Guitar Hero Helped Me Become a Professional Musician, Pt. 1
The start of 2025 has been quiet on the ép socials and ép blog, but it’s been a flurry of activity behind the scenes: I’ve been hard at work on about a dozen client projects big and small since the end of the holidays. Working with notation is a very methodical process that can take a lot of energy, so I’m pretty good at building in little slices of downtime into the structure of my workday. One way I’ve been spending that downtime is playing rhythm games, like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. They've been an on-and-off fascination of mine since I was 13.
With apologies, I am going to brag for a moment here: I am quite good at these games. You could say I dabble. Here’s a video from 2020 in which I perform James Ehnes’ recording of the third movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.
(This video is making a small resurgence since James Ehnes shared it a couple of weeks ago. It’s quite unique since I’m the first person to adapt a violin concerto onto the game, as far as I’m aware. It may go down in history as my greatest achievement.)
15 years ago, I was among the top players of this game (more on that later in the article). But a lot of time has passed since then, and many other more dedicated people have stuck with it - meanwhile, I have barely touched a plastic instrument in over a decade. By today’s standards, I am merely a solid player, not at all exceptional. And I’m 100% okay with that! I’m not aiming to be the best in the world - I’m just spending some free time doing something I enjoy.
Guitar Hero Helped Me Become a Professional Musician
Something I often hear from skeptics, or perhaps the uninitiated (let’s face it, mostly the older generation for whom video games don’t really resonate):
“Imagine if, instead of playing Guitar Hero, you had spent all that time learning the real guitar!”
I’ve heard this “clever” quip so many times, and I find it disingenuous, or at best incurious. It hinges on an unexamined notion that human activity must be productive in order to have value. If I were feeling equally disingenuous, I might respond with “imagine if, instead of watching TV, you had spent all that time writing screenplays!” Sure, they’re both conceptually linked, but the former is entertainment, a diversion, while the latter is hard work and consumes a lot of creative bandwidth. They’re just fundamentally different activities and they achieve different things. Most people would agree that dedicating some amount of time to rest is important, and video games are a perfectly valid way to spend some of that downtime.
Building on the TV/screenplay-writing analogy: aside from the straightforward benefits of resting and recharging, watching TV can also improve your screenwriting abilities, as well as any other skills related to visual media and storytelling. A great story isn’t created in a vacuum - it is derived from the creator’s lived experience and inspiration they’ve drawn from other media.
I would add that it truly doesn’t take that long to become a good Guitar Hero player. I don’t have hard numbers, but I guarantee you it’s a tiny fraction of the time that it takes to become proficient on the real-guitar. How would you rather spend your downtime: being an awesome solo-shredding guitar master in the game, or being yet another mediocre guitar player in real life? I rest my case.
OK, I'll bite. What on earth is a Guitar Hero?
There’s a good chance you’ve at least heard of Guitar Hero, but you might not know what it is. I’m going to break down the basics.
Promotional art for the game Guitar Hero 3 (2007).
Notes appear at the top of the screen and steadily scroll to the bottom. You use your guitar-shaped plastic game controller to hit them in time with the music. Playing a note involves two steps: hold down one or more of the five “fret” buttons corresponding to the five note colours on screen, then hit the “strum bar” to simulate strumming the note. As you progress to the higher difficulties, you no longer have to strum every single note, since some notes are “hammer-ons” or “pull-offs.” This happens when there are two or more notes in quick succession; hammer-on/pull-off notes get a special colour and design, and they can be hit simply by pressing the appropriate fret button, assuming you successfully hit the note preceding them. This mimics the technique of the same name on the real guitar, but the game takes it to such an extreme that a skilled Guitar Hero player can shred long guitar solos with only a few strums.
Rock Band is a separate video game series designed by a competing company, and the guitar gameplay is functionally identical. They took the additional step of adding a drum kit controller and a karaoke-style lane for vocals. Add a bass player into the mix with a second guitar controller, and you have the ultimate 4-person party game.
EDMONTON, ALBERTA: Here’s a deep cut - me and my brothers playing Rock Band together in 2013.
