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Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1779 Joined: 13 Dec 2007     | |
Copy Clerk  Posts: 82 Joined: 16 Mar 2008   | It's not something to be proud of in public. If they act like it's a way greater accomplishment than it is, let them down gently. If they're arrogant about it, burn them. If they're complete douchnozzles who think it makes them better than other people, bludgeon them with the nearest heavy object. It's for the good of mankind. |
Paperboy  Posts: 45 Joined: 18 Jan 2008 | when people brag, yes its very annoying, but if he was just bragging to his friends that also play GH then so what, he wasnt trying to 1-up a real guitar player. |
Paperboy  Posts: 30 Joined: 20 Mar 2008  | yeah, ive been playing bass for a few years, and its fun, and im not bad at it. i also play guitar hero, im not great at it, but i found it helped my fingering a bit, i find it does require a certain amount of skill to play guitar hero really well, but its not like you can write your own songs and play in front of people, so i guess what im saying is although guitar hero takes skill and raining blood is impressive on expert, your still just a big video game nerd haha and on a side note, in case anyone thinks im a jerk for that last comment, ogre battle 64 is my favorite game of all time, so have at it hahaha |
Anonymous Source Posts: 3 Joined: 26 Mar 2008 | The problem with many of the analogies given in this thread is that they neglect the artistic and creative side of both creating new and playing existing music on guitar. There is a joy in creating great music from scratch and, for me, a sense of release that is hard to describe. But, when i hear someone bragging about how good they are in Guitar Hero i feel like they are indirectly cheapening the guitar experience. Its the equivalent to how an artist would feel hearing some guy brags about his ability to paint by numbers. Truth be told, it does take some skill to paint by numbers, but it is but a pale imitation of learning how to paint and creating work yourself, even when all you are doing is copying someone elses work. That aspect aside, Guitar Hero is insanely popular for a good reason. Its a fun game, and getting expert on some songs is pretty tough - so in itself, such an acheivement is good. However, comparing Guitar Hero skills to real guitar skills is kinda like comparing the ability to pick up girls in a dating game to picking up girls in real life.. its much more fun in real life, and the rewards for success are infintely better. |
Anonymous Source Posts: 1 Joined: 27 Mar 2008 | I'd love to point out that I was great at GH and RB for quite some time. Even won a tourny and got a good bit of cash. But then I got a real guitar, and I realized that the better I got at a real guitar... the more I suck at GH/RB. I still practice the same amount on both, but to make higher notes my hand just wants to much further down. Now, a few months later, I've been reduced to only four staring (Thats doing OK for those that aren't GH fluent) some songs on expert. The thing is, I play GH / RB just to feel cool and have some motivation to actually learn the damn thing, because plucks/wails of a real guitar isn't all to inspiring... Plus, it -is- a really good way to blow off steam if you manage, god forbid, to 100% a song. |
Copy Clerk  Posts: 95 Joined: 27 Mar 2008   | I dont really understand why so many people who play guitar get so defensive about Guitar Hero. Sure, lots of people brag about 5 starring Metalica on expert, but no one really takes it all that seriously. I can play a little guitar (meaning i can play Mr. Tamborine man and thats about it) so, yes guitar nuts, i understand real guitar is harder. But thats the point, the game is just for fun, it makes you feel like a rock god for a bit, and thats it. |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1869 Joined: 4 Nov 2007     |
Oh god did I laugh. And as an ex-piano player I can understand that pain, too.
