Guitar Hero brings business to six-string tutors

As a guitar player for a long time, I think this is just awesome. Perhaps, rock and roll/hard rock has a chance of surviving considering the current culture of Pop/Hip-Hop....not that I don't like hip-hop...but when was the last time a metal album hit #1 and stuck there for a while....it's been a while.

In the meantime, I must hit the store for some more aquanet. Laterz!

The only thing that Guitar Hero may help, is in the timing and maybe keep the rhytm.

But thats it.

I'm not taking guitar lessons yet, but I just bought an acoustic yesterday, it's pretty fun so far. Reading the music notes feel like looking at the coloured buttons in guitar hero.

My reply was actually for Frank.

Are we sure that this isn't just Activision paying CNet off to say this?

wow, maybe with this kind of success, they can come out with games like "drive your vehicle well - hero" and "don't be a lying politician - hero" and perhaps the new favorite - "don't talk on your cell phone too loudly, you a**hole - hero". i think this hero franchise has just found unlimited possibilities...

Wonder will Rock Band come out with a similar article for drums.

Real guitars are for old people.

Well, duh.

I got Guitar Hero II when it came out for 360, and after about a month I was on Expert, starting from Easy.

I liked it a lot, and my friends played guitar and needed a bassist. So, I picked up a really cheap (Target, lol) bass that I'm learning on. I can move my fingers pretty fast, compared to when I tried to learn a song on my mom's old guitar.

I think it's helped me. I can keep time better, and I can stretch my fingers (That was my main complaint when I tried the first time)



Well, duh it doesn't teach you real guitar, but it does have elements that translate well into actual guitar. When I see people saying they'll never play Guitar Hero because it's just fake, I kinda laugh. It'd probably help their playing.

I don't click on stories that link to anything CNet.

Next month, we'll see an article about how tons of people quit playing guitar because it isn't remotely similar to the game. There are no colorful lights to follow, you can't be an expert after a month, no one is cheering when you get it right and no cash is flowing in the door. Plus, learning song notation isn't exactly cake. Sure, basics are fine, but the more advanced stuff tends to be confusing.

Next they have to work with real rythm and beat, keeping up with the exact timings of a metronome on the hundreds of different speed variations. Not to mention trying to get a handle of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and 1/16 beats under each of them as well as knowing how to deal with holding notes for lengthy times.

Next comes when the gamers' soft fingertips get torn apart by the E string, the muscles screaming when the fingers have to actually move into unusual positions Guitar Hero doesn't even come close to simulating while trying to those same underutilized muscles bend strings.

Not to mention trying to keep a tune. It is easy when all you have to do is match up colorful buttons to lights on the screen, but try and MAKE something that sounds good? There is a huge killer right there. The various rules about what actually sounds good together, from the basic blues chords up to Jimmi Hendrix are hard to keep together. It takes months to be able to do anything halfway decent in an impromptu blues chord, let alone pull out a Led Zeppelin song.

All of this difficulty takes months of hard work with zero rewards flowing in. No achievement points, no step-wise reward system to keep the player strumming away, nothing.

Now, if someone figured out how to make a six string, plug it into a console and get the game to do everything a guitar actually can do, then we would have a lot of excellent players. However, all Guitar Hero will manage to do is disillusion a lot of people about music when they can't "beat" it in a few short weeks. It takes a lifetime of commitment even the most die hard MMO players would have a hard time swallowing.

Why do I know all of this? Because I was a gamer who went to play guitar after enjoying the first Guitar Hero. I managed to stick with it and even after these years am only still marginal at best, barely squaking out a Normal rating in the game's nomenclature.

If you liked Guitar Hero 3 and want to pick up playing, know what you're getting into before dropping the hard earned cash on expensive tutors and expensive equipment. An El Cheapo Squire Fat Strat is twice as much as the entire game and included controller, not to mention the other necessary equipment and tutor fees.

i belive that the deline in rap/rnb music sales is proportionate to the acessabillity of the internet and ease of access to pirated music.
Demographic differences could also be directly relevant to how tech savvy and computer literate different genre listeners are.

Generally speaking rap/hip-hop/rnb listeners will be younger and your hard pressed to find youth today who dont know about file sharing networks or torrents. older rock fans though possibly computer iterate (since it is increasingly difficult to function in society without email) it is unlikely that they know of aforementioned pirate methods.


to sum up simply, USA today journalists would likely use record sales and iTunes store figures to base their argument where they havent given thought to the demographic that appeals to rap/hip-hop has descended to methods of acquiring music in ways that cant be traced, or if traced, difficult to obtain statistics

whoops,

forgot to add that my comment was for INCH75 vocals