Guitar Hero is still maintaining attention - perhaps the only game this year so far that’s driven me far enough to want to attempt things I’ve failed over and over again until I can do them. One problem with playing so many games is that when things get difficult it’s all too easy to give up and start the next game ad infinitum - Halo, Outrun 2 and this have successfully avoided such a fate so far though.
Guitar Hero’s Easy and Normal modes are almost a way of easing you into the ‘proper’ game - the guitar controller has five fret buttons, and Easy mode uses only three; Normal mode four. Hard mode uses all five and Expert is just ridiculous. However, in Easy and Normal you have no problems with hand placement on the neck - you have four fingers (unless you are unlucky or stupid) and these rest on the first four frets respectively.
The problem you’re likely to encounter in Normal mode is the fact that using your pinky may seem a little difficult - the same applies to anything similar, be it typing or other finger-intensive tasks. Your index and middle fingers (and your thumb, for what it’s worth) have a tendon each - your ring finger and pinky share a tendon, which is the main reason why they are more difficult to use for precision tasks than your first two fingers. Thankfully the required amount of dexterity is easy enough to build up, though it may take a few sessions before you’re able to play comfortably for an extended period.
Moving on to hard is where the game’s design decisions really begin to show. Here, the number of frets outnumber your fingers, and it’s taken some clever design in the note placement in-game to bring out the similarities between playing a real guitar and playing the game.
Above is the scale pattern for a major scale, as played on a real guitar (cheekily pinched from cyberfret.com, which just happened to be the first hit on Google for “guitar scale”). To put it in perspective, the vertical lines are the frets and the horizontal ones signify strings - the blobs signify where a note should be played, and reds for octaves. The numbers in the blobs tell you which finger to use.
To put it in a Guitar Hero perspective - on the sixth string you would play red with your middle finger then blue with your pinky; on the fifth string, green with your index finger, red with your middle finger, blue with your pinky; etc. Obviously there is no definition of strings in Guitar Hero but this brings in the concept of positioning - playing on the first four frets of a real guitar is called playing in the ‘first position’, and thus playing with your index finger on green, middle on red and so forth in Guitar Hero will be the same.
The second position would involve starting to play the same shape on the neck from the second fret; the third position from the third fret; the seventh position from the seventh fret… I think you can see where I’m going with this. This is usually marked above sheet music in Roman numerals - obviously there is no need in tablature. But I digress, back to Guitar Hero… once the fifth fret comes into play, having a knowledge of positioning is beneficial - at first it’s pretty tempting to just stretch your little finger whenever an orange note comes along, but soon after the first few tracks you’ll realise that’s not possible to maintain as an effective method.
So, you’ll be wanting to use the second position - that is with your index finger on red, middle finger on yellow, ring finger on blue and pinky on orange. Guitar Hero’s design is such that the game is intended to feel as much like playing a real guitar as can possibly be managed by using a 3/4 sized Gibson SG with buttons and a flappy thing to resemble strings and nothing in the way of tonewoods; only plastic.
Thankfully for the most part, the game succeeds in doing this - the best song to see the obvious effect with is “I Wanna Be Sedated” by The Ramones on Hard. The first half of the song is played in the first position until the inevitable punk song key change occurs - and from then on, the rest of the song is played in the second position, just like on a real guitar.
Similarly, many of the fast solos in the game adopt a similar technique - most parts are in bursts of three notes and while they will take a while to get the hang of, most of the difficulty involved is in nailing the timing and knowing which fingers to use depending on your position (an art in itself) rather than having to zip around the neck at lightning speed. Whilst your fingers will be moving fast your entire hand won’t have to move about that much.
Whilst there’s loads of nice little touches in Guitar Hero, such as the hammer-ons and pull-offs, which amusingly I am rubbish at, to the fact that on single notes you can have lower frets on the neck held down with no detrimental effect (for instance, on a single yellow note you can keep red and/or green held down too, but not blue or orange) - the element of positioning is the thing that impressed me most, and for me is certainly the one thing that makes Guitar Hero valid to an extent as being similar to ‘the real thing’.
For a game which has the sole purpose of enabling people to rock, that’s no bad thing.
