Guitar Hero Helped Me Become a Professional Musician, Pt. 2
This is a follow-up to my March article, in which I related my experience of playing Guitar Hero to real world practice techniques. I recommend reading Part 1 first, but it’s not absolutely necessary. This article stands on its own, but the context is helpful!
One consequence of Guitar Hero’s decline in popularity is that no company manufactures guitar-shaped video game controllers anymore. That is changing, since incentives are starting to line up again (the genre is making a bit of a comeback lately thanks to open-source clones) but for the time being, they are surprisingly difficult to come by here in New Zealand. As a result, I spent 3600 words talking about Guitar Hero and giving the impression that I’ve been playing it in my downtime as a pastime. In fact, what I said was that I’ve been “playing rhythm games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.”
The game I have been playing is called GITADORA. It’s a Japanese arcade game series first launched in 1999 and it’s the original inspiration for Guitar Hero. I discovered this electronic drum kit eight months ago in the corner of my local arcade, and I was immediately hooked.
It shares a number of traits with Guitar Hero and the many other Western plastic-instrument games that it inspired, but there are also a number of key differences. Just like part 1, I want to use this video game as a jumping-off point for discussion around practice and performing techniques, and I hope it’s an interesting new perspective on concepts your music teacher has told you hundreds of times.
GITADORA GALAXY WAVE！！！
The original 1999 incarnations of this game were called ギターフリークス (GuitarFreaks) and ドラムマニア (DrumMania). They were designed by Japanese video game giant Konami (of Dance Dance Revolution fame) and the format was revolutionary at the time; it laid the groundwork for many imitators, the most famous of which being Guitar Hero (2005). Eventually these two games, running on the same software engine, were combined into GITADORA in 2013, but the series wouldn’t make its way into arcades outside of Japan until 2019.
TOKYO, JAPAN: Arcade machines for DrumMania and Guitar Freaks v8, released in 2011. This was the final version to feature the 6 lane format - 3 drums, 2 cymbals, and 1 pedal - as well as the 3-fret guitar controllers. [PHOTO CREDIT: Timur Yanberdin on Flickr]
The game has a dedicated fanbase, and the latest edition GITADORA GALAXY WAVE (2024) boasts about 120,000 registered players. That’s a conservative number, too - it doesn’t account for casual players who don’t create a username, nor several countries that aren’t connected to Konami’s official servers like the UK.
As an English-speaker, you probably haven’t heard of GITADORA - it’s fairly obscure outside East Asia. I’m very lucky to live only a few blocks from New Zealand’s only GITADORA-DrumMania arcade console. I suspect my local Auckland arcade felt it was a safe investment due to the large population of Hongkonger, Singaporean and Taiwanese students at the University of Auckland nearby.
The game is reasonably well-known in Japan, particularly among dedicated gamers, while Guitar Hero failed to gain any real traction in the Japanese market. The continuing dominance of arcades is a cultural difference related to urbanization; the vast majority of Japanese citizens live in huge and dense metropolises, and they have less than half the house size of Americans on average. Bulky plastic instruments are not an ideal way to fill up already-limited living space, and a gamer is likely to be a short walk or transit ride from their local arcade anyway. On the other hand, the majority of Americans live in single-family detached homes in suburbs - they have ample space for game controller storage, and the nearest arcade is likely a bit of a drive away.
There is also another cultural difference that is harder to articulate, but if you’ve ever played a classic arcade game like Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, you’ll know what I mean. They are easy to learn but hard to master. There appears to be no ceiling to how insanely difficult the game can get. There is always another level or difficulty gradient that feels just out of reach, and it’s a powerful motivator to continue playing to refine your skills. In the business world, they call this Kaizen - continuous incremental improvement - “the key to Japan's competitive success,” according to the concept’s creator.
Here is one of the top players in the world playing one of the hardest songs in the game. There are hundreds of songs of a similar difficulty.
Indeed, rhythm gamers are very competitive, and are always looking for the next challenge. The development team does occasionally include popular J-Pop and J-Rock songs, but the bulk of the song list is made by an in-house sound team specifically to present fresh challenges to hardcore players. The punishing learning curve and obscure setlist can make GITADORA feel alienating to newcomers, but once you’re invested, it can feel like an experience specifically tailored for you. I love that after 16 years of making imperceptibly slow progress on French horn, I can take all the good practice habits I’ve internalized and apply them to this silly video game to make eye-wateringly fast progress.
