As a dedicated musician and avid GH/RB fan, I find the attitude most musicians I know have towards the games to be narrow-minded and elitist.
And believe me when I say I'm plenty narrow-minded and elitist already.
It's true that you're limited slightly when you're singing in these games, because you need to hit each note in the correct pitch, and if you insert any character into the song - some artistic gravelly voice for example or a bit of glissando around the edges, you tend to lower your score. However, if you don't care about the score and are just playing for fun, you'll still pass the song as long as you've sung more or less correctly, particularly on the easy levels where you just have to hit the right note at some point along the way.
The Beatles Rock Band has the facility for three mics, allowing for (in some cases quite complicated) three-part harmony - you can even mix and match what you sing throughout the song as long as one of you's on the tune at any given point. I've done this with a mic on a stand in front of me while I played an instrument part at the same time, and I can tell you, it's both challenging and requiring of musical ability.
The big drawback of the singing part is that even at its highest levels what the game wants is for you to exactly reproduce the original artist's performance, not give your own take - but then, if you sing in a cover band, that's presumably an aspect of your own aim too?
The big bonus of the singing part is that, particularly at the highest levels, it will expect you to be perfectly on pitch (assuming the original performer was of course), and this cannot be entirely useless to the training singer or one who's wondering if they have any ability to hold a tune in a bucket.
When I personally sing in these games I'm not really going for a high score though, so I'll admit that I imagine listening to a points-getting performance might well be boring.
As to the other instruments, I play drums well enough to know that from the Hard level up, you are playing an actual drum beat. You could move from Hard on GH/RB to a real live kit and walk straight in and pass Standard Grade (age 16 exams) music performance at Credit level.
The guitar part is almost nothing like playing guitar. Even then, though, only almost - although the left hand fingering is nothing like hold chord shapes, the basic principle of how it works (hold down correct button/collection of buttons (as opposed to string/collection of strings), then strum to create note) is the same. The strumming is the same - to the extent that my strumming on a real guitar has actually improved. There is no doubt that your hand-eye coordination, and your ability to hear and understand cross-rhythms (even if most people don't know that's what they're hearing/playing) is improved by playing the game, even though you obviously couldn't then move straight to a real guitar.
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And believe me when I say I'm plenty narrow-minded and elitist already.
It's true that you're limited slightly when you're singing in these games, because you need to hit each note in the correct pitch, and if you insert any character into the song - some artistic gravelly voice for example or a bit of glissando around the edges, you tend to lower your score. However, if you don't care about the score and are just playing for fun, you'll still pass the song as long as you've sung more or less correctly, particularly on the easy levels where you just have to hit the right note at some point along the way.
The Beatles Rock Band has the facility for three mics, allowing for (in some cases quite complicated) three-part harmony - you can even mix and match what you sing throughout the song as long as one of you's on the tune at any given point. I've done this with a mic on a stand in front of me while I played an instrument part at the same time, and I can tell you, it's both challenging and requiring of musical ability.
The big drawback of the singing part is that even at its highest levels what the game wants is for you to exactly reproduce the original artist's performance, not give your own take - but then, if you sing in a cover band, that's presumably an aspect of your own aim too?
The big bonus of the singing part is that, particularly at the highest levels, it will expect you to be perfectly on pitch (assuming the original performer was of course), and this cannot be entirely useless to the training singer or one who's wondering if they have any ability to hold a tune in a bucket.
When I personally sing in these games I'm not really going for a high score though, so I'll admit that I imagine listening to a points-getting performance might well be boring.
As to the other instruments, I play drums well enough to know that from the Hard level up, you are playing an actual drum beat. You could move from Hard on GH/RB to a real live kit and walk straight in and pass Standard Grade (age 16 exams) music performance at Credit level.
The guitar part is almost nothing like playing guitar. Even then, though, only almost - although the left hand fingering is nothing like hold chord shapes, the basic principle of how it works (hold down correct button/collection of buttons (as opposed to string/collection of strings), then strum to create note) is the same. The strumming is the same - to the extent that my strumming on a real guitar has actually improved. There is no doubt that your hand-eye coordination, and your ability to hear and understand cross-rhythms (even if most people don't know that's what they're hearing/playing) is improved by playing the game, even though you obviously couldn't then move straight to a real guitar.