Okay, I’ve read through this thread, and the answers here are all very interesting. The stuff about performance rights is all true, however it’s not the reason.
I’ve been lurking the straight dope message boards for years, but only today have I actually signed up and registered so that I could post. The reason? Setting you folks straight on this very question. Congratulations, you’ve got a new doper.
Okay, on to the explanation…
If it were simply a question of rights issues, then the Dance Dance Revolution games would also use covers of the songs instead of the originals. Yet DDR and its ilk, for the most part, simply get the mechanical rights and put the real songs into the game. So why is guitar hero different?
Because when you make a mistake in DDR, all of the instruments keep playing. Your score suffers, but the music keeps playing as it always did.
When you make a mistake in guitar hero, the primary instrument (lead guitar, rhythm guitar, or bass, depending on the song and play mode) stops playing and a “mistake” sound is played instead.
In order to implement this in the game code, the makers of Guitar Hero needed original multitrack sources for every song in the game. When I say multitrack, what I mean is that the drums are one track, the vocals are another track, the lead guitar is another track, the rhythm guitar is another track, the bass is another track, etc.
This allows the game programmers to mute the track where the player made a mistake, and allow all the other instruments to keep playing.
It also has some other advantages. In multi-player mode, it allows them to pan the instruments to left or right of the audio field, to match the onscreen positions of the two players. When things are moving very fast and furious in a multiplayer game, you can hear both your chosen instrument, as well as the mistakes, appear to come from the side of the screen that your avatar and “fretboard” graphic is on.
Additionally, it allows them to control the relative loudness of the tracks, so that, for instance, when you are playing in the bass+guitar cooperative multiplayer mode, they can turn up the bass and the guitar a bit more in relation to the other instruments, so you can both hear yourselves play.
There are other advantages, such as was previously mentioned: being able to control whether the notes fall precisely on the beat. Oh, and it lets you have real-time control of the pitch of the note via the whammy bar.
And did anyone notice the little RJ-11 jack on the bottom of the Guitar Hero 2 Xbox360 controller? I’m guessing that’s for a future pedalboard upgrade. To implement this, they’d definitely need the original multitrack recording so they could change the amount of effect on the instrument depending on how you step on the pedals.
So why don’t they just get the original multitrack masters from the original artists? Believe it or not, it’s actually easier for them to just record really precise covers of the songs than try to go through all the trouble that would require. Many of the songs were recorded on very old equipment, many of the master tapes are very old and fragile or perhaps even missing altogether, many of the artists would refuse to give out the original multitrack recordings, etc.
Some of the tracks in the Guitar Hero games ARE from the artist’s original multitrack masters, and in some cases, expanded versions of same (Trogdor, anyone?). But for the most part, they are the tracks from recent indie artists who are closely allied with the game developers and could deliver the tracks in nice neat easy to edit digital files.
How do I know all this? I actually have no sources to cite on any of the above information. I’m simply someone who knows a thing or two about music production and game production, and it is the only possible logical explanation. It’s also very obvious from listening to and analyzing the game.
Now, if I could just talk to the game programmers about improving the way it tracks my hammers and pull offs…