Limb Independence (Slow Practicing & “Chunking,” Pt. 2)
I am a latecomer to the GITADORA scene, but I was able to hit the ground running thanks to my prior experience playing the 4-drum, 1-pedal plastic kit on Rock Band. The gameplay is similar to what I laid out in Part 1: coloured notes scroll from the top of the screen down to a strike line at the bottom of the screen, synchronized to the music.
It took me a few months to get used to parsing the more difficult 9-lane format - 4 drums, 3 cymbals and 2 pedals - and there was one persistent issue. The Guitar Hero & Rock Band series did not include any mechanic for a hi-hat pedal. Not being a drummer myself, I never really grasped how much of a skill deficiency this was until I started paying attention to it. You’re telling me that in addition to all the other stuff my other three limbs are doing, I also need to remember to play offbeats with my left foot?
This is an extremely unusual problem to have - anyone who actually studies the drum set would learn to use their left foot fairly early on - and it felt completely insurmountable at first. Any rhythm my left foot was playing would unintentionally draw in one or more of my limbs and completely throw off my sense of pulse. It was similar to the feeling you get the first time you try to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time. In the first couple of weeks of playing GITADORA, I avoided any song that involved the left pedal. But I quickly realized this was just kicking the can down the road. If I was going to achieve anything higher than a “C” rating on this game, I would need to bring this wayward leg into line.
I could have just played the problem songs over and over again, perhaps failing slightly less on each successive attempt. But that would not be an effective use of my time, or my arcade tokens. As an experienced practicer, I knew the next steps were slow practicing and “chunking.”
I talked in-depth about how even the highest-level players benefit from absurdly slow practice in part 1, but there isn’t an immediately obvious way to do this in GITADORA; due to it being a public arcade machine, the game is not bundled with any sort of “practice mode” or mechanism to slow the music down at all. Thankfully, the world is full of extremely competitive players who also understand the value of slow practice, so nearly every song in the game has been screen-recorded and uploaded to YouTube, and can be played back at any speed you want.
Adding my left leg into the mix was simple; set a song to an absurdly slow speed on Youtube, and break it down into manageable “chunks.” Remove a few factors from the equation and start from a place of comfort. I start with feet only, just focusing on the individual rhythms of my left foot and right foot, and how they interact with each other. This is usually quite easy, so once I achieve fluency at full tempo, I might try it with only my left leg paired with one hand. Once I’m comfortable with that, I’ll add in the other hand, still taking care to start at a slow tempo and work my way up. Next I might try two legs, one hand. This is par for the course for beginner drum students; when I took a short drum lesson with my friend and highly accomplished percussionist Dominic Jacquemard, he taught me how to do a basic swing beat by breaking it down exactly like this.
There is a great deal of smart practice you can do without your instrument. It’s not possible in every single case, but drumming is a prime example. I don’t have an electronic drum kit - they’re expensive and would take up most of my tiny downtown apartment - so I practice by stomping my feet and slapping my knees while sitting at my computer desk. Since my goal is just getting my limbs coordinated, it’s really beneficial not to think about anything else like stick grip or posture (that’s what my lesson with a real drummer was for!).
After about seven months of playing this game regularly, something magical started happening. I was sight-reading some songs newly added to the game, and my left foot was hitting every single note, seemingly without me even giving it a thought. This is the end result of my chunking practice - effectively, I can now put my left foot on autopilot, which frees up mental bandwidth for my hands and right foot to play more complex rhythms.
Rhythm is Everything
Here is one of the biggest differences between GITADORA and the Guitar Hero/Rock Band franchises: The latter just detects whether you hit the note or not, but GITADORA (in line with its peers in the Japanese rhythm game genre) scores you based on how rhythmically precise you are. The final score screen has helpful statistics, most notably the number of early or late notes, so you can get a sense of your tendency to rush or drag the tempo.
AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND: A typical score screen from GITADORA GALAXY WAVE. Note the meter at the bottom which indicates how many notes you hit early (“Fast”) and how many you hit late (“Slow”).
There is a 54-millisecond window - from 27 milliseconds early to 27 milliseconds late - when you can hit a drum and have the game register it as “PERFECT.” When you put it into words like that, it sounds impossibly small, but I’ve found in practice that it’s a reasonable margin between being “locked into the groove” or rushing/dragging the tempo. ± 30-48 milliseconds is “GREAT,” ± 51-72 milliseconds is “GOOD,” but ± 75-96 milliseconds is only “OKAY” and will break your note streak. “OKAY” is basically the game telling you “fine, you kind of hit the note, but do better next time.”
