Wanna be a Guitar Hero?

Many of you may be familiar with a video game known as Guitar Hero, well they have just come out with a second one titled Guitar Hero 2, clever I know. Anywho I have the luxury of being good friends with my neighbors, and they have the luxury of being able to afford both of these games. So once in a while I step over next door, and if they aren’t playing it at the time, which they usually are, it doesn’t take a whole lot to get them to fire it up. The game controller has five “fret” buttons, a strum bar, and a whammy bar. It is basically a guitarist’s version of Dance Dance Revolution. The fret buttons are different colors, and during songs you have to hold down the corresponding button, or buttons, and strum the bar. You get more points for chords, flawless streaks, and using the whammy bar. The concept that I want to throw out there is that this is actually a decently effective training tool towards picking up a real guitar. It teaches you note related hand eye coordination, and what I think helps best is the rhythm. Your strumming has to be right on, and rhythm is a vital part of guitar playing. Another thing I would recommend doing is learning a song on the game that sounds like it should be learnable on real guitar. Learn it note for note, chord for chord until you have mastered it on the expert level. Then pick up your real guitar and sit down and try to study tablature or notation to that song. You will find that the song comes along much faster, because you already know the rhythm and how many notes go where, it is just about translating it onto your real fretboard. I am not saying to do nothing but play the game by all means, but I am saying that it can most definitely be more that just a video game. Just click this for Guitar Hero's official site.