I was at a party the other day, and as with any party with 20 somethings, there were video games. It was decided that we play Guitar Hero. I have heard good and bad about this game. From "they should go play a real instrument" to "it gives people a foundation in rhythm."
So we start playing, and everyone is on "hard" and being quite successful, while I am on "easy" and failing miserably, hitting every button a fraction of time too fast. After the song, I give up, dissatisfied with my "performance".
A while later, it is found that the delay was on by accident (used for HDTVs) and that, in fact, the sound was too fast relative to the display. This discrepancy in timing only affected me, a play-by-ear intermediate musician.
Conclusion: Guitar Hero does not teach rhythm - it teaches to press a coloured button when that colour appears on the screen. Wasted time that could otherwise be spent with a real instrument.
I just finished reading "Guitar Zero" by Gary Marcus after seeing a recomendation for it on this forum. Gary is a cognitive scientist and a professor of psychology and this book chronicles his effort to learn guitar. He discribed himself as having no natural sense of rhythm. He found that Guitar Hero help him to acquire enough rhythm to be able to eventually play with a band.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone learning ot teaching music.
I enjoy Guitar Hero with wired controllers(no delay) but hated Rock Band. I wanted to "fire" my non-musician friends from our "rock band" because their timing was so bad. ---------- 12gagedan's YouTube Channel
Can someone rig up a harmonica version with 10 scrolling lines and the possibility of 2 colours per line to represent blows and draws. And perhaps a little whammy bar appendage for bends.
Rocksmith is actually worth atleast something if you have a console and guitar.
You plug in a guitar and learn and the difficulty ramps up as you get better.
The beginning is a joke but once it has a lock on where you are skillwise it ramps up a lot. I have played guitar since I was a kid so ramping it up was easy.
Atleast my tv doesn't lag and the game is reasonably specific about intonation of bends.
Last Edited by on Apr 15, 2012 6:27 AM
I started a project just like that a year or two ago, I made the graphics OK, but got bogged down with programming the note recognition. I might resurrect the idea now you've reminded me...
as youth advisor on an annual habitat trip, i got to listen to a whole slew of teenage boys bragging about how great they were on guitar hero. i asked them if any of them played guitar, and none did. i wrote it off as a waste of time.
but the next year, several of them had started playing real guitar, and the year after that, they were pretty good. so maybe it has some value after all.
