just an extremely fun game that brings people together. Anyone who is a fan of music/rhythm games should absolutely pick it up.

Don't Understand Huh?

Well, I can't exactly pull out two guitars at a party and have two people who have never played the guitar before go head to head. It's a game for crying out loud. Drunk Guitar Hero parties FTW. Not nearly as much puking involved as DDR. I could see it as helping new guitar players improve their dexterity, but apparently, if you have all that nifty equipment to be in a band, this game isn't exactly aiming at you now is it.

What is so much better about Guitar Hero?

I hear all these things about Guitar Hero yet it's just a ripoff of Guitar Freaks, part of the Beatmania/DDR/etc. series from Konami. What is so new about Guitar Hero that makes it get all this press? Why didn't Guitar Freaks get it 5 years ago?

I love it...

Does anyone else find it knee-slappingly funny that all the rock stars featured in the article that are challenged by a toy guitar are in prodigiously terrible bands? Discuss.

Future man!!

I wonder if Future Man [flecktones.com] has tried his hand at this game. I bet he TOTALLY rocks!! Seriously, although very simplified, the "controller" is conceptually similar to his Drumitar [wikipedia.org].

Buy a metronome, it is cheaper

Having endured 4 learning teenage guitarists in my household over the years, the major deficiency was rythm. Learners are so focused on picking the right note, the structure of the piece gets lost. I went out and bought a metronome, but that rarely got used.

What would I know, I'm just an old guy. An old guy that has endured countless "up-and-coming" pub bands who could have done with a metronome when they were practising. That goes for the drummer as well.

The problem is the 5 buttons

Unless you're a 6-fingered bad guy from The Princess Bride [imdb.com] (who, ironically, is best known as the guitarist from "This Is Spinal Tap"), there's no way to play that game the way you play a real guitar because of the five buttons. Four buttons would've been much better, or perhaps with a couple of rows of four buttons for a total of eight, would've been more realistic and fun for us four-fingered and one-thumbed folk.

I play banjo...

and my question is... when is banjo hero going to come out? I've been itching to complain about it not being like an actual banjo.

Just confirms...

As a bass player who's played in many rock bands this just confirms what I've found.. many lead guitar players get away with having bad or even no sense of rhythm/time.

i love that game ;)

i just got the guitar hero 2, that came out today!

i played the crap out of the first one, beat every song with 4 or 5 stars on expert
i wont try and disect why its fun, but it IS :) its extremely fun when playing with friends against eachother!

had to laugh at this quote

"It doesn't have anything to do with playing guitar," Mr. Einziger says. "It's all rhythmic."

Hate to break it to this guy...but he should be using rhythem when he plays a real guitar as well!

publicity & inspiration

I'm all for it if it inspires even a small fraction of players to take up a real instrument. Just as long as they start at the beginning!

GH2 is good publicity for one of my fave bands, Rush [rush.com], whose YYZ is at the "advanced" level. I can see a lot of adults going "so that's what that is", having heard it but not knowing where it's from. It's not exactly plain sailing on real instruments either. A kid who starts off fresh, trying to play that on guitar or bass, is risking sore fingers and severe disillusionment. Still, you gotta love a song with a minor-fifth riff on the Morse Code broadcast by the radio beacon at the band's home airport...

Guitar isn't rhythmic ???

"It doesn't have anything to do with playing guitar," Mr. Einziger says. "It's all rhythmic." A big part of playing rock guitar is rhythmic. Any good guitarist will be good at this, as soon as they retrained their muscles to hit buttons instead of plucking strings and fretting notes (much more difficult to coordinate the two). Of course, then it wouldn't be much of a story.

Regarding The Backlash...

