A while back, we featured an announcement from Gamers To Players (G2P), a new instructional documentary, which made an interesting claim: This DVD boasts the ability to “transform gamers into real guitarists.” Join us as we put this claim to the test, attempting to use the DVD’s instructions to turn a Rock Band/Guitar Hero devotee into a real-life shredder. Will the methods work, or will the DVD turn out to be a cheap cash-in? Week one of Gamer 2 Player awaits you, after the break.
We’ve decided to take the Gamer 2 Player series to a weekly format — learning a skill is a lengthy process, after all. Plus, Tuesday is when the new Rock Band songs become available on Xbox LIVE, so after my painful trials, I can cool down and feel better about myself by pretending I’m already good at rocking. So, without further ado, here are our initial impressions of the G2P DVD:
Aaaaaaaaaargh my hand. Though to many folks this is a well-known fact, someone ought to warn us total newbies: Getting the finger positions right on a real guitar is way, way more painful than on a small plastic toy. My wrist is killing me. My forearm is killing me. I can’t stretch my damn fingers that far. On the Rock Band guitar, I can manage the green and orange frets (first and fifth) simultaneously with no problem; they’re barely a couple of inches apart. On my Epiphone, there’s as much distance (if not more) between the first and fourth frets. I can handle them all right if I’m playing the first string; the sixth string is a fool’s errand at this point. Even trying to get my fingers onto the sixth string feels like I’m trying to curl my hand around hard enough to touch my own wrist. Everybody tells me this will become easier with practice, obviously, but it’s going to be a long road ahead. I need to commit myself to regular practice if I’m going to build up the arm and hand muscles that Rock Band simply does not require of you. I wish G2P had mentioned that in its documentary portion, ’cause that strikes me as a pretty important difference.
Muscle necessity aside, G2P covers quite a few bases. The DVD is split into two sections: A documentary, and a series of supporting “bonus lessons.” The lessons go at a good pace, introducing one new skill after the other, but I would have liked to see a bit more interplay between the two sections. The learning process would be a lot smoother if the documentary were to pause every now and again and suggest which bonus lessons the viewer ought to try, to support the points made in the last documentary chapter. Instead, each portion is a self-contained section — if you want to practice what you’ve just been taught by the documentary, you have to stop the video, exit out to the main menu, and then navigate through quite a few menu levels to access the individual lessons. The material is there, but a little more user-friendliness would go a long way towards teaching gamers — we’re used to things like interactive tutorials and hand-holding when we get started.
As for the quality of the material, G2P certainly knows its way around the Rock Band/Guitar Hero world. Both the documentary and the lessons are grouped into Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert portions, mirroring the difficulty levels of the rhythm games, and the techniques introduced are relegated to their appropriate chapters. The documentary assumes no prior knowledge on the viewer’s part — in fact, the first several chapters could just as easily be used as an instructional video for Guitar Hero. G2P covers things like holding down a string to select the pitch and producing sound through the actual act of strumming. It gives you game-like hints, covering things like “you don’t have to let go of the button/string when repeating a note” and how to play a long note by strumming once but holding down the button/string. It goes so far as to explain every portion of the game controller and indicate its corresponding function on the real guitar, including the effects switch and the whammy bar. I half expected to learn why my Epiphone has no Xbox Guide Button.
Though G2P does a good job of starting you off with the basics, and it certainly covers every difference between the guitar and controller, a few key starting points are absent from the beginning. The proper way to hold a pick would have been nice, as well as maybe a tip or two on how to hold the neck. The DVD advises you to keep your thumb on the back of the neck, but that’s about it — I was hoping for a little more instruction to avoid some of these hand-cramping issues. As early as the Easy-level lessons on aligning my fingers with the first four frets, I was having significant difficulty getting all four fingers to hold their intended positions. I’m sure this is more about my ridiculously weak hand muscles than an issue with G2P, but a little more guidance would have been nice. It wasn’t until several lessons later that I was reminded that beginners are likely to need to build up pinky strength.
With the basics behind two-string chords and note transitions practiced several times, I took a peek at the bonus lessons. As mentioned, the lessons do a decent job of backing up the techniques introduced by the documentary — players will start off playing simple one-string patterns, and will then be led up to upward scales on two strings, downward scales, and more, emphasizing simple abilities like adding more fingers to go up in pitch, and then pulling them off to go back down. Each difficulty level contains 10 different lessons, which are handled quite nicely — the documentary teaches you to read tablature early on, and each lesson shows you the note chart you’ll be playing, followed by a demonstration. The camera even switches to the different hands for a close-up of proper technique, focusing on the picking hand for one playthrough, and the fret hand for the next.
What would be great is if G2P had devised a way to translate tablature into scrolling notes, to give gamers something more familiar to work with, but that’s probably asking too much.
Thus far, I’ve watched and practiced the Easy and Medium portions of the documentary, and I’m using the 10 Easy lessons for practice while I build hand strength. I peeked ahead, out of curiosity, at the Expert lessons:
Point well taken. I’ll try those later.
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