Many people will be familiar with – or at least have heard of – the very popular games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, which are available for all the current consoles. These games allow you to ‘play’ songs on a plastic guitar replica, alone or with friends, and Rock Band has extra instruments including drums and keyboard. The musical controllers themselves are simplified versions of the instruments in question – the Guitar Hero controller has five notes, a strum bar and a whammy bar, as well as a sensor that activates a bonus when you lift the controller so the neck is vertical, akin to a rock star-style jump. The game includes hammer-ons and pull-offs, chords and sustained notes where the whammy bar can be used to full effect, to increase your score and provide some texture.
The game itself is surprisingly sophisticated, and requires very precise timing to hit the notes. If you miss too many, the song ends and you are informed that “You Suck!”; if you complete the song, you are informed that “You Rock!” and are awarded a rating of 3-5 stars based on your score. The notation used is a sort of scrolling tab, going from the lowest note (top of fretboard and left of screen) to highest (bottom of fretboard and right of screen). The notes are not named, but this gives a rudimentary demonstration of the piano keyboard layout, with pitches rising from left to right, and the same idea on guitar of higher notes being lower down the neck. There are bar lines on the screen, which are not explicitly labelled as such but can be identified by someone who knows what they’re looking for.
It’s not a real guitar, and if you’re good at Guitar Hero that doesn’t automatically mean you can play the guitar; conversely, and more surprisingly, being able to play a real guitar does not mean you will immediately excel at Guitar Hero. I would argue that someone with musical experience is likely to improve more quickly at this sort of game, but it has its own special techniques and like any video game (or other skill) it needs some practice to be good at it.
While Guitar Hero and Rock Band are probably the most famous video games which use instrument-style controllers, they are by no means the first. There have been a number of games over the years which have attempted to capture instruments, with varying levels of both practical and financial success. I’m going to look at four of them in detail: the Miracle Piano Teaching System, Donkey Konga, Samba de Amigo and Wii Music. I’m not going to look at the dancing games (Dance Dance Revolution and the various spinoffs) as while they teach rhythm and have considerable merit in that they got gamers to exercise while playing ten years before Wii Fit they’re about dancing rather than playing music.
I’ll be looking at each of these games as a case study, giving a brief overview of its time and place in gaming history, what the game involves and assessing it for musical and pedagogical value. Video games seem to be a pet peeve of some teachers (music and other) as they are seen to be distracting kids from practising and engaging in worthwhile pursuits. Phillip Johnston’s Nintendo Practice, explaining how the method employed to play platform games reflects good practice technique, is a very good post to read for teachers who question the pedagogical value of video games in general; hopefully this series of posts will shine some light on the video games we should be encouraging our young musicians towards. And just in case you’re still not convinced that video games have any merit: there are pro leagues which pay out thousands and thousands of dollars in prize money, with competitions aimed at younger players awarding college scholarships. If that’s not of educational value I don’t know what is.