The "I play guitar in real life, so why would I want to play this game" are just symptomatic of a self-entitled attitude that I've found to be somewhat pervasive throughout the world of 'unsigned musicians.' After spending years and years and years slugging it out in several local music scenes (with marginal aptitude, at best, I admit), I have come to realize that many musicians, who subconsciously realize the real-world triviality of their pursuits, ultimately look to rationalize and justify their stake in the pursuit by painting their efforts as far more Herculean than they are. This is one of the main reasons why it's rare to meet a musician that doesn't consider his creations to be his "life's work" or to view his status as a musician as anything other than a divine calling or a reason for being. The simple fact is that many people are uncomfortable with the realization that what they do is, ultimately, entertainment and seek instead to find karmic value for their priorities by portraying the act of strumming a guitar to be somehow akin to finding a cure for cancer or (and this is ALL to common) actively working towards social change. Yes, I play guitar in real life, and yes -- I love Guitar Hero. Why? Because it's fun. Yes, I can plug in a real guitar and learn those songs and play them (if, of course, that was something I felt any desire to do), as can any moderately skilled player with an instrument and access to transcriptions of the tunes. But the simple fact of the matter is that Guitar Hero is a completely different kind of enjoyable activity than that of actual 'music making.' For some of us who exert a good deal of mental energy in their songwriting and playing, a game like Guitar Hero presents a refuge from intellectualizing things like "having fun." It's a way to enjoy myself casually and to do so using a skillset I'm already decent with (moving my fingers in a guitar-like motion) as opposed to something that's frustrating and foreign to my brain (first-person shooters and the like.) I firmly believe that those who feel the need to point out that Guitar Hero is somehow 'beneath them' because of their musical abilities are simply looking for a pedestal from which to impart "wisdom-on-high." No, playing Guitar Hero is not the same as playing a real guitar -- Hell, neither is checkers. But I'm still at a loss as to how those components could be even remotely analogous to anyone's mind unless they were merely searching for a "deeper meaning" where it doesn't exist.

It IS related to real guitar

I played Guitar Hero for the first time two weeks ago. I was with a group of friends, two of whom play real guitar. It was the first time on the game for everyone there except one guy (not a guitarist). The two guitarists were MUCH better than everyone else. I think it was mainly their left-hand control.

That said, I don't think anyone really believes that GH is training for real guitar playing.

Liking Guitar Hero? Check out Frets On Fire

If you like Guitar Hero as a concept, I'd recommend checking out Frets On Fire [kempele.fi], an open source quitar playing game, where the aim is to "play guitar with the keyboard as accurately as possible". Totally addicting.

For people with "controller" trouble.

The controller that comes with your game, or the japanese version: http://www.play-asia.com/paOS-13-71-88-49-zh-70-14 xa.html [play-asia.com] are both inadequate. There are some third parties that made a controller for this game (guitarfreaks in jp) that's substantially heavier, but most importantly, the buttons are more tactile. They click like mouse buttons. Unfortunately I've lost the name.

I get so PO'ed using any guitar controllers I switched back to the PS2 pads. Just choose the inverse button layout, or assign your own layout by holding the pad upside down, using the analog sticks for picks. You'd be surprised how good it is to handle.

Guitar Hero is a blast and not the same old FPS

Who didn't want to be a guitar hero as a kid???? What's up with all the negativity?? Guitar Hero is NOT a game to learn to play guitar. It's to get together with your friends and have a blast with the crowd going wild when you hit the notes and to feel bad when the crowed boos you off the stage when you don't. I play guitar, (Gibson SG, Gibson Les Paul), and the songs that I know on the guitar are harder to play on Guitar Hero than on the actual thing! The games a blast, a different game than all the FPS and strategy games that are often played with a group. What other good music games are out there??

My friends and I end up playing this game, with it's silly little plastic guitar - outfitted with a whammy bar - all night. And the hard level is HARD. (Bark at the moon solo anyone?) I love that the virtual artists actually move their hands and body language like they are playing the song. All I want is an OPEN API so I can plug in my own songs, or other songs from my favorite bands (copyright issues) Star Power baby!!