Understanding that the mechanisms for Guitar Hero vs. Real Guitar are worlds apart, I’m still curious: does being an actual guitarist confer any kind of advantage in GH? Have any real guitarists tried it?
Not a real guitarist, nor do I play one on TV. Other than Rock Band that is.
But I have actually posed this question to a few.
Yes, playing a real guitar does transfer over to the game, and vice-versa. Mostly in the accuracy and speed of moving from one pattern to the other on the fret buttons. Also building endurance for continuously moving your fingers rapidly for longer periods of time.
Another thing is that you’re listening to the music differently when you’re playing it than when you’re just listening for pleasure.
There’s a video somewhere of the guys in Rush taking a crack at Guitar Hero (I think it was a Colbert Show outtake). (ETA: or was it Rock Band? one of the two…)
ISTR somebody (possibly Slash) remarking that he was spending a lot of time playing GH, but was finding it surprisingly challenging.
Scott Ian of Anthrax royally fucking up Anthrax’s Madhouse in GH.
Tom Morello talked about getting his ass handed to him by twelve-year-olds playing his own songs.
Rush played Rock Band on the Colbert outtake. They sucked lol
Here’s an article on Slate about Rock Band by the guitarist of Slater-Kinney.
It’s hard in some ways because you want to actually attempt to play the songs, which you can’t do because the timing is different and the strum patterns are also different. It helps when you move to the harder levels because chords are something that your mind and muscles are already trained to do. I’d say that it’s largely a draw.
I am a guitarist and I do not totally agree with that.
There are some skills or techniques or whatever you’d like to call them, that I’ve managed to pick up along the way that I suppose contribute to Guitar Hero ability – like not having to look at my hand to know where my fingers are and a certain amount of dexterity – but there are also detriments as well. For example, in the video game, where your fingers go according to the song is not usually very intutive. There are only five buttons to work with, so sometimes when the notes are going higher, your fingers are going in the wrong direction on the neck… so sometimes it feels utterly backward.
That and the little flipper thing that acts as a strum just doesn’t really feal connected – I’m not sure how to explain it, but with real playing you don’t feel like your left and right hands are doing two different things – I get that a lot from the video game.
I’d say the biggest contributing factor for both activities is a sense of rhythm. There’s more hand-eye coordination needed for Guitar Hero than for real playing, but for real playing there’s more ear-hand coordination – if that’s even a term.
Related: I tried Guitar Hero’s version of Rock Band recently (World Tour? can’t remember for sure), and because my dinner guests were good at doing the guitar and bass, I grabbed the microphone.
I found that with songs I knew well, my knowledge was hurting me, because the melody line the game was asking me to sing was considerably dumbed down from the original song, and to stay on the line, I was having to actually sing quite mechanically, with no flair at all. I’ve sung on Rock Band too, and found it much more in tune with the vocal track in my head (at least on the one song I did).
I dunno, maybe I should have amped up the difficulty level on GHWT - it might have presented me with a more complex vocal line to aim for. I didn’t because I only knew a few of the songs really well, and a lot of them I didn’t know at all.
All the songs are unlocked on our Wii at home, but they don’t travel. 
You can try it again at our house sometime and maybe you’ll know more of the songs and be able to sing at a more challenging level.
I forgot to add that my husband, Wash, plays the guitar and he’s soooo much better at Guitar Hero than me. I don’t know if it’s because he’s used to playing guitar or if it’s just because he spends a lot more time on it than me.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. You play something enough times, it’s like reflex. Now give the guy a controller that’s shaped like a guitar & ask him to do something different - he’s definitely going to have a hard time.
FWIW, I play guitar and have never played GH or any of “those” games. Why play one on TV when I can be one in real life? 
