Sideshow
13th March 2008, 16:09
So I had thought that it was past the time when a Guitar Hero guide would be useful, but it seems more and more people are still buying/getting into it, and what with Rock Band's European release coming up (hopefully soon), I changed my mind. Which brings us to here.
This is arranged basically as a guide for the complete beginner who has never held an SG before. There will be tips thrown in which will be useful to everyone, but I'm going to put them where a newbie will find them most useful, so you more experienced players looking for tips will have to wade through the easy stuff. Sorry :)
Basic basics:
The guitar has 5 frets; from low to high they are Green Red Yellow Blue Orange (GRYBO). It also has a strummer (which sends a strum when pushed down OR pulled up) and a whammy bar.
Your hand has 4 fingers (I'm ignoring the thumb, because except for Hendrixalikes it's irrelevant to GH); I'll refer to them numerically: 1 is your forefinger (your pointing finger), 2 your middle (the bird), 3 your ring finger and 4 your little finger (pinky).
For learning the game I recommend the original Guitar Hero - it's difficulty scales the best through all difficulty levels.
First up, play a song on Easy. Hold the guitar with 1 on G, 2 on R and 3 on Y. As you see a note heading toward the line, hold down the fret which it matches. As it crosses the line push the strummer down. Repeat for the next note, but this time pull the strummer up. Do this for the rest of the song. You may encounter chords, where more than one note appears at the same time. For these you have to hold down more than one fret!
Alt strumming (beginners can skip reading this bit for now):
Alt strumming just means that you alternate which direction you move the strummer: down-up-down-up. People tend to instinctively just down strum - only ever hitting the strummer downward like it was a button. You see here I am recommending alt strumming right from the beginning. This is because it's not a hard habit to pick up, *unless* you have taught yourself to down strum. Learning how to alt strum after down strumming has become ingrained takes practice and can be very annoying as you will find you get frustrated missing lots of notes that you would normally hit. When you down strum your timing is based on the double-action of hitting the strummer and then recoiling back up. The time it takes to recoil back up gets lodged in your head, and when you start trying to alt strum you'll find that the up-strums go off a lot quicker than you expect, so you will miss a lot of notes by hitting them too soon on the up-strum. Basically, you just have to practice a lot and push through it. being able to alt strum will improve your play a lot. Anyway, that's why I'm introducing it off the bat.
Moving up:
You can play another couple of songs on Easy if you want, but really you should be ready to move on to Medium now. Don't worry if you fail songs - failing songs is something you're gonna have to get used to :)
Switch up to Medium and start a song. Position your hand: 1 on R, 2 on Y and 3 on B. Play the song! You may be wondering why you don't have a finger on G. To play green notes, extend your 1 finger to G. That is; you move 1 between frets to play both red and green notes. If GR chord comes up, then you move 1 to G and 2 to R. If you can manage the stretch then try and leave 3 on B. After you've played the chord reset 2 to Y (and 3 to B if you had to move it). That horrible ridge in the middle of the Y fret (the one which will leave your middle finger tip aching) will help you know where the yellow fret is.
Avoid: Positioning your hands 1G 2R 3Y 4B. You may think it's easier now, but it's a bad habt to get into, and will slow you up a lot later on.
How frets work:
You do not need to time the pushing of the fret button with the note. You are much better off holding down the frets long before the note arrives. Higher frets take precedence over lower ones: Green is the lowest fret and Orange is the highest. If you hold down Green and Red and strum in time then you will be able to hit a single red note. This means that some charts are easier to play than they appear. For example, say you have a long string of alternating Blue single notes and Yellow-Blue chords.
I.E. B YB B YB B YB B YB
You do not need to change your fingering to play this! Just hold down B and Y and strum in time. On the chords the game will register that you're holding down the chord, and on the single Blue notes it will see that you are holding down yellow and blue, and the highest note (Blue) takes precedence.
From here you should just play the game. Work your way through the set list. Sure, you're gonna fail out of songs. Skip the ones you can if you get sick of them, and come back to them when you have to. There's nothing I can say which gets around the simple fact that to be good at GH takes practice. Practice > everything else.