The analogies are a bit off but not totally. Fighting is a skill, too; one that many soldiers are proud of. Combat is an experience as well; one that some must feel cheapened by some teenager bragging about his 1337 Halo 5ki11z. They'd still be prickish to shove a gun into an average FPS player's hand and say "dazzle me". |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 3824 Joined: 26 Feb 2008    |
I can't play it on Guitar Hero or a real Guitar.... So I agree. That is like someone kicking my ass at Gran Turismo (Cold day in hell...) And then saying that they are a better driver, even though they don't have a license... I can do stuff in an underpowered 1990 Mazda pickup that some streetracers can't do in their souped-up rice racers. Anyone ever drifted an 80 horsepower truck before? I thought not. |
Paperboy  Posts: 23 Joined: 2 Feb 2008   | The only time I find it truly irritating is when they claim that it's harder than real guitar, and that it takes more skill. Because it really doesn't. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 3824 Joined: 26 Feb 2008 | Okay, having read through the full thread... If they are bragging that they beat you, yeah, they got you, good for them. Bragging with their fellow "Guitar Heros," good for them, let them have their moment in the flashlight. Bragging that they are better than you? Lay them out verbally and protractedly... |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1869 Joined: 4 Nov 2007 |
That is so cool I just might faint at the sheer awesome. Could you give me driving lessons? |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 3824 Joined: 26 Feb 2008 | I would, except for the fact that what I do is highly illegal... And I never plan my sessions, I just find roads that have the perfect lack of traffic in the middle of the night... Although the freeways here are nice and straight and have no traffic at 3 AM... |
Gone Gonzo  Posts: 1555 Joined: 7 Mar 2008  |
actually the analogies are spot on that we're bringing up. just because it has nothing to do with the "creative aspect" of playing a guitar, it has parallels to the subject, such as driving a car at high speeds (yeah a bit different than normal driving) and playing a racing game, using athletic skill to play basketball/football and playing nba2kX/madden 2kX, boxing/mma skills vs playing fight night/those god awful ufc games, using a sniper rifle to kill a real person vs playing a sniper in the fps du jour an analogy is a simple comparison for things that are similar but not identical, it's used to put an idea across so someone can grasp a concept better than they already are. such as comparing cpu speed and ram in a computer to horsepower and torque in a car, after doing that most ppl understand what the role of the cpu and ram are in a pc. now as for guitarists and musicians, yeah i have played several instruments over the years, i'm also a HUGE music fan (i probly have more cds and forgotten more about music and it's intricacies than a lot of the "musicians" on here know) but i don't think that playing a real guitar has ANYTHING to do with playing guitar hero or rock band, the ONLY two parts of rock band that are anyway close to the real thing is drums and singing, more so on the singning part like seriously do you see ANY pro-athletes, military personnel (both active and retired/inactive), race car drivers complaining about ppl playing games in their respective fields and saying how awesome they are at the job? the answer is NO, so that means any guitarist complaining about someone bragging about how good they are at game is just a douche the ONLY thing you need for guitar hero/rock band is just the ability to count the 8 steps of death in a song, yes ALL songs can be broken down into 8 steps, dj's use it to mix, and 4/4 time is just 2 bars to give you the 8 count so seriously get a freaking life and stop being a douche cause someone is bragging about being good at a game |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1869 Joined: 4 Nov 2007 |
QFT. And also, what are the 8 steps of death? |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1555 Joined: 7 Mar 2008 |
it's a term dj use when mixing songs, all songs can be broken into 8 beat counts or 2 bars of 4/4 signature. it makes things easier to mix and count so you can align the diffrent beats when mixing most major notes and events (such as samples and start of vocals) in any song happen on the 1 and 5 beats, minor stuff in between those. electronic is the best example of it, voodoo people by the prodigy is a good example of a song that follows it pretty well, the first drum beat is a 1 count and go from there, apollo 440 is another good example of a band that follows it to a tee, then again they are dj's but this can easily be transported to other forms of music, just find the rhythm and you can find the 8 count. mind you there are a few exceptions to the rule as well and a couple caveats but all songs with a rhythm of some form can be mixed with any other piece of music. it's not as hard as you'd think just remember what georege clinton said "free your mind and your ass will follow" |
