Learn to Play the Guitar in a Guitar Video Game

Guitar video games are designed to turn players into musicians, allowing them to play a variety of songs using virtual instruments with real strings. These games are typically played with a special guitar-shaped controller, whose buttons correspond to specific notes on a virtual fret board. The player presses the correct buttons in time with the music, earning points and sometimes extra for certain techniques. These games are designed to emulate the experience of playing a musical instrument and require good timing in order to succeed, similar to the way that playing guitar or any musical instrument works.

The first Guitar Hero game was developed in 2005 by RedOctane, a company that specialized in creating unique gaming controllers. The success of the original game spurred the creation of several other musical titles based on the same concept. In 2006, the Guitar Hero series was expanded with the release of Guitar Hero II, while 2007 brought the additions of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock and Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s. These games added many new songs to the Guitar Hero library while also packaging drums and a microphone with the guitar, creating a full musical ensemble that competed against the competing Rock Band franchise.

In 2008, the game series was rebooted with Guitar Hero World Tour. This new entry used a different controller with a single row of five buttons rather than the previous four rows, allowing it to handle more complex chords and scales. It introduced a career mode that allowed players to complete shows with a full band, and a multiplayer competition called Battle of the Bands that pitted two teams of eight against each other. It also included a number of new minigames that were more focused on quick-play scoring and rewarded players with additional equipment for their Guitar Hero arsenal.

While the game does a very good job of teaching players to hit the correct buttons at the right time, it is very limited in its scope and can only teach the mechanics of the selected songs. The game cannot teach finger tone or feel, which are the factors that give a musician their own distinctive sound. For instance, a guitarist’s fingers may bend in certain ways or touch the string a little more hard than others, creating subtle changes to the note’s sound that make it uniquely their own.

Fortunately, there is another option that will allow people to learn to play the guitar in a way that will be much more like actual playing than either of the Guitar Hero or Rock Band titles. A guitar-shaped video game called Rocksmith, released in 2015, uses real electric guitars that connect to the Xbox One console and display their six strings on the screen. Its gameplay teaches the mechanics of each individual note by showing it on the fretboard and letting players press the appropriate button to play that specific note. The camera zooms dynamically to highlight the area on the fretboard that the player should be aiming for, replicating how a guitarist’s eyes move up and down the strings of an actual guitar as they perform a song.