By training my left leg to work independently, I didn’t just solve my biggest weakness; I turned it into one of my most useful strengths. GITADORA only penalizes you for missing notes, and not for playing extra notes. This means that I can use my left foot hi-hat pedal as a metronome pretty much whenever I want. Student-me would not have understood the significance of this, but to present-me, it’s a game-changer. The difference is that I now understand that rhythm is everything.
A colleague once told me, “if you play the wrong note at the right time, at least you’re 50% right. But if you play the right note at the wrong time, you’re 100% wrong.” This observation is a little trite, but it points towards something much more profound; rhythm is not only important, but it’s fundamentally baked into every single aspect of music on several dimensions. Harmony is rhythm. Tone production is rhythm. Musical structure is rhythm. The oboist’s tuning A is rhythm. Everything is rhythm.
On a micro scale, harmonies are just extremely fast and intricate polyrhythms. Sound waves have a frequency, after all, and the more perfect the ratio is between frequencies, the more harmonious the interval is. “Harmony is rhythm” sounds abstract, but it’s a real phenomenon that you can train your ear to hear. Zoom out to the macro scale, and you can see how the overall structure of a piece of music is itself a rhythm. Even the most layman listener can detect when the pacing of a song is off, even if they can’t always put words to it. A piece with a flawed overall structure can come across as stilted or awkward or jarring or monotonous. For my fellow music theory nerds, Schenkerian analysis is certainly not perfect, but it’s a valuable study of the intersection of rhythms: how rhythms on the scale of milliseconds interact with rhythms on the scale of minutes or even hours. Rhythm is everything, and everything is rhythm.
Coming back to a more human scale, even if you’ve only studied music for a few months, you’ve probably had a teacher encourage you to “subdivide” the beat to improve your sense of pulse. This is of course what I am doing in GITADORA with my hi-hat pedal foot, but let’s take this a step further.
Everything is Rhythm
One of the biggest struggles that I picked up during my studies as a horn player was hesitation before note attacks. I think it's reasonably common, at least to a small degree, for most wind and brass players, but it’s difficult to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. In practice, you audiate the note you want to play in your head, take a good deep breath in, place your mouthpiece on your face, and… nothing. It’s like your brain interjects, “nope, it’s not quite right yet,” and your instinct is to just hold your breath and not play a note at all. Trying to override this instinct is even worse - when you don’t listen to your brain and just try to play the note anyway, you get this horrible explosive sound. Your air is not coordinated with your tongue and your lips don’t buzz at the right frequency, and the embarrassingly bad sound further reinforces your hesitation next time. This problem was worse if I wasn’t yet warmed up, and it was especially acute if I was a little out of shape. It was a recurring issue in my practice sessions and horn lessons, and it certainly ruined a few auditions, but strangely, it was never an issue when I rehearsed with an orchestra or a chamber ensemble.
SASKATOON, SASKATCHEWAN: Performing with the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra.
This hesitation issue plagued me through my student years, and I slowly picked up strategies from mentors and colleagues to mitigate it. There was one moment that really cemented my understanding of the problem and led to me overcoming it completely. My friend Megan Amos, principal horn of the Columbus Symphony Orchestra, told me that she encountered it too, and she finally put a name to it: the valsalva maneuver. She sent along this short article by Victoria Symphony Principal Trombonist Brad Howland - it was probably just the first result she found on Google, but it sent me down the rabbit hole.
“The Valsalva Maneuver is an automated response by the body to certain stimuli. The brass player takes a breath, but before playing can commence there is a momentary hesitation while the tongue moves up and locks in an upper position, causing a build up of air pressure in the mouth.”
So I’m not the only one?? Howland’s article led me to this somewhat longer article by Sam Burtis, which I highly recommend for brass and wind players. Burtis talks about his experience playing a low-budget off-Broadway show that was “very destructive to all the brass players' setups” due to issues of ensemble coordination and pitch. “After about four days of rehearsal I found that I couldn't count on being able to attack any note, anywhere on the horn.” To fix this, he paid a visit to his old teacher Carmine Caruso, a legend in the brass pedagogy world, who gave him the world’s shortest lesson. It’s worth quoting the entire section here in case the article ever disappears from the internet again:
“After I explained my problem he said that I should sit down and play the "Six Notes" for him. I had been studying with him long enough to know that I should tap my foot for four beats before commencing the exercise, and I started to do so. I got maybe two or three foot taps out and Carmine stopped me.