A Challenger Appears:
So, you've played the setlist, you can 5 star the first half of it no problem, what do you do now? Move on to Hard of course! Hard is the difficulty where the game gets, well, hard, but it's also the point where it get's really fun. Unlike the fairly abstract charts in Medium, the notes you play in Hard charts tie in closely with what you hear, so the feeling of playing the song really kicks in.
Why does the difficulty ramp up so much? Because of the new arrival: Orange! The extra fret makes all the difference. However, if you've followed this guide up to now you should be OK - you've got finger 4 who's just been hanging around looking for something to do, and with a little practice he'll be happy to play all your orange notes for you. If, OTOH, you opted for the 1G 2R 3Y 4B fingering on Medium, well, you're in for some pain. I recommend against trying to use 4 to play B and O - stretching your pinky is not easy! At this point you're gonna have to unlearn the fingering your used to. Good luck and God speed! (Don't worry, it just takes practice; I did exactly this)
Play the setlist! Practice!
Expert:
Done with Hard? Time for Expert! And really, I have nothing for you. There is not substantial change on Expert compared to Hard; you've already made the leap to Orange. On Expert you'll get more notes, more chords, harder chord switches and faster section, but the paradigm remains the same and all you have to do to get better is... practice!
HOPO:
Hammer-on/Pull-off. If you are playing GH1 then ignore them. They aren't needed, and the way the system works makes them harder to perform than actually strumming. In GH2, though, they were made substantially easier to do, and being able to perform them is a very useful skill to have.
What notes can you HOPO? If you look closely at the frets on the board you will see that some have a black circle around their top, and others are just white. The white notes are the ones you can HOPO. In the earlier games the circle isn't hugely obvious so it can be easier to work out it a note if a HOPO by knowing how the game works it out: you see those horizontal lines that scroll toward you on the note chart? The distance between those lines determines if a note can be HOPO'd. If a note follows another note within this distance on the board then it can be HOPO'd.
Variances: In Rock Band notes are rectangular bars and HOPO notes are less wide and have rounded corners. in GH3 notes can arbitrarily be HOPOable, but the black/white circles are much clearer to compensate.
How do you HOPO? To HOPO you just have to hit the fret button on the controller in time with the note. That is, you are not holding down the fret in preparation for the note and then strumming. Instead, you just hit the relevant fret in time with the note. However! You can only do this after you have successfully hit the previous note, either by strumming it or by HOPOing it. In practice this means you strum the last black circled fret before the HOPO section and then HOPO all the notes as much as you can. Once you miss a note you won't hit any more until you strum again though, so be careful. In general it's a good idea to strum occasionally during long HOPO section (for example; every second note / every fourth note / beginning of strings). A good song to practice HOPOing is Less Talk More Rokk in GH2.
Variances: GH3. You don't need to hit the previous note, or time it, you just need to be holding down the correct fret when the note goes past the line. Yes, GH3 is a festival of noobishness.
Scoring:
You get a set amount for every note you hit. If you hit ten notes in a row without making a mistake your multiplier will increase (which means all notes you hit will gain you more points). The multiplier caps out at x4.
Star Power:
You gain star power by hitting all the notes in a star section. This will fill a quarter of your bar. If you use the whammy bar while sustaining a note in a star power section you will gain a little more star power. You can activate SP once your bar is at least half full. Once activated your bar will drain, and while it does your score multiplier will be doubled (up to a max of x8). While your star power is active you will not gain more SP, even if you go over the top of another star section (except in Rock Band where you will). Star Power also increases the rate you recover your Rock Meter, so on hard songs it's good to save up for the tricky sections; it'll help you get past them.
Tip: activate SP when you think there's a lot of notes coming up, and you have a 4X multiplier.
Advanced skillz:
Skipping: see ign.com...
Actually skipping is useful when you are stuck on a song, are sick of it, but can't get further in the set list without finishing the stupid thing. Generally you can use Star Power to cover this, but some songs have more hard bits than SP will provide for.