These two franchises were in their heyday from around 2006-2012, and they were able to get some of the world’s greatest rock n’ roll talent on board: Eddie Van Halen, Slash (Guns N’ Roses), Ozzy Osbourne, Sting (The Police), and Gene Simmons (KISS), just to name a few. Guitar Hero released an entire game devoted to Metallica; Rock Band released an entire game devoted to The Beatles. Even the then-19-year-old Taylor Swift was involved, performing Love Story and You Belong With Me in a motion-capture suit for the family-tailored spin-off, Band Hero (2009). This was big business, and it was a win-win for the artists; it was a relatively low-effort extra revenue stream that introduced their music to new audiences in an immersive way.
This genre’s explosive success led to billions in revenue, and the plastic instruments came to populate millions of households across the world. However, with each successive game came increasing pressure to include more and more popular songs, with higher licensing fees, necessitating even more sales. The fad was short-lived, as rushed production schedules, market over-saturation, and perhaps other related factors (like the 2008 recession) led to Guitar Hero declining in popularity and fading from the public consciousness.
Practicing Practicing
I hope this goes without saying: the skill of pressing plastic buttons in quick succession and reading this idiosyncratic multi-coloured notation does not translate into real guitar skill. Like, at all. There is a bit of skill-transfer from the plastic drums to the real kit - you can legitimately learn the basics of rock grooves, practice the separation of hands and feet, and even work on rudiments like paradiddles and flams - but in my experience it’s fairly limited. The real musical benefit is more abstract. Let me explain:
Every rhythm game that I can think of contains feedback mechanisms. There is instantaneous feedback: exceptional play is rewarded with explosions of bright and flashy graphics and the cheers of a virtual crowd, while poor play is punished with a dull and muted colour palette and discordant sour notes. There is also more specific feedback. You’re shown a breakdown at the end of the song detailing what percentage of the notes you successfully hit, your score, and your rating (Guitar Hero & Rock Band use a “5 stars” system).
A score screen from Rock Band 2.
Most rhythm games use score multipliers to incentivize players to push themselves towards perfection. The more notes you hit in a row, the higher the rate that your score increases; if you successfully play 30 notes in a row perfectly, every further perfect note in your streak incurs a 4x score multiplier. If you can master certain particularly challenging sections, you’ll be able to access “Star Power” mode, which is a compounding 2x multiplier for your multiplier. In practice, a player that scores 100% on a song can potentially receive double the points of someone who scored only 95%. Because of the way different score multipliers interact, small improvements in performance can result in exponential improvements in score.
Thanks to these feedback mechanisms, I believe rhythm games are exceptionally well positioned to help people practice the skill of practicing. They lay bare, in no uncertain terms, how well you did and precisely where you could improve. It’s little wonder that the developers of the original Guitar Hero (2005), added a “Practice Mode” into their highly anticipated sequel Guitar Hero 2 (2006) in response to overwhelming demand from fans.
Work Smarter, Not Harder
I mentioned in the introduction that I was briefly “among the top players” of the game, and it’s not an empty boast. For a period of about one year between 2009 and 2010, I was #1 in the world in the category of “full band cumulative score” in the game Rock Band 2, alongside my three bandmates Derek, Alicia and Yaz. Specifically, the sum of our highest score on each of the 84 songs in the game was the highest in the world. We also held the high score for at least half of those individual songs. This is not well documented, so you’ll mostly have to take my word for it - all that remains from those halcyon days are a couple of blurry photos of my parents’ old CRT screen.
Here are the results from our record-setting run (circa 2009) of “Teen Age Riot” by Sonic Youth. Don’t go too hard on Derek a.k.a. Blaze - this is one of the hardest songs in the game for drums, and he literally only missed one note.
Skill (and practice) was an important piece of it. At my peak I could consistently achieve 100% on every song except for the most difficult fifteen or so, and the same was true of our drummer and bassist. (The singer is always expected to score 100%.) However, we were in fact not among the most skilled players in the world. There were bands out there that were successfully hitting all of those tricky passages that we had stumbled on time and time again, but we were still able to surpass their scores simply by applying that famous principle, “work smarter, not harder.”