He gave me an even bigger smile and said "You're not listening to your foot."
I paused for a minute to let that sink in; tapped my foot four times while consciously subdividing and paying attention to what I was doing, and succeeded in attacking a note cleanly for the first time in almost a week.
"OK, that's enough, go home and practice and you'll be fine." was all Carmine had to say, and he was right. The importance of good time cannot be overstated.”
That’s right. The hesitation/valsalva maneuver issue is a rhythm issue. This is the reason it didn’t bother me in rehearsals - the prevailing pulse of the ensemble acted as a reference point for the coordination of my air, tongue and lips.
It sounds painfully simple, but all I needed to solve my problem was to tap my foot and really mean it. You can almost hear the eye roll when Burtis writes “sometimes, in some performance situations, you just have to define the time for yourself. Physically.” This made an enormous difference in my confidence and overall musicianship, so I tell people about it any chance I get. (Caveat: foot tapping can be irritating to musicians around you, so just tap your toe lightly inside your shoe - if you’re sufficiently tuned into your internal sense of pulse, it will achieve the same thing.)
As someone who never studied the Caruso method, I have no horse in this race. I’m not beholden to any pedagogical dogmas, I’m not a Caruso guy at all, and I’m telling you: Caruso was right. I’m not even a proponent of Caruso’s “Six Notes” exercise specifically - my warmup is quite different (more chaotic), but aims to achieve essentially the same thing. If you’ve played a mock audition for me, you’ve already heard a less eloquent version of my “rhythm is everything” spiel. I’ve given it to horn players for the solo from Stravinsky’s Firebird, flutists for the opening solo of Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune, and even oboists about the tuning A for the orchestra.
Caruso passed away in 1987, but his method lives on, championed by Julie Landsman at the Juilliard School.
Maybe I would have figured this problem out more quickly had I been alive in the 80s and studied with Caruso. But then I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to experience GITADORA, so I guess it all balances out in the end.
Guitar Hero Helped Me Enjoy Being a Professional Musician
I’ve tried to be less technical about GITADORA than I was in Part 1 with Guitar Hero, since I don’t have any special insights on technique that a real drummer couldn’t explain far more effectively. But I can tell you how the game makes me feel. I think the thing that draws me to rhythm games, and “plastic instrument” games in particular, is that I can engage with music without any of the hangups of professional musician life.
Being a good musician is a prerequisite for my livelihood, which means that it gets easily entangled with my sense of self-worth. It also means I have to maintain a high standard of performance and preparation, which requires work, planning, and optimization. Every musician is familiar with the feeling of arranging their entire life to accommodate practice sessions and rehearsals. You don’t always have the means to organize your schedule the way you want, which results in late night concerts followed by early morning teaching, auditions on four hours of sleep, and bringing your instrument with you on vacations. It’s so easy to develop unhealthy habits or mindsets surrounding your music-making, and it’s easy to forget why you love music so much in the first place.
Playing a rhythm game like Rock Band or GITADORA is not really music-making - you’re really just pressing buttons in sync with the music - but it engenders the excitement of live performance without any of the stakes. Nobody cares if you miss a note, or if you’re out of practice, or if you make a mess of a song that is beyond your skill level. Like a recreational runner, the only person you’re really meaningfully competing with is yourself. Surpassing a benchmark that you set for yourself in something that completely doesn’t matter is a seriously underrated thrill. It’s one of the joys of being human.
I’ve met most of the other regulars at the local arcade by this point, and they each have their preferred games, each striving to hit their own benchmarks. The GITADORA crowd is very welcoming; they’re happy to take turns on the machine, and they love to share their favourite songs. When I was just getting started, the veteran players explained some of the game’s mechanics to me, which was very helpful since most of the UI is in Japanese. Now that I am one of those regulars, I’ve done my best to pass on that knowledge to newer players. There is healthy competition, but everyone understands that it’s not a zero-sum game.
The last thing I’ll leave you with is this meme I borrowed from the GITADORA community, which perfectly encapsulates the experience of playing it. The numbers are difficulty ratings from 1.00 to 9.99, with 9.99 being the most difficult chart possible.
