Justin Aiken and Professor Lawrence Green
Background
Guitar Hero and Rock Band are two of the most successful video game franchises of all time – Guitar Hero alone has topped $2 billion in the first quarter of last year. In these games, a player mashes plastic buttons on a guitar shaped controller in time to notes scrolling across the screen. Rock Band added virtual drums to the game, letting would-be Ringos play with a handful of drum pads and a kick drum. Although you couldn’t learn to play the drums from playing the video game alone, people discovered that you could learn enough of the fundamentals to play basic beats and fills. Sadly, the would-be guitar players don’t receive this same kind of edge from the plastic toy controllers. For my project, we sought to use a real guitar to play these games.
Setup
instruments, synthesizers, and computers can communicate. I was able to write a driver script that took the MIDI data coming out of the guitar, and simulate video game button presses based on what notes the guitar was playing. There were some initial hurdles to overcome with the coding; the MIDI converter I was using (glovePIE) didn’t recognize the interface the guitar came in on – this took two additional programs (MIDIYoke and MIDI-OX) to channel the data in.
Next we had to figure out how to have the player actually play the game. We chose to use frets 5-9 on the guitar to simulate the five buttons in the game (Fig. 1). Our original intention was to have this be possible with any of the bottom three strings, so that the player could play more than one note at a time. This proved to be impractical, as the chord shapes used in the game felt too unnatural on a real guitar, so we decided to edit the songs we were using down to having only one note at a time. We then fed these button presses into Frets on Fire, a free open-source clone of Guitar Hero.
In Practice
We used three common guitar songs for the project: Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple, Iron Man by Black Sabbath, and More than a Feeling by Boston. I tried the game out first, playing through each of the songs a couple of times. I was delighted as a guitar player to see that I could get much higher scores using the real electric guitar versus using the Xbox 360 controller – I also found it more fun.
In fact, everyone that tried it found it to be very fun. After playing through the song in the game a few times, players did get better at some of the guitar techniques – their timing improved, they got better at picking the notes cleanly, their alternate picking improved, and some of them got a little bit faster. However, there were some skills that did not carry over to actually playing the song as was written. Learning the five note patterns from the song did little to help the players learn where to put their fingers when playing the chords, riffs, and licks the songs actually used.
In the end we all agreed that although playing the game was no substitute for real practice, playing the game with a real guitar was a much better way to spend time than playing with the toy, and would be a fun and effective way to augment regular practice. While being entertained, one could still be picking up muscle strength, dexterity, and picking technique.
The Future
I will be using this system personally in some of my guitar lessons. Some of my students are very dedicated, and practice often. But I have some students that lack the level of interest and dedication to practice daily. Letting them spend some time playing songs they like with this system will help them develop some needed physical skills, learn the form of the songs, and keep their interest up.
Harmonix, the publisher of Rock Band, have apparently decided that learning real skills is the future too. At the E3 conference on June 12th, they announced the upcoming Rock Band 3, which will now let players use a “real instrument” in the game. Although not actually a real guitar, it is much closer than the current generation; it has 17 fret buttons for each of the 6 strings (a total of 102 buttons!) and 6 real strings for picking. The future is bright for guitar playing gamers!
References
- http://www.gamespot.com/news/6209327.html
- http://www.oxmonline.com/article/features/presses/rock-bands-alex-rigopulos-oxm-interview
- http://www.gizmag.com/rock-band-3-real-instruments-rhythm-gaming/15391/