I think in the sense of coordination and rhythm it does, but too much knowledge may screw you up for reasons mentioned above. I’m a shit guitar player, but a decent keyboardist, and my keyboard abilities definitely helped in Guitar Hero. For example, I know a lot of people have difficulties with their pinkies. I don’t. I don’t play the game a lot, but was able to beat songs on expert all the way up to the final (or perhaps next-to-final) tier without any practice. The hardest thing for me to get down well, since I’m not a guitar player, was a steady up-down strum, instead of downstroking everything.
So, being a keyboard player with a rudimentary knowledge of guitar certainly helped making the game easier for me than non-musician buddies of mine.
Only tangentially related to the OP: Why is it called Guitar Hero? What is there heroic about playing guitar karaoke? Or is there some kind of plot to the game , where you rescue Santa from pterodactyls?
Well, because you’re up there pretending to be one of your guitar heros. I also wonder if the name is an allusion or otherwise inspired by a line in the Clash song “Complete Control”: “You’re my guitar hero!”
nm
I play guitar, and play farily well. I found the “dumbing down” of songs to be very frustrating when I first started. When I moved the game from easy to hard it actually got easier for me because my fingers finally felt like they were at least moving in time to the notes more often than not.
My girlfriend was an excellent violinist in high school- first chair all-state or somesuch. She’s phenomenal GH player- beat Through The Fire And Flames on Expert.
Guitar teacher here. I can’t tell you about the transfer of skills from Guitar to guitar hero because I’ve never played the game. I can tell you that the transfer of skills from guitar hero to Guitar is the cube root of fuck all.
My adult students joke about it (‘That passage was so much easier in guitar hero’), I have a couple of tween-age students who have kinda sorted out the difference, and I have one 10 year old student that is driving me crazy because he doesn’t practice at all between lessons, and yet, he’ll waste hours on that f#@*&ng game… It’s a shame, because he’s in a duet class, and the other kid is progressing, and guitar homer is holding him back.
One of these days, I’ll try to get around to playing it and maybe I’ll see what the fuss is all about. Meantime, I’m going to go play on the real guitar some more…
One thing that transfers very well from GH to the Real World is interest in guitar as an instrument. My nine-year-old son plays GH and Rock Band, and it made him interested enough in music to take guitar lessons, which he’s been studying for about about six months. He and all of his friends want to be Guitar Heroes now, and I think its great that the game has stimulated this sort of interest in playing ‘real’ music.
And, yes, I’ve played GH, and its not at all like guitar playing. The transferable skills are limited to listening for changes and noticing the song’s beat and suchlike. Which is great but not a very big step up in learning an instrument.
I play guitar at an intermediate level, and I play expert in Rock Band, and I don’t think there’s a lot of translation between the two. I do think both help build your dexterity and sense of rhythm. I think someone who had played a lot of Rock Band or Guitar Hero would pick up guitar a little faster than if they had never played the game, but not because of any skills they learned. Rather, they’d get better a little faster because their fingers are a little stronger and their sense of the rhythm and timing of a song would be a little better.
But one area where I think it’s a big help is that it teaches you that you CAN get better. One of the problems with real instruments is that the learning curve is so steep that it can take years of hard effort before you really start to feel like you know what you’re doing. So it’s sometimes hard to see progress and people get discouraged and quit.
Rock Band and Guitar Hero give you that feeling too - the frustration of thinking that you’ll never get any better, and that the hard stuff looks so impossibly hard you’ll never be able to play it. But the learning curve is fast enough that those “a-ha!” moments come with enough regularity that you feel compelled to keep with it. Then later if you pick up a real instrument, you’ll know that no matter how much you suck, you’ll get better if you keep at it.
The instrument that translates much better to real life are the drums. I’ve got the Ion advanced drum set, which is basically a set of real electronic drums connected to an Xbox controller. I never played drums before in my life, and never thought I would because I couldn’t separate all my limbs worth a damn. But now I can play along with MP3’s in ‘freestyle’ mode (where the game basically just acts as a drum synth), and do a credible job of drumming to some songs. The translation from expert mode in the game to real drumming can be, for some songs, nearly identical.