Guitar Hero/Rockstar–Bad for my business?

Ha! You thought I was going to post a rant about how I’d lost all my guitar students to a video game, didn’t you? Nope, business is just fine, other than the early summer chaos that kicks in when regulars go on vacation and new blood comes to ME for a guitar vacation.

But like many musicians I wasn’t thrilled when I first heard about Guitar Hero. Why would you want to play a pretend guitar when a real one is so much more fulfilling over the long term? John Mayer rips into the game in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, saying it brings guitar playing to the masses without having to put anything into it. I doubt he really cares as much as the blogs and tabloids are going off on it, but it looks like he still said it. Then I was reading an SF Gate article about this actor, Adam Jennings, who does motion capture work for the Guitar Hero games (makes the faces & stuff they animate into the characters). I clicked on the comments, noting that the first several were from jealous puds who didn’t think his facial expressions were very talented (as if the four pictures used in the article were the ONLY ones he made for the game), people suggesting the practice of a real guitar instead of a plastic one, and my favorite, the guy who suggested they attach motion capture sensors to other parts of Steven Tyler’s body (his nose and, ahem, other places) to capture a real rockstar’s backstage experience.

Then there are the musicians who get bent out of shape at bars giving up their open mic nights for Rock Band/Guitar Hero nights where people can get up on stage and jam with the video games. Threads on some of my guitar player websites have gone goofy about this, players threatened at their supposed right to play crappy blues and acoustic dreck for the thousandth time, as if the video game has replaced open mic night forever. I wonder if their parents were threatened the same way thirty years ago when Pac Man was popular.

If anyone was going to be threatened by Guitar Hero it was ME because I pay my bills teaching real guitar. I was annoyed a bit at the punks who admitted they were playing the game hours a day and practicing half hour a week, but then something changed when a student–fourteen-years-old–asked me to teach him The Police song “Message in a Bottle”.

“How did you hear this cool song by one of the greatest bands of all time?” I asked. (See yesterday’s post.)

His response? “I heard it in Guitar Hero.”

And so it continued. Gimme Three Steps, Cult of Personality, Smoke on the Water, all these killer rock songs the kids would never have heard (or at least appreciated) until they experienced it in a video game. Dragonforce owes a big chunk of their recent success to having their song “Through the Fire and Flames” included in the game. There are countless videos on Youtube of dudes videotaping themselves beating the expert level, proof of their achievement for the world to see. Think that’s funny? Check out the number of times these videos have been viewed….50,000, 200,000! Some of my students make & watch these videos. Hey, it beats tagging the neighborhood with those dumb scribbles.

I was tempted to make a video of myself shredding on guitar all Guitar Hero-like…but then I saw the South Park that made fun of the game. Stan (or is it Kyle’s?) Dad, Randy, starts playing a Guitar Hero song on real guitar, gets mocked by the kids. That would be me.