On being a guitar hero

By Todd Stadler · Friday, January 2, 2009 2:14pm

Unlike a great many nerdy white 30-something males, I don't play Guitar Hero very much.

It's not that I don't like the game, but rather that I don't play video games much at all, unless you count whatever the Hasbro lawyers have allowed to remain on Facebook of a game that resembles, but emphatically is not, Scrabble. This lack of gaming may have something to do with my lack of an actual video game system like an XBox or a Wii.

Anyhow, for those not familiar with it (and let me just say to you that I'm impressed you even found my blog), Guitar Hero is one of a series of recent video games that I'll call "reality games" (for lack of a better term), given that they involve the approximation of a real-world skill, rather than the contrived manipulation of some bizarre collection of switches.

In Guitar Hero, you hold a controller that looks like a guitar, only with different-colored "fret" buttons on the neck instead of strings. There's a switch that approximates strumming up and down, and even a whammy bar.

Like most reality games, the object is to do something (or several somethings) at a particular time — you're judged on your precision. In Guitar Hero, you're supposed to hold down one or more colored buttons and "strum" at a given time as you listen to popular rock songs. In Rock Band, a similar game, there are similar guitars, as well as a five-piece drum set of sorts and even a microphone, all of which is similarly judged on getting the right "notes" at the right time. Cleverly, when you are performing poorly, the sound being played, instead of being the correct instrumentation for the song, sounds bad, which is better feedback than some on-screen meter reading "poor" (though there is that, as well).

Anyhow, I've recently had occasions to play both Guitar Hero and Rock Band, and I have come to this conclusion: I am not as good at these games as I would have thought.

This surprised me a bit, because I fancy myself a musician — or at least a decent drummer. I'm no great shakes on the guitar, but I know how one works and I can hack out a few tunes on one. Still, even if it makes sense that I'm not only so-so at Guitar Hero, you'd think I would be pretty good at the drums on Rock Band.

But here's the problem: unlike those who are good at these games (and who aren't necessarily even musically knowledgeable), I tend to think far too much about what I'm being told to do. I've seen people who are good at these reality games, and there's no way they're consciously processing the rapid set of complex instructions in time to actually carry them out.

All you have to do is head down to Wunderland to watch the kids play Dance Dance Revolution (or whatever they have there now) on the top-secret top level to know what I'm talking about. No way are they actually thinking, "Left arrow — that means move my left foot to the side." It just goes straight in the optic nerve, bypasses the brain (or at least most of it), and heads on down to the leg muscles.

Or that's how it seems to me. Of course, I was always especially bad at Dance Dance Revolution because it seemed like it was trying to teach me to dance — something that, if I'm any good at it, it's because I was making it up as I went along, not because I was following any set of instructions.

Anyhow, rather than simply seeing a series of colored dots on the Guitar Hero screen and attempting to move my hands in time with them, I too often ask myself, "What are those dots trying to get me to do?" By which I mean not merely "which buttons should I press?", but "What rhythm are they trying to get me to play? How does it fit into the song? What part of what I'm hearing am I supposed to move in sync with?"

This high-level thinking does little to actually help me do well at the game, especially when the notes are coming fast enough that there's only time for near-subconscious reaction.

All of which is a nice way to make me feel better for doing worse at the game than video gamers with no musical talent — you see, I'm simply thinking too hard. Because I'm so musically talented that it's hindering my gaming skills. Something like that. The point is that, if I can't be exceptional in one way, it must be that my other exceptional qualities are overpowering that one way. I'm too good at music to be good at games that merely make a mockery of making music. Right?

But it's not just that. Games like Guitar Hero remind me of nothing so much in my musical training as sight-reading (that is, where you're given a piece of sheet music you've never seen before and are asked to perform it right away). These games just take it one step further, where the sheet music, as it were, is revealed to you just a second or two before you have to play it.

I'm fascinated by this, because sight-reading was always the least favorite part of any musical competition I was in. That video game companies have now turned the act of sight-reading into a bestselling pop-culture sensation — and not only that, but one tied to the machismo of guitar rock — is not something I would have otherwise predicted.

This was driven home to me when playing the drums on Rock Band at a friend's house. I was attempting to play at Medium level for a Nirvana song, and I was doing poorly. The easier the level is, the more of the actual "notes" in a song it leaves out, and I couldn't figure out what subset of Dave Grohl's drum part that it wanted me to play.

My friend suggested that I try playing it on Expert level, where the dots on the screen pretty much correspond one-for-one with the actual part. I won't say I got 100% of the notes, but I did surprisingly well, given how many notes there were to play. And this was because I knew the song well enough that I was basically playing the part as I would on a real drumset, and pretty much ignoring the screen entirely. I was eschewing the sight-reading and was instead playing along to a song.

All of which is just another way to try to elevate my perceived musical skills, again: I can just, you know, intuit a drum part on Rock Band. Yay, me?

But enough about me. Here are some other things I've learned while playing Guitar Hero:

• Living Colour's Cult of Personality is an amazing song, no less powerful almost two decades later. Apparently, Living Colour recorded a new version of the song just for the game, and I actually like the newer version better.
• Oddly, I can find nobody on the Web talking about the opening notes of the guitar solo on Foghat's "Slow Ride", which always sound to me like the "look away, look away, look away" section from (I Wish I Was in) Dixie. Is it just me?
• Apparently, I honestly cannot tell the difference between a serious song by Judas Priest and one by semi-satirical Tenacious D. This means something, though it's probably not favorable to Judas Priest.
• I also thought I was the first person ever to notice that the first nine notes of Clapton's solo in Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love" are the tune to "Blue Moon", but that was because I mistakenly thought the song was called "Sunshine of My Love" in my search terms. Now that I have the title right, I see that lots of people have noticed this. The "Blue Moon" lick isn't in the same key or mode as the rest of the song, so it's not too obvious (here my lack of music theory hinders my understanding). I was excited to have discovered this, though, with the joke apparently being a moon/sun comparison.
• I am a closet guitar ham, by which I mean that when I play Guitar Hero, I really like to rock out as much as possible, arching up on my tip-toes to reach the top (orange) note in that solo, gracefully swinging the whammy bar in for a few knocks on that sustained note and then tossing it aside, and generally acting like an ass, but enjoying the heck out of it. Real gamers, on the other hand, stand rock-still, which probably helps their accuracy, even if it makes them look like shoe-gazing emo kids.