Our strategy was called “pathing.” I mentioned earlier that skillful play allowed you to access “Star Power,” which is a multiplicative score multiplier. In the Rock Band series, it’s called “Overdrive,” and it compounds even further if you coordinate it with your band. If everyone deploys their Overdrive at the same time, you can achieve astronomical score multipliers as high as 12x and 14x. Through a bit of trial and error, we discovered that the singer was the key to optimizing our score: Every player contributes roughly one quarter of the final score, but the singer’s points are much more concentrated. Naturally, the singer doesn’t generate any points when they’re not singing, like during a guitar solo or instrumental break, so the sections where they do sing are goldmines if utilized correctly.
We spent hours preparing for each song. Yaz would extract data from the song and chart it onto an excel spreadsheet, which would crunch the numbers and show us point differentials. He and I would then pass this excel spreadsheet back and forth with our theories, trying to maximize the number of vocal phrases (and ideally lots of notes in the other three instruments) encompassed by our score multiplier. Once we found the highest score we could, we would translate this spreadsheet down to “path” - a simple code that instructed each player when to activate Overdrive, down to the specific note.
Yep, we found a way to turn video games into clerical work.
Slow Practicing and "Chunking"
Let’s come back to 2025 and talk about an actual world-class player. Alec Castillo, a.k.a. “Acai,” is arguably the most famous Guitar Hero player right now. Rhythm games are functionally his full time job - he carves out a comfortable living through sponsorships, streaming his gameplay on Twitch, and generating ad revenue on YouTube. His skill level is galaxies beyond anything I could dream of achieving myself. Plus, he’s a talented real-guitar player and real-drummer, making him immune to that snarky “learn a real instrument” criticism (he often mentions he was inspired by the video games to pick up the real thing).
Something I particularly like about Acai is his consistency and extraordinary ability to perform under pressure. One of his most impressive recent accomplishments was beating the entirety of Guitar Hero 2 in one sitting without making a single mistake, which is impressive on several levels. The game naturally progresses from its easiest songs into its most difficult songs, which means he didn’t even encounter the most treacherous parts of the game until several hours into an attempt. It’s one thing to play an insane solo like this, but it’s another matter entirely to do it after several hours of focused gameplay, where one mistake means you have to start over:
Acai perfectly clears the infamous solo from Buckethead’s “Jordan” in Guitar Hero 2.
A limitation of its old hardware, the timing window of Guitar Hero 2 is much less forgiving than later games, demanding a high level of precision from the player. To top it off, he did this all on a Twitch livestream with hundreds of people watching, so the embarrassment factor for making a silly mistake is sky-high.
The Twitch stream format allows viewers to interact directly with the streamer via text chat, and naturally Acai gets questions all the time from people looking to improve their skills. He is very forthcoming with nuggets of advice, and they all essentially boil down to two things: Slow practice and chunking.
The benefits of practicing a section at a slower speed are pretty obvious, but Acai takes care to emphasize that you should start by practicing absurdly slow. Try it at one quarter speed or maybe even slower - as slow as it needs to be for the passage to feel trivially easy. You also need to practice it in the exact way you plan to perform it: Did you notice in the above GIF that Acai employs a “tapping” technique, bringing his right hand off the strum bar and onto the fretboard? (I also employ this technique less skillfully in my own video to improve my trill speed). Even at the absurdly slow tempo, it’s still important to bring your right hand over (in slow motion!) to tap the fretboard. Only once consistency is achieved - say, you can play it 10 times in a row perfectly - should you increase the tempo by a small increment.
Another crucial piece of the puzzle is chunking. This is the answer to the question, “how can they possibly read that many notes so fast?” They don’t! The more you play, the more your brain automatically groups notes into patterns and familiar gestures. Take this passage:
This 8-second excerpt contains almost 150 notes, and it was designed to challenge the world’s best players on their technique. At this blisteringly fast tempo, it simply isn’t possible to mentally process these as individual notes, but once you understand their structure, it’s remarkably simple. Here are the first four measures broken down:
The first measure is a technique called “chimneys” in the Guitar Hero community. To execute them, you basically just alternate your hands: first, the right hand taps one note, and the left hand plays three notes by flicking both the middle finger and the ring finger onto the fretboard in quick succession and immediately pulling them back in the reverse order.
