Guitar Hero and Real Guitarists

[WordMan]

I, pathetically, have nothing to add here. My son has Guitar Hero so I have seen him, but I have never played it myself.

To quote Clint Eastwood, who gives old fogies a role model: Now get offa my lawn…

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@squeegee

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.

Alex Lifeson from Rush was a guest on That Metal Show on VH-1 Classic a few weeks ago and said he thinks Rock Band/GH are great because parents keep telling him their kids are picking up the guitar because they like fake guitar so much.

I suppose he has something of an interest in seeing RB2 do well since they’re featured in it.

[zweisamkeit]

@pulykamell

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.

I cannot up/down strum to save my life in GH! I can only strum downwards and I know it’ll come to bite me on my ass when I try to go up to Hard. Any tips to try to make my brain and hands cooperate in learning this?

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@zweisamkeit

I cannot up/down strum to save my life in GH! I can only strum downwards and I know it’ll come to bite me on my ass when I try to go up to Hard. Any tips to try to make my brain and hands cooperate in learning this?

FWIW, I can strum up-only fast enough to play on Expert. My problem with expert is I can’t move my fingers back into place after playing an orange note, so I end up screwing up the next three bars.

I’ve tried strumming up and down, and it makes it much easier to perform long segments of closely-spaced chords, but it also makes the guitar jump around a bit under my hands, which messes me up.

ETA: My tip for strumming faster in one direction only is to place the pinky-side of your palm against the body of the guitar and strum upward using your pinky, ring and middle fingers. I can go ridiculously fast doing that; it’s just not very comfortable for long periods, so I tend to switch to my index finger for slow bits.

[Eonwe]

Certainly being a musician helps, not necessarily being a guitar player.

The three biggest hangups I observe in people playing Guitar Hero are:

1. not strumming up and down. This is a place where playing guitar already would give someone the right idea about technique.

2. not being able to accurately use one’s pinky and/or move your hand up one position.

3. perhaps the biggest problem, people who are keyed in to the visual more than the sound of the game. It’s pretty hard to play the game by vision, but if you listen to the song and kind of see which buttons are upcoming, it’s very easy to know the rhythm in which they’re meant to be played.

[Gwyen]

I cannot play the guitar, or any other instrument for that matter.

But I fucking shred on Guitar Hero.

My SO can play drums, guitar and bass… he is ok at GH. He is better at the drums than me on World Tour and Rock band. He says that it is confusing sometimes on songs he really knows, because his fingers want to play the song like he knows it on a real guitar.

I think that the only thing that being a real musician may help in GH is having rhythm. I do have rhythm, you need it for that game on the harder levels. You need it to get the timing right.