Anonymous Source Posts: 3 Joined: 26 Mar 2008 | Wow, what a post, cleverlymadeup. Analogies are certainly intended to help understanding (and thank you so much for explaining that, truthfully i was a bit mystified about the whole thing), but a bad analogy fosters bad understanding of the concept at hand. Your analogy of cpu/ram in a computer to power/torque in a car is a bad one, for instance. In a car, power roughly equals revs x torque. More torque generally equals more power. In a computer, CPU speed and RAM (speed? quantity? i'm guessing speed) are linked in the sense that if RAM speed doesn't equal or exceed CPU speed then there is a bottleneck, otherwise there is not.. and these days, much of this problem has been circumvented via introducing caches and intelligent algortithms. RAM quantity isn't really relevant to CPU speed at all, as long as there is some. You give this analogy to someone, and there is a good chance they walk away thinking that more RAM (speed? quantity?) equals a proportionally faster CPU speed.. a misguided conclusion. And thats the thing. Many of the analogies here have reduced guitar playing to just something mechanical and i am saying that creating music is more than just moving your fingers at the right moment. Its surprising that you are arguing this actually, considering that you have "forgotten more about music and its intricacies than most 'musicians' know".. Also, thanks for arguing with a point i wasn't making. Like i said earlier, getting expert on some songs in guitar hero is tough, and a good achievement. I do think that such an achievement pales in comparison to being able to actually play the song, but unless they are equating real guitar skills to guitar hero skills, rubbing that fact in someones face is poor form. |
BANNED  Posts: 317 Joined: 30 Jan 2008 | Real guitar is 'harder' because it has the opportunity for deeper and more rewarding levels of complexity, guitar hero does not posses such opportunity for complexity if a computer game could simulate all aspects of guitar playing, the feel and tension of the springs, the vibrations, the full range of possible motions that make up the guitar experience (i don't play, my terminology may be flawed), in a way that let you match it to a running screen of such motions... would that be on par? Ok, you cant make up your own music, so lets say we add a 'free play' section where you can play your own sequences and record, play to them, or just play for the heck of it... some would say, that while you were going a long way about it, you were playing guitar really and fully, there's no way to cheat, you must know how to pluck the strings and do whatever it is you do with frets and teeth and whatnot. so scale this back, keeping free play, to five simple buttons and a strummer... its not guitar, but it is an instrument in its own right, now, take away free play... What is the point of this? i'm trying to provide a defined level of equation between guitar hero and real guitar, not say they are equal, but put forward the point that guitar hero is still music, albeit to someone else's beat, it simply lacks the (optional, even with actual guitar) complexity of real guitar. If someone says "i can do X on guitar hero" Say a piano player says "i can play tune X with my piano" Guitar hero players have earned their skills, have climbed a ladder, the opportunity to go even further with your own instrument should not be taken for granted, it is a gift that you can climb the ladder of music higher, and a scar to your name if you would begrudge those whose chosen path does not extend into your own realm. Yes, guitar hero is called guitar hero, think of it as a compliment and get on with rocking will you? we need new tunes for GH4 |
Muckraker  Posts: 321 Joined: 25 Mar 2008  |
I don't find it rude if GH players think they're the 'leet shizzle' because they can 5 star a song. You're supposed to play games for fun, not to act tough, especially when it's only a game-surrogate to the real alternative. The only time I actually act tough at GH3, is when I'm holding a tiny party, since it's a damn party game. And they're impressed when I complete a song on Expert. I'm not even that good at all, but then again, I don't WANT to be the best and act all arrogant. I just want to have fun, as do all my visitors. Besides, everybody kicks my ass at SingStar anyways :p |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1555 Joined: 7 Mar 2008 |
ok sorry but you're wrong and let me explain 1. many ppl draw that analogy of car's horsepower and torque to a computers cpu and ram, i wasn't the first, try reading some media, cpu is often called horsepower let me explain #3 a bit more in a car you can have 700 hp and 100 Ft/lb torque, yes you will have a powerful roaring engine but it won't have a lot of guts to it and you won't go very fast because the torque is bottlenecking it much like a computer with a 5GHz chip and 256 megs of ram, yeah it will be fast but it won't be anywhere near it's potential because it's being bottlenecked by the ram now you take a car that has 319 Hp and 330 Ft/lb torque against that 700 hp car and the "faster" car by horsepower alone will be smoked pretty bad same goes for a 2.5 GHz pc with 2gigs of ram will out perform that 5GHz pc geez looks like my analogies line up, which means it was a correct analogy :) now as for your "playing guitar being art" arguement, no it's not art, it's imitation. if you write your own songs, THAT is art, if you play raining blood by slayer on your guitar, that's NOT art, that's just playing something someone else created to use an art parallel it's like saying you're a painter cause you traced over the lines of Andy Warhol's campbell soup can painting and then coloured it in. |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1869 Joined: 4 Nov 2007 |
You know, this is a good point. Someone, I forget who, once said something to the effect of (specific isn't it?) "Creating music is artistic, playing music is technical." Yes there's room for creative expression but that's pretty slight compared to composition and no one who plays GH is kidding themselves that they're doing anything other than pressing the buttons on time. They know that playing their little controller is a technical exercise of hand-eye coordination, just like guitar playing is to a much greater level. |
