Learn to play, noob – Rock Band 3 and music training

My mom was long intent on seeing me have some music education, and as a result, I had a good 13 years of piano lessons, as well as Suzuki violin training throughout elementary school. Maybe it’s just the technophobe in me, but seeing people talk about learning how to play music from Rock Band 3 baffles me. “Go do it the old fashioned way!” I think…before remembering that the entire reason I got started on keyboards is because of The Miracle, the now ancient DOS/Amiga/NES/SNES MIDI keyboard program.

Of course, despite certain videogame-y elements, like minigames and very direct progression, the Miracle was pretty overtly intended as an educational tool, with its first priority on getting the basics out there. Rock Band 3 is some point on a much more circuitous path; there was nothing about the original Guitar Hero that was terribly similar to, oh, actually playing a guitar. Rock Band had a much clearer declaration of intent – “It’s like playing music with your friends” – but while the drums and vocals offered more realistic experiences if desired, the guitar mechanics were virtually unchanged. With RB3, their intent seems to have reached fruition – on the highest difficulties, Pro mode is apparently playing the song verbatim (albeit with only one hand on keyboards…). Once you’ve learned in the game, you can get yourself on a real keyboard/plug your guitar into an amp and hammer out the melody or chords FOR REAL! That’s fine and well, but I don’t feel that Rock Band has an appropriate framework for actually learning how to “play music” – it’s the difference between memorizing the solution to a puzzle and understanding how to solve it.

First, and this is pretty much *the* dealbreaker, beyond anything else for me, the game does not provide appropriate feedback for mistakes. Played the wrong note? *CHNK* Played the right note a bit too early? *CHNK* From a game design perspective, I can wave this away pretty easily (back when the buttons didn’t correspond 1:1 with notes, it was a reasonable, if not at all ideal, solution to the question of what noise to make when the player makes a mistake), but when it comes to actually understanding how an instrument works? I just don’t see how that’s workable. In the most brutally reductive sense, you are essentially playing an instrument with broken keys. I’m sure there are plenty of famous guitarists who were never taught, and started themselves off aping other performers they admired – but that hardly disproves my point. They had to figure out what they were playing by the trial and error of listening to the instrument in their hands. RB3 teaches you to follow visual cues on a screen as directly as possible, and what you learn from playing a wrong note is, “oh, that was a wrong note.”

Beyond that, the tremendously impersonal nature of the feedback hurts in other ways, too. For example, I’ve seen a lot of people bewildered by the fact that the keyboard is meant to be played one-handed. “How am I supposed to move my hands like that?” It would be a lot easier to explain if the game had anything to say about, oh, fingering. I’m completely serious when I say Pro Keys would be a much simpler for people to understand if the game had a demo that even just showed how to play a simple C-major scale. But of course, that would be superfluous when the game isn’t really interested in music theory anyway. Again, formal music instruction isn’t everything. But it’s much easier to understand, especially for people who don’t have a hell of a lot of innate talent.

Moving on, the fact that “play the whole song, starting from the beginning, at full speed” is the only way to work on a song is almost as bad. Yes, this is how I “practiced” piano when I was young and didn’t know better. No, it’s not actually a good way to do it. If you went to a professional orchestra rehearsal, even the day before a big concert, you might not see them play through an entire song, start to finish. Just bashing through a song over and over isn’t the most effective way to practice – not compared to breaking down the hard parts and working on them alone, and maybe even slower until you get them right. Repeatedly. That guitarist you’re imitating probably doesn’t only play his BLAZING GUITAR SOLOS at full speed when he’s preparing for a performance, regardless of whether or not he had a teacher who told him to go home and use his metronome every week. Why should the game expect you to?

I am not going to say that learning to read music, practicing songs hundreds of times, or grinding scales is “fun.” For many people, it is very hard work. But if your aim is to become “a guitar player” and not just “a person who can play ‘Du Hast’ on a guitar”, I don’t feel that Harmonix is providing a shortcut at all. If it’s enough to get you hooked, or convince you that maybe learning music isn’t as daunting as you might think, that’s awesome. But there is so, so, so much more depth and reward to be found in the performance of music than flashing lights and little dots and numbers on a screen.

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