If you are a session musician, or a musician playing in a large band, you are expected to play the notes in front of you exactly as they are originally played, or as the conductor or arranger wants you to play them. There is no room for improvisation or injecting your own interpretation into the music in any way. A session drummer who is ‘in the groove’ will be hitting the rhythm exactly as its put down on the page without the slightest amount of deviation.
Now, when you get to solo playing, blues, jazz, or other improvisational styles there is certainly plenty of room for injecting your own interpretation into the music, but for many, many musicians this is simply not the case.
I’ve been playing music on various instruments for 35 years - never at a super high level, but well enough. Guitar Hero honestly doesn’t feel that different to me in many ways than some instruments do. If you play a MIDI keyboard with velocity turned off (like many old synths that you can hear in ‘real’ music), the only way you can change the music is to change the timing and duration of the key presses. Would anyone argue that that’s not making music?
Guitar Hero isn’t a fad - what it is is just the first product in an entirely new way of making and experiencing music. There will be competition, there will be other products coming out that allow more expressiveness. You can bet on it. For instance, it wouldn’t be that hard to add velocity sensitivity to the strum bar, and give you extra points for hitting with the right volume level, perhaps as shown by the width of or size of the notes on screen. You ca n already add your own vibrato and bends with the whammy bar - I can see that morphing into a game that requires you to bend notes to match the music for extra points, either with the whammy bar or perhaps by pushing laterally on the fret buttons like bending strings.
I fully expect that someone will eventually come out with games that let you use other kinds of instruments like saxophones or keyboards. An Irish Whistle only has six holes on it - such an instrument would be easy to fit into the ‘guitar hero’ user interface. There are already MIDI controllers that have breath controls and buttons to simulate woodwind instruments - I can imagine such instruments in the future being bundled with a ‘game’ that consists of a guitar-hero like interface and a hundred songs that you can learn to play. Different skill levels might introduce different techniques, and at the end you’ll be playing on expert with a band - but you could unplug the controller and keep playing into a synth and be making real music. So the line between a game and real music starts to get awfully blurry.
I’d love something like this for keyboards - at easy level you play the song with one hand, melody line only. As the difficulty level goes up you start adding chords, position changes, your left hand, etc. When you’re 5-starring songs on keyboard hero, you really know how to play a keyboard.
Then there’s the other side of it - ‘Rock Band’ is being touted as not just a game, but as a vehicle for appreciating music. Harmonix plans to make thousands of songs available for download, and they believe that people will want to build music catalogs and just sit down for an hour or two and play along to some of their favorite music - not to beat high scores or see how fast they can shred, but just to experience music they like in a more interactive form. We’ll see how well that takes off, but it’s certainly something that appeals to me.
I think we’re really just seeing the start of things to come.