The second measure has the same pattern but flipped upside-down, which are called “reverse chimneys.” The hands still alternate, but now the notes are shared equally: two for the right hand and two for the left hand, each still played with a quick flicking motion. All this time, the left hand “anchors” on the green fret, never letting it go for the entire duration of the phrase. In practice, both chimneys and reverse chimneys can be performed within a fraction of a second.
The next four measures follow the exact same pattern, with the same execution, but at twice the speed. See if you can parse it:
Hey, I didn’t say it was easy - I said it was simple. Acai is able to reach speeds over 25 notes per second without breaking a sweat using this technique. The point of “chunking” is to reduce the cognitive load required to achieve the task and thereby increase your consistency in successfully achieving it.
French Horn Hero
My music teachers are surely shaking their heads right now. Methodical preparation, slow practice, reducing cognitive load - these are all concepts they taught me over and over again. This rhythm game lens is just another perspective on these same concepts. I want to tie this all together with an anecdote from my student days.
I love the French horn, but it is a famously temperamental instrument and demands a very high level of precision. It’s a real devil’s bargain - because of how your notes sit in the harmonic series, you get this incredible range of expression, from silky smooth slurs to tender melodic sweetness to punchy fanfares, but those close partials make it exceptionally easy to make mistakes. If I’m being honest with myself, I rarely practiced as methodically as I should have, since I always had this subconscious excuse: “I can practice this all I want, but the horn is unpredictable, so anything could happen in the performance.” Truthfully, this idea only holds you back. It’s important to recognize there are healthy ways to push yourself to achieve at the highest standard you’re capable of while still practicing self-compassion.
It was a typical cold February day in Toronto, and I was playing my audition list at my weekly horn lesson. My orchestral excerpts were sloppy and full of trepidation, as they often were, and my horn teacher Gabriel Radford decided to try a different approach. He dropped his copy of the Gunther Schuller horn études on my stand. “Forget about your excerpts,” (I’m paraphrasing) “this week, please learn the first étude in this book.” We reviewed techniques for slow and methodical practicing, and he sent me on my way.
Those Schuller études are excellent learning tools for an advanced student because they’re merciless. They are atonal and filled with enormous leaps and pitfalls for the player, with tempo markings that are just shy of unplayable.
At first I was intimidated, but I decided to earnestly dive in and learn it. I set my metronome to its slowest tempo, and deconstructed the first measure into various groups of two notes, then three notes, then four, then five. I repeated the process with the second measure, linking it with the first measure. It was excruciating at first, but eventually patterns (“chunks”) emerged from the chaos; the second 4-measure phrase was identical to the first, but transposed down by one semitone, which made it much easier to grapple with. The absurdly slow tempo allowed me to center my sound on every note, a focus which overrode my usual pre-occupations, and I took care to maintain that idea of rich and full sound as I gradually increased the tempo.
I successfully learned the entire page over the course of just a few practice sessions (much faster than I expected!) so I spent another half-hour every day for the rest of the week carefully notching up to the printed tempo. By the time my next lesson rolled around, I had essentially mastered the étude, with enough muscle memory engrained that I could confidently and consistently perform it at speed.
“That’s phenomenal, Taran,” Gabe said (again, paraphrasing), “why can’t you apply this methodical practice to your excerpts?”
“Well, they’re totally different. Excerpts are way less technically challenging, so the same practice methods don’t really apply. Like, I can’t slow-practice the already slow Tchaikovsky 5 solo. I can’t slow-practice the first note of the Ravel Pavane.”
“Why not?”
That was a lightbulb moment for me. I’ve been talking about Guitar Hero throughout this article, but real music-making has so many more dimensions. Guitar Hero is completely binary - you either hit the right note at the right time, or you don’t. It doesn’t include dynamics, it doesn’t account for the natural push and pull of tempo, it doesn’t allow for improvisation or happy accidents; it simply does not let you imbue any of your personality into the music. As a real-life musician, all of these little details are worth your attention, and they can all benefit from slow, methodical practice.
High-level Guitar Hero is just the purely mechanical manifestation of universally applicable practice techniques. I deliberately used the phrase “demands a high level of precision” for both the French horn and Guitar Hero 2 in order to draw a parallel: Where I saw a frustrating and insurmountable obstacle, Acai saw an opportunity to push the boundaries of what he was capable of.
I still have plenty more to say about rhythm games, so check back next month for part 2!