Anonymous Source Posts: 3 Joined: 26 Mar 2008 | lol mate, i've demonstrating a lack of understanding of power/torque and cpu/ram? Perhaps you should first not mix up the concepts of computer speed and CPU speed (yes, they are two very different things: one can benefit from more RAM, and the other one doesnt) and revisit your understanding of the power/torque relationship. Here's a nice article explaining it, but broadly, an engine with a lot of power and low torque has to be seriously thrashed to get peak output, whereas an engine with relatively less power but more torque doesn't.. The 700hp/100ft/lb engine specs you've given would likely have some serious real-world problems based on the crazy-high RPM's it would have to generate (vibration, sucking in enough air, etc) and this is why such figures are rare in engine creation. In theory though.. the 700/100 car would beat the 319/330 car, assuming it could get to the crazy-high RPM it needs to get those kind of power figures. At any rate, the topic at hand is on guitar hero vs playing guitar. The point i'm making is not and has never been that playing all guitar is art. It's that there is a creative and artistic side to playing the guitar, and this is why musical pieces always sound a little different when played by different people. Also, even when you are just copying someone elses stuff, you are still creating music, a factor thats easy to overlook these days. |
Infamous Scribbler  Posts: 643 Joined: 31 Jan 2008 | How do you do the 8 steps of death if the songs in 9/8? =P |
Gone Gonzo Posts: 1555 Joined: 7 Mar 2008 |
actually sounding different when other ppl play a song has a few factors how the instrument is tuned a perfect example of that is stanley clarke playing silly putty and the primus cover of it, i've played them side by side and you can faintly hear the differences cause les tried to play it exactly like stanley, which is no small feat, but both of them use the same basses and both are extremely talented same goes for jimi hendrix and stevie ray vaughn with voodoo chile, both are similar but both are a bit different as for the hp/torque and cpu/ram comparison it's not exactly the same, it just has the same fundamentals behind it. and yes the pc with the faster processor but less ram than one that has similar amounts of cpu/ram could possibly beat it as well given the right conditions. whic just further proves my analogy correct
you still can, other time signatures are harder, armand van helden's witch doctor famously has a triple beat, so it has 9 beats to the normal 8 and makes life really interesting when trying to mix but it is possible |
Muckraker  Posts: 328 Joined: 4 Jan 2008 | So, what I gather from the first post... 1) You may not claim to be good at Mike Tyson's Punch Out in front of somebody who is a trained boxer. 2) You cannot talk about a cool racing game you've played in front of somebody with a valid driver's license. 3) You cannot claim to be good at a game like Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Smash Brothers, etc etc, because somebody may have been in a real fight before, and won. 4) You are no longer allowed to have fun playing The Sims, because the person next to you does just about everything you can do in the game, but in real life. 5) You are no longer allowed to talk about any of your achievements in Cooking Mama, Trauma Centre, Phoenix Wright, Call of Duty, or Grand Theft Auto, because you're not a real chef, surgeon, lawyer, soldier and/or criminal, respectively. 6) I don't care how good you are at Mario Brothers, because I eat REAL mushrooms. 7) You cannot enjoy playing Madden, NHL, NBA or FIFA games. I mean, why don't you go out and play in the REAL NFL, NHL, NBA, etc etc etc? With those rules in mind, you can take just about anybody down a few pegs in order to boost your own ego by completely missing the point, but hey, if you're going to be a pompous ass, you don't care about any of that, do you? |
Copy Clerk  Posts: 53 Joined: 7 Mar 2008 | How I see it is there is two ways it could happen #1: he says "Hey guys! I can play Raining Blood on Expert in GH" if you put him down for that than you were being an asshole #2: he says "I'm so good at GH I can play Raining Blood on expert, I bet I would be able to do it perfect on a real guitar now!" in this case it was him who was being an asshole Of course the wording of these could vary quite a bit. |
Anonymous Source  Posts: 7 Joined: 28 Mar 2008 | In my humble opinion, I think that the two are entirely different skills. Matching colors on a plastic guitar is nothing like actually playing a guitar. If it was, I'd be in a band already. The only time it's appropriate to say "oh yeah, well I can play that on a real guitar" is when the person in question playing Guitar Hero is acting totally smug, and not realizing they're just clicking plastic buttons. |
Pulitzer Laureate  Posts: 835 Joined: 22 Aug 2006  | @cleverlymadeup: What's with this 8 beats of death crap? Sure, frequently, music is in 4/4. Pop music is almost always in 4/4. But all music? I've had to deal with too many fucked up meters to let that slide. (alternating 2/4-5/8, for example) On the topic at large: |
Well, anyone bragging isn't cool, but Guitar Hero and guitar are not the same thing. I know people who are awesome at guitar but suck at Rock Band, as well as the reverse. It's incomparable. Just because it has a fancy controller doesn't stop it from just being a game. I wave a wii controller around like a boxer, but that doesn't mean I can beat you up in real life.