An Actual Guitar-Player Playing Guitar-Hero, and the Rage that Ensues…

I remember when Guitar Hero came out – I was pissed! I’ve been a guitar-player since I was 14 years old, and my reasons for getting into it were based on my own impressions of the extreme coolness of playing guitar – not from any local fad. All around me, back then, my peers were getting more and more into rap music, while I enjoyed the music that I enjoyed, not whatever social trends directed me to… I’ve never worn my pants around my knees either…

But in later years, someone came up with the brilliant idea of making the playing of an electric guitar into a video game! Suddenly a great deal of the music I’ve loved all my life was emulated by pressing buttons on a guitar-shaped video-game controller, and I stayed away from it for a long time.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been a lover of video games since I was a small child, and the ever-evolving gaming industry delights me to no end. (For a bit of a different perspective on the evolution of video games, check out HighGuy420’s “Why we GAME”) It wasn’t until the late winter of 2010 that I played my first bit of Guitar Hero, and of course, (with all the beer, wine, and that other precious “inebriant” more and more Canadians enjoy regularly), my first attempt to rock out to whatever Metallica song I surely would’ve done much greater justice to with a good axe and a powerful amp resulted in near-perfection – on the easy setting of course… I followed up this performance with some poorly articulated acoustic-fingerstyle guitar-playing which, despite my assurances that cold fingers and general rustiness prevented me from showcasing my real talents, nevertheless impressed everybody around the table.

It was more than a year later that I found myself battling against my new girlfriend in her basement - to the tune of more recent “metal” songs I’ve never listened to (I’m old-school! ). In the standard hotshot-guitarist attitude, I attempted to destroy this poor girl in the game, and (naturally) found myself defending my performance on the grounds that no video game cam simulate real guitar-playing the way a real guitar can… I know, I know, it’s just a game – but the thing is, it’s only a game!

While playing Guitar Hero, I found that the skills I still retain in playing guitar don’t transfer well at all to watching for cues and responding by pushing buttons, (except in the matter of rhythmic precision – something that years of palm-muting to the best of 80s thrash-metal {and that means MEGADETH - Hammet can go #$@% himself} has made me an expert in), especially given the comparative incomparability of the action demanded of the simple, 5-button “fret-board…”

In Guitar-Hero you’ve got to hit the “frets” (buttons!! Arghhh!) at the precise moment, and strike the “strings” at the same moment, but when you’re playing a guitar, quite often you’ll fret the strings a moment before striking them, making sure that your fingers are well in place to make the right sound. Of course, when you’re pounding out super-fast metal riffs on a real guitar, you’ve got to be pretty quick with both hands, and a certain natural rhythm develops with practice. Similarly, in the game, you’ve got to integrate the cues you’ll see on the screen with the sound of the song you’re “playing” – so for a guitarist playing the game, approaching it with a guitar-player’s attitude can screw you up. So much for that hotshot attitude…

Still, I have a lot of fun playing the stupid game nevertheless. While she sits on the couch pressing buttons on a guitar-shaped controller, watching and listening and playing a video-game weakly imitating guitar-work – I’m standing up, making funny faces and pretending to be stroking off during the rhythm parts… Hey, being a guitar-hero is as much about showmanship as proficiency, right? It’s only when a repeating pattern demands rhythmic exactness that I manage to get a better score than she does – but that’s mostly because I haven’t played the game as much as she has. The idea that getting really good at the game might inhibit my approach to playing a real guitar leaves me almost as soon as it crosses my mind – a worry borne more out of lack of practice lately than anything else – I miss my generic old telecaster and Peavey practice amp like crazy!

To play Guitar Hero really well, you’ve got to play a lot of Guitar Hero – being musically inclined can only get you so far. Even on songs I could destroy with a real guitar in my hands, (at least at a point in the not-too-distant past), the buttons you push to carry on in the game have very little to do with how a real guitar is played… The closest playing Guitar Hero comes to playing a real electric guitar is developing a little extra facility alternating between individual fingers – you can’t tear up your fingertips pushing plastic buttons!

The way you’ll attack individual or groups of strings with a pick demands a significantly different motion of one’s picking hand than the strum-bar on a Guitar Hero controller. The way one holds any given finger on any given string at whatever given fret demands a significantly different set of motions from the fretting hand. Still, the game developers have probably done the very best possible job in approximating the basic challenges of guitar-playing in a way that appeals to non-guitarist video-game lovers on a mass scale. When Guitar Hero first came out, some people who started really getting into the game jokingly told me I should be an instant pro – I wanted to put my guitar into the hands of the best Guitar Hero players and watch them fumble with it in embarrassment…

Anyway, I want to close by saying that I think Guitar Hero is a pretty cool, fun game to play – so long as you’re not interested in crossing Guitar Hero proficiency with any real skill on a real guitar. Now as far as people being introduced to the idea of playing guitar by having a lot of fun playing Guitar Hero, I say go for it! A good argument could even be made that the simple practice of watching for your cues coming up on the screen and matching them with your fingertips may make an extremely rudimentary, (but nevertheless useable) preparation for sight-reading… Or something… Maybe not. I did most of my guitar-learning by reading tablatures I got from the internet and painstakingly practicing passages in many of my favourite songs - so it was always more about coming to train my hands to create the sounds I wanted than about playing as I read the music off a sheet. Good arguments can be made for any number of different approaches to anything – but the bottom line here is that being good at Guitar Hero has almost nothing to do with being good at guitar – and vice versa. All of which is, of course, mainly to justify a significantly low Guitar Hero score by a significantly proficient woodshed guitarist. Grr indeed!