RSS Feed
Print Story
E-mail Story
'Guitar Hero' is a blast, but does it foster learning?
| Saturday, Dec 1 2007 6:35 PM
Last Updated: Saturday, Dec 1 2007 6:41 PM
My 11-year-old looked up from his bowl of Cocoa Puffs. "Dad," he said, "have you ever heard the song 'Snow Ride'?"
Our readers recommend:
Loading Stories
I was gnawing on a piece of wheat toast and reading the comics page. "Do you mean 'Slow Ride'?" I answered. "By Foghat? Yes, and I will probably be OK if I never hear it again as long as I live."
No such luck, my son informed me. "Slow Ride," unbeknownst to me, is one of the novice-level songs on "Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock," the video game/faux musical instrument that's threatening to become the Furby/Tickle Me Elmo/Playstation 3 of this Christmas season.
With my help, he'd purchased the game a few days earlier as a Christmas gift for his sister. In doing so, he was applying a tried-and-true sibling strategy: If it's in the house, I get to play it too. "Guitar Hero III" is now hiding in a closet, waiting for visions of sugar plums to start dancing in his pre-adolescent head.
This means I will be hearing "Slow Ride" over and over and over. And going mad. Slowly.
I am consuming in this lemming-like way for a couple of reasons. One, I like the fact that my kids enjoy a lot of the same music I did when I was growing up, and "Guitar Hero" is full of that stuff ("Slow Ride" notwithstanding). It makes me feel cool and I need all the coolness validation I can get.
Second, I'm hoping the game inspires them to pick up a real guitar and learn to play. I have tried to encourage this behavior before, with very limited success. Apparently they are not impressed with my example. This is understandable, given the fact my virtuosity extends to about three chords.
Many guitar players are dismissive of "Guitar Hero," which requires gamers to hit color-coded buttons (rather than strings) on the neck of a plastic, guitar-shaped controller. The game can be a challenge, although the required commitment isn't even close to what's necessary to master a real six-string.
"I have no use for that game," Bakersfield guitar teacher Larry Mumford says. "It's instant gratification. It's for juvenile delinquents."
Well, there is this, though: The game gets sedentary kids (and adult delinquents) off the couch and atop the coffee table where they belong. Yes -- and I say this from experience -- you can work up an authentic sweat playing "Guitar Hero."
The game also gives kids the faintest glimpse of how music is actually played. Your two hands must work independently of each other, and dexterity, timing and rhythm are all essential skills.
The third and latest version of "Guitar Hero" brought in $115 million in its first week on store shelves, so hundreds of thousands of kids will eventually be introduced to the possibility of switching to a real guitar. Guitar teachers around the country confirm that, indeed, the game has created new interest in music lessons. Of course, these students will quickly realize that the solos they've perfected playing "Guitar Hero" aren't so easily replicated on a real instrument, and many will go back to video-screen dominance. But many will stay with it.
That comes as no surprise to 69-year-old guitar teacher Wayland Peddy, one of the deans of the trade in Bakersfield. Pop culture trends often result in up-ticks of interest in guitar, he says. Peddy remembers an upsurge in new guitar students after the Beatles hit it big in the late 1960s, another spike after the release of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" in the early 1970s and yet another when the 1987 Ritchie Valens biopic "La Bamba" was packing theaters.
He'd never heard of "Guitar Hero," but he doesn't see why its effect should be any different. "If it puts music in their minds," Peddy says, "it should have an impact."
Plenty of these novices will go back and forth between the tedium of practice and the simulated proficiency of the game. Perhaps then, fortified with a whiff of greatness, they'll return to their scales.
That's what I hope happens in my house, anyway. At least my kids ought to develop an appreciation for Billy Gibbons and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Nothing wrong with that.
At a time when budget-challenged school districts are sometimes forced to pay more attention to standardized tests than music education, anything that gets kids thinking in musical terms has to help.
In fact, maybe we're onto something here. "Oboe Hero," anybody?
Contact Robert Price at 395-7399 or rprice@bakersfield.com.