Anyone Can Play Guitar (Hero)
Are Guitar Hero and Rock Band Destined to Replace Real Guitarists?
Jun 26, 2009
There was a time when rebellious teenagers would come home from school and cloister themselves in their rooms, their only companions a compact disk or cassette player and a worn out Les Paul or Stratocaster knockoff. Albums would be played at volumes found to be obnoxious by most parents and teenage hands would move up and down the fretboards of those well-worn guitars, mimicking the sounds that crept from the speakers of the overworked stereos and boom boxes. This wasn’t all that long ago. Yet is that era coming to an end?
The Game Controller Age
Since the introduction of Atari in the early 1970s video games have become more and more prevalent in the average household and have played an ever increasing role in the lives of young Americans, especially males. With advances in technology in the past decade these games have become more realistic and have grown to encompass more and more topics and genres. Beginning with very basic action concepts, video games and gaming systems have rapidly expanded into outside realms. One of the more recent realms which video games have delved into is rock music. With the release of Guitar Hero 5 only months away the question is will a new generation continue to pick up real guitars?
It was 2005 when the world was first introduced to Guitar Hero and in 2007 Rock Band followed. Guitar Hero is based around the concept of an individual following along to music played on a screen by hitting buttons on a plastic guitar-shaped game controller to mimic the changes in the song. If played correctly the virtual audience is appeased or enthralled and the player is allowed to advance to a more complex song. Rock Band built upon this same concept, allowing up to four players to play along in a group format- thus playing as a ‘rock band.’ These games have gone on to sell millions of copies. With the release of Guitar Hero 5, the fifth major Guitar Hero release (not counting releases dedicated to specific bands such as Aerosmith and Metallica or portable versions of the game), and the Beatles: Rock Band, the new addition to the Rock Band series, both due in September, what will the fate of real guitar music be?
Rock Music as a Game
There is no doubting that it takes a certain level of ability to play along with these games. Players apply the same hand-eye coordination and dexterity that are involved in other video games to using the plastic guitar-shaped controller in Guitar Hero and Rock Band. In the June 2008 issue of Guitar World Slash, whose playing with Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver has made him one of the most influential and revered guitarists of the past twenty years, admitted to having trouble with Guitar Hero III and having to work at playing some of the songs on Guitar Hero II. Thus, even a real guitar hero still has to work at playing Guitar Hero.
But these are still only games. At the end of the day, good as any player is at Guitar Hero, Rock Band or any other music oriented game along these lines that might come out, no new music has been produced. And it is not as if the players were playing on a real guitar and could apply the skills learned while learning and playing a cover song when it came to writing their own music. New music has not been created and musical ability has not been expanded.
The Future of Rock Music
While games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band may cause some players to spend all of their free time playing them and thus never allowing them time to every pick up an actual instrument, these games may inspire others to really learn to play the songs that they hear in the games. Or at the very least it will expose younger players to classis rock songs from the 60s, 70s, and 80s that they might not have heard otherwise. More often video game players that would normally just have played other action oriented video games are now being exposed to rock music.
These video games are likely not discouraging too many new guitar players from playing a real guitar. And in the world of rock music, a world which is still overwhelmingly male dominated, as long as females only pay attention to real musicians and not Rock Band musicians, there will always be a plethora of teenage hands working their way along the maple and mahogany necks of real guitars.
