Can Rock Band 3 teach you to play a real guitar?

[hepcat]

I Wanna Rock!

Can Rock Band 3's new, more realistic controller make me a real-life guitar god?

By Nina Shen Rastogi

Posted Friday, Oct. 29, 2010, at 12:24 PM ET

As rock-and-roll guitar fantasies go, mine are relatively modest. I would just like to be able to play Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" someday, perhaps around a campfire. So last year, I went to my local Guitar Center, bought myself a Yamaha Junior—my elf-like hands being too tiny for a grownup guitar—and settled in with a few teach-yourself-guitar books.

I lasted all of two weeks. Sitting alone in my apartment, plonking away in a vacuum—it just felt too much like a chore. Junior has spent the last 12 months on top of a pile of CDs behind the couch.

If books couldn't help me, then how about a video game? Rock Band 3, which came out this week, features an optional, $149 axe that's more akin to a real-life guitar than the game's classic, guitar-shaped controller. While I'm no gaming master, I was willing to give the Xbox method a shot. At the very least, I could pretend to be a champion shredder without aurally assaulting my friends and neighbors.

While the Rock Band franchise has been a big hit since its debut in 2007, it has also faced criticism for failing to capture what it's really like to play an instrument. After all, you played the original guitar controller by pressing five buttons on the neck and strumming a bar that looked like a big light switch. (You use the same controller to play the bass line.) As real-life rock star Carrie Brownstein put it in her Slate review, Rock Band bears about as much resemblance to guitar-playing as Operation does to performing surgery.

Rock Band 3 aims to change that by adding a "pro mode," which vows to take players "into the realm of real musicianship." The key to pro mode is the schmancy "Fender™ Mustang™ PRO-Guitar™ Controller," which has a mind-boggling 102 buttons on the neck—one for each fingering position on a 17-fret, six-string instrument. The light-switch-esque strum bar has been replaced with a set of strings. While this new-fangled faux guitar is still plastic and feather-light, it makes the old controller look like a Tinkertoy. (Rock Band's drum expansion kit, meanwhile, has three improved cymbals, and the brand-new keyboard covers two full octaves.)

I was first introduced to the new guitar at the offices of MTV Games, the publisher of Rock Band. (The game was developed by Harmonix, the controllers by Mad Catz.) Even there, surrounded by several friendly PR folks, the device seemed infernally complicated and the onscreen notation abstruse. In classic Rock Band mode, the screen shows a five-lane highway; as little gemlike bars come speeding down their respective lanes, you press the corresponding colored button and then "strum" at the precise moment the bar reaches the bottom of the screen. In pro mode, the five lanes become six strings and the bars become little colored squares bearing a number from 0 to 17, indicating which strings to press and pluck. Though I tried playing along with the seasoned MTV folks, I couldn't help feeling like I was in the middle of a cocktail party being conducted in Cantonese. (I had a little more success on keys, largely because what you see onscreen is a straightforward representation of the actual keyboard—there's less translation involved between your eyes and your fingers.)

Once I got the game and the guitar home for a little private time, things got better. Rock Band 3 has an extensive set of lessons in its training mode—I started with note basics, which taught me how to play open strings before adding in frets. I'm currently stuck on basic power chords—thankfully, you can slow the lessons down while you practice—but I could eventually work my way up to major and minor seventh chords and arpeggiation.

While this is all pretty standard guitar-lesson material, Rock Band 3 has some advantages over those teach-yourself programs I'd been using. For one thing, I like that it encourages my plodding attempts. When you make it through a round without making a mistake, a big "100%" bursts on the screen; when you master the whole exercise, you are cheered and applauded. Those little carrots keep things fun, but the interactivity also makes for a better teaching tool. The six-string map shows you where your fingers are at all times, which helps you self-correct, and the game can also be set to pause a lesson whenever it senses you're screwing up too much. Text instructions show up on the right-hand side of the screen, and an image of the fretboard pops up on top. You can see where your fingers are and where they're supposed to be; when you connect with the right position, you hear a satisfying little plink!

http://www.slate.com/id/2272761/pagenum/2

I don't see this helping anyone learn guitar, but the fact that you can get a stringed MIDI guitar for so cheap is definitely something I'm checking out. (MIDI is a way of recording digital notes instead of actual audio, then you can manipulate it with different sounds put to it or changing the time, length, velocity, etc - very cool to do with a guitar over a keyboard)

[iamcline]

It will make the positioning a bit easier, but that is it. There are way too many variations for Rock Band to teach someone how to play guitar. So much muscle memory required, accuracy, etc...even after 7 years of playing I still feel like there is so much to learn.

[hepcat]

It will make the positioning a bit easier, but that is it. There are way too many variations for Rock Band to teach someone how to play guitar. So much muscle memory required, accuracy, etc...even after 7 years of playing I still feel like there is so much to learn.

Yea I agree, takes a lot of practice and muscle memory to get good at guitar. But I like the technology behind it. I'm a pretty good guitar player and I'm just curious to see what would happen on that stringed MIDI guitar if I played a Doc Watson song and tried to record the MIDI out from it. (look him up if you haven't heard of him...almost made me quit playing guitar)

[Captroop]

Why don't they just make a guitar cable that plugs into your game console instead of an amp, so you can actually learn guitar while you play? Honestly it can't be that hard. And whoever finds out how to make that interface will make a billion dollars.

[hepcat]

Why don't they just make a guitar cable that plugs into your game console instead of an amp, so you can actually learn guitar while you play? Honestly it can't be that hard. And whoever finds out how to make that interface will make a billion dollars.

Much harder than you'd think. Difference is digital versus analog audio. If it's going into a computer or game system, it's gotta be digital. A real guitar is analog. That stringed MIDI guitar is as close as you're going to get. Might just get better detail as it advances, because my assumption now is that it's pretty shoddy at picking up even medium difficulty licks.

[Captroop]

Much harder than you'd think. Difference is digital versus analog audio. If it's going into a computer or game system, it's gotta be digital. A real guitar is analog. That stringed MIDI guitar is as close as you're going to get. Might just get better detail as it advances, because my assumption now is that it's pretty shoddy at picking up even medium difficulty licks.

I don't think it's that hard. You can convert analog to digital. Rock band is able to judge the tone of the player singing vocals. In a way, vocals are in fact analog. How much harder would it be to judge if a strummed note was correct or not?

[hepcat]

I don't think it's that hard. You can convert analog to digital. Rock band is able to judge the tone of the player singing vocals. In a way, vocals are in fact analog. How much harder would it be to judge if a strummed note was correct or not?

Well duh we can convert digital to audio...that's how most music is recorded nowadays. But that is more costly and unnessesarily difficult to do than using a MIDI guitar - which is much more simple. Instead of having to recognize a reproduced sample of an analog waveform from a guitar string being plucked, it just gets sent the information from a spot on the fretboard that represents a note(or notes). Much easier and cost effective for the majority of people using this technology, especially if the MIDI guitar uses strings like a real guitar and can tell where you put your fingers...it's just pointless to do it the other way and far more expensive. It's basically what you're asking...the cord coming out of the guitar just isn't quarter inch but a DIN (MIDI) cable.

[Hawk]

might help with getting the rhythm etc...but can't see it helping alot

[rodeo]

answer: no

[natty]

If you want to learn how to do something you have to do it. Simple as that.

Most people will give up learning once their fingers start hurting. When I learned I was 13 and played for hours and hours until I thought my fingers were going to fall off.

[hepcat]

If you want to learn how to do something you have to do it. Simple as that.

Most people will give up learning once their fingers start hurting. When I learned I was 13 and played for hours and hours until I thought my fingers were going to fall off.

Truth, truth. Gotta play through the pain. But once you get those nice calysts, playing is fun. I'm primarily a bass player - had a weekly gig at a place in town and through practice and gigs my right hand middle finger spent two months with a huge black blood blister on it. But now I can drag my fingers across a brick wall without even a scrape.

[Carolina Husker]

Yes absolutely. Air guitar helps too.

[Doyle]

No. But the Rock Band concept to teach guitar could. I bet anything someone is working on the concept now and will be available in a few years. This coming from a guitar player.