Can You Actually Learn How to Play Music From a Video Game?
I’ve been playing music games for the last 10 years and have been playing music for even longer, and I’m fascinated by how much you can learn from playing video games. Answer: Some, and in interesting ways.
I’m not in the camp of musicians who scoff at music games for not actually teaching music because Guitar Hero etc. They are all actually good for teaching some basic skills – and great for keeping things interesting people to rest. No game will make anyone a good musician, but it can be the start of a journey.
I’ve broken down the three major music video game franchises – Guitar Hero, Rock Band , and Rocksmith – in terms of what they can and can’t teach you.
Guitar Hero: Better than Nothing
The original Guitar Hero games are the least effective at teaching real music. On a real guitar, you play six string combinations at the 22nd or 24th fret. Guitar Hero controllers have the equivalent of one string and five frets. I didn’t do the math, but guitars have to be a gajillion times more complex than controllers, so there’s not much to convey here.
That doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to play the guitar with Guitar Hero . Holding the frets with one hand while playing with the other gives you the basic feeling of limb independence needed for real guitar playing, and it can also teach you rhythm. Through repetition, Guitar Hero can help you learn rhythm in a way that practice alone can’t. (Unless you use the metronome religiously, and we all know no one does.)
Band Hero, a spin- off of Guitar Hero , includes a drum kit and has the same major positives and negatives as the drums in Rock Band, detailed below.
Rock band: a little closer to real music
Rock Band ‘s musical instruments (guitars, keyboards, drums) offer more variety than a single Guitar Hero instrument, and the keyboard and drum controllers are much closer to their real-world counterparts than guitar controllers.
Keyboard
The Rock Band keyboard controller is a two-octave keypad-style keyboard. On the highest “Pro Keys” difficulty, you play the notes more or less in the song, or as close as you can get within a range of two octaves. So you can actually learn the keyboard parts on this instrument if you take the time, but there are a few important caveats.
Fingering : Rock Band doesn’t do anything to teach you how to play the keyboard effectively – there’s no manual on which fingers to use and when. This can lead to bad musical habits that are hard to break later. It doesn’t really matter to me, but I’m only interested in playing riffs in a garage techno band, not playing “serious” music.
Bass : One of the difficulties of learning to play the keyboard is the combination of the left hand, the bass part, with the right. “Real” piano learning involves both hands almost as soon as you start playing to build the habit, but Rock Band doesn’t play left hand parts. To be fair, a lot of real keyboard parts don’t do this either.
Listening : Rock Band doesn’t let you hear what you’re actually playing. You’re basically triggering the music from a song with keystrokes, so there’s no nuance: hold down a note too long, Rock Band won’t recognize it. Are some parts too loud and others too quiet? He will not be heard. Also: It’s a game, so rhythm hit boxes are forgiving – you can consistently drag or lead the rhythm and still score without knowing you’re playing at the wrong time.
Drums
In terms of transferable skills, Rock Band drums are suitable for beginners. The controller consists of four drum heads and a pedal that plays the bass drum. It’s like playing drums on an electronic kit because it’s true: you can turn a Rock Band kit into functional electronic drum pads by soldering a few wires together .
But does it teach you how to play the drums? Something like. The main goal of beginner drummers is to develop your sense of rhythm, and Rock Band will cement in your body memory to “play on time” rather than not play Rock Band , although it still allows you to play casually.
These are drum pluses. Here are the drum negatives.
Limb Independence : Rock Band drums require three limbs; real drums require four. The game does not take into account the foot you control your hi-hat with. So it’s definitely useful, but not everything you need.
Technique : Rock Band (and Band Hero ) don’t teach drum mechanics: how to hold the sticks, how to control their rebound, etc. So you can easily get into bad habits that you have to give up later on. .
Listening : You really need to hear yourself when you play drums. Before playing with other people, you need to be able to control your volume and intensity, and you need to know when you’re playing out of time, even a little bit, and Rock Band won’t let you do either. It won’t teach you how to blend in with a bass player or how to drive a band’s engine. He won’t teach you how to move into your girlfriend’s apartment because you’ve been evicted from yours too, and real drummers should know that.
Creativity : My friend is a very good drummer, but he can’t play the Rock Band drums to save his life because the concept of playing the “right” drum at the “right” time conflicts with how he handles his instrument. Rock Band doesn’t have the “I play amazing drums, just not the ones you tell me I should play” setting. Instead, he punishes you for any creativity. More on this below.
Bas-guitar
You don’t need a game or any lessons to learn how to play the bass because basically it’s so easy it’s like a joke. (Shots, bassists!)
Rocksmith: Seriously; learn more-at
Ubisoft’s Rocksmith and the newly launched Rockstmith+ subscription service are on the edge between “music lessons” and “playing”. They contain interactive instructions and some mini-games, but here I will focus on the main game – gamified music learning is very different from music games.
The core Rocksmith game is essentially Guitar Hero with a real guitar: you use any electric guitar or bass as your “controller” and your scores are based on following exactly the guitar or bass lines of thousands of songs. Because you play real guitar, Rocksmith is a lot harder to master than Guitar Hero or Rock Band, but once you put in hundreds of hours, you can play the real guitar part from The Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction. ”
Overall, Rocksmith is great for beginners. When you’re first starting out, playing the guitar is awkward —it’s an unnatural way to move your fingers, and it’s uncomfortable to hold the instrument. Fluency (and calluses) is only achieved through repetition, and Rocksmith will gradually teach you how to shape your fingers into song chords, how not to mute other strings, how to use a pick, and more. This will help you learn how to comfortably hold and use the guitar, and all this will transfer directly to playing music for real. Something like.
The core Rocksmith game won’t teach you any of the subtleties that separate good guitarists from bad ones – for that, you need to focus on how your technique affects your sound, which is hard to do while you’re trying not to fail. from a song in a video game.
However, you can at least hear yourself playing the guitar in Rocksmith , although you can also hear the guitar from the recorded music tracks. It’s confusing until you get used to it and/or play around with the levels so you’re loud enough to hear the “band”. Beginners will probably not make these adjustments because it will degrade their sound.
Then there is a backlog. I played Rocksmith on console (PC should be better) and found that hitting a note and hearing it in milliseconds made the game almost unplayable. I fixed this by splitting my guitar’s signal so I could hear myself through my own amp and still run the game, but I didn’t expect a beginner to even know they needed to do that. My guess is that most beginner guitarists either give up in desperation or make up for it by hitting notes too early—probably without even knowing it. This is not good for real world play.
Creativity is the missing ingredient in all these games.
For me, the most interesting thing about making music is not memorizing and repeating the notes and patterns that make up a song; it comes together and makes strange noises with my friends in the garage. Musical theory, practice and technique are just tools to make strange sounds more interesting.
These games (especially Guitar Hero and Rock Band ) are designed to mimic the feeling of making music with friends, and they do a great job of it. However, they are not really intended for teaching music, and this is not to be expected. Players can learn a few useful skills as they play, but more importantly, there is a generation of young guitarists who have been inspired to pick up real instruments after mastering guitar controllers, and that inspiration is arguably the most important musical lesson of all.
(In fact, “learning to play on time” is the most important musical lesson of all.)