Skipping simply involves not playing all the notes. Rather than try and hit a pile of difficult notes / chords (e.g. GY->GR->YO, repeat), mess them up and fail the song, you can just ignore one of the chords and hit the rest (play GY->GR->skip, repeat). Your Rock Meter is still going to go down, but much slower, so if you have it in the green before the tricky bit you should be able to scrape through.
Not how you get a high score, but it can get you onto greener pastures and away from painful calumny. I'm looking at you, Freya.
Hand Positions:
Once you've been playing for a while you should find there are three general positions you will be switching you hands between. These are 1G2Y3B4O, 1R2Y3B4O and 1G2R3Y4B. While you can play the whole game from the first position / second position, you should at some point try learning how to fluidly switch to/from the third. It's handy for bits like Monkey Wrench's GR/GY alternating chords.
The only other position you'll use is the horror of 1G2R4O, but this isn't a positions so much as one of the distressing three-note chords that GH80 and GH3 like to punish you with. And don't forget GH3's super-special-awesome-funtime 1G2R3B4O moment.
This is arranged basically as a guide for the complete beginner who has never held an SG before. There will be tips thrown in which will be useful to everyone, but I'm going to put them where a newbie will find them most useful, so you more experienced players looking for tips will have to wade through the easy stuff. Sorry :)
Basic basics:
The guitar has 5 frets; from low to high they are Green Red Yellow Blue Orange (GRYBO). It also has a strummer (which sends a strum when pushed down OR pulled up) and a whammy bar.
Your hand has 4 fingers (I'm ignoring the thumb, because except for Hendrixalikes it's irrelevant to GH); I'll refer to them numerically: 1 is your forefinger (your pointing finger), 2 your middle (the bird), 3 your ring finger and 4 your little finger (pinky).
For learning the game I recommend the original Guitar Hero - it's difficulty scales the best through all difficulty levels.
First up, play a song on Easy. Hold the guitar with 1 on G, 2 on R and 3 on Y. As you see a note heading toward the line, hold down the fret which it matches. As it crosses the line push the strummer down. Repeat for the next note, but this time pull the strummer up. Do this for the rest of the song. You may encounter chords, where more than one note appears at the same time. For these you have to hold down more than one fret!
Alt strumming (beginners can skip reading this bit for now):
Alt strumming just means that you alternate which direction you move the strummer: down-up-down-up. People tend to instinctively just down strum - only ever hitting the strummer downward like it was a button. You see here I am recommending alt strumming right from the beginning. This is because it's not a hard habit to pick up, *unless* you have taught yourself to down strum. Learning how to alt strum after down strumming has become ingrained takes practice and can be very annoying as you will find you get frustrated missing lots of notes that you would normally hit. When you down strum your timing is based on the double-action of hitting the strummer and then recoiling back up. The time it takes to recoil back up gets lodged in your head, and when you start trying to alt strum you'll find that the up-strums go off a lot quicker than you expect, so you will miss a lot of notes by hitting them too soon on the up-strum. Basically, you just have to practice a lot and push through it. being able to alt strum will improve your play a lot. Anyway, that's why I'm introducing it off the bat.
Moving up:
You can play another couple of songs on Easy if you want, but really you should be ready to move on to Medium now. Don't worry if you fail songs - failing songs is something you're gonna have to get used to :)
Switch up to Medium and start a song. Position your hand: 1 on R, 2 on Y and 3 on B. Play the song! You may be wondering why you don't have a finger on G. To play green notes, extend your 1 finger to G. That is; you move 1 between frets to play both red and green notes. If GR chord comes up, then you move 1 to G and 2 to R. If you can manage the stretch then try and leave 3 on B. After you've played the chord reset 2 to Y (and 3 to B if you had to move it). That horrible ridge in the middle of the Y fret (the one which will leave your middle finger tip aching) will help you know where the yellow fret is.
Avoid: Positioning your hands 1G 2R 3Y 4B. You may think it's easier now, but it's a bad habt to get into, and will slow you up a lot later on.
How frets work:
You do not need to time the pushing of the fret button with the note. You are much better off holding down the frets long before the note arrives. Higher frets take precedence over lower ones: Green is the lowest fret and Orange is the highest. If you hold down Green and Red and strum in time then you will be able to hit a single red note. This means that some charts are easier to play than they appear. For example, say you have a long string of alternating Blue single notes and Yellow-Blue chords.
I.E. B YB B YB B YB B YB
You do not need to change your fingering to play this! Just hold down B and Y and strum in time. On the chords the game will register that you're holding down the chord, and on the single Blue notes it will see that you are holding down yellow and blue, and the highest note (Blue) takes precedence.
From here you should just play the game. Work your way through the set list. Sure, you're gonna fail out of songs. Skip the ones you can if you get sick of them, and come back to them when you have to. There's nothing I can say which gets around the simple fact that to be good at GH takes practice. Practice > everything else.
A Challenger Appears:
So, you've played the setlist, you can 5 star the first half of it no problem, what do you do now? Move on to Hard of course! Hard is the difficulty where the game gets, well, hard, but it's also the point where it get's really fun. Unlike the fairly abstract charts in Medium, the notes you play in Hard charts tie in closely with what you hear, so the feeling of playing the song really kicks in.
Why does the difficulty ramp up so much? Because of the new arrival: Orange! The extra fret makes all the difference. However, if you've followed this guide up to now you should be OK - you've got finger 4 who's just been hanging around looking for something to do, and with a little practice he'll be happy to play all your orange notes for you. If, OTOH, you opted for the 1G 2R 3Y 4B fingering on Medium, well, you're in for some pain. I recommend against trying to use 4 to play B and O - stretching your pinky is not easy! At this point you're gonna have to unlearn the fingering your used to. Good luck and God speed! (Don't worry, it just takes practice; I did exactly this)
Play the setlist! Practice!
Expert:
Done with Hard? Time for Expert! And really, I have nothing for you. There is not substantial change on Expert compared to Hard; you've already made the leap to Orange. On Expert you'll get more notes, more chords, harder chord switches and faster section, but the paradigm remains the same and all you have to do to get better is... practice!
HOPO:
Hammer-on/Pull-off. If you are playing GH1 then ignore them. They aren't needed, and the way the system works makes them harder to perform than actually strumming. In GH2, though, they were made substantially easier to do, and being able to perform them is a very useful skill to have.
What notes can you HOPO? If you look closely at the frets on the board you will see that some have a black circle around their top, and others are just white. The white notes are the ones you can HOPO. In the earlier games the circle isn't hugely obvious so it can be easier to work out it a note if a HOPO by knowing how the game works it out: you see those horizontal lines that scroll toward you on the note chart? The distance between those lines determines if a note can be HOPO'd. If a note follows another note within this distance on the board then it can be HOPO'd.
Variances: In Rock Band notes are rectangular bars and HOPO notes are less wide and have rounded corners. in GH3 notes can arbitrarily be HOPOable, but the black/white circles are much clearer to compensate.
How do you HOPO? To HOPO you just have to hit the fret button on the controller in time with the note. That is, you are not holding down the fret in preparation for the note and then strumming. Instead, you just hit the relevant fret in time with the note. However! You can only do this after you have successfully hit the previous note, either by strumming it or by HOPOing it. In practice this means you strum the last black circled fret before the HOPO section and then HOPO all the notes as much as you can. Once you miss a note you won't hit any more until you strum again though, so be careful. In general it's a good idea to strum occasionally during long HOPO section (for example; every second note / every fourth note / beginning of strings). A good song to practice HOPOing is Less Talk More Rokk in GH2.
Variances: GH3. You don't need to hit the previous note, or time it, you just need to be holding down the correct fret when the note goes past the line. Yes, GH3 is a festival of noobishness.
Scoring:
You get a set amount for every note you hit. If you hit ten notes in a row without making a mistake your multiplier will increase (which means all notes you hit will gain you more points). The multiplier caps out at x4.
Star Power:
You gain star power by hitting all the notes in a star section. This will fill a quarter of your bar. If you use the whammy bar while sustaining a note in a star power section you will gain a little more star power. You can activate SP once your bar is at least half full. Once activated your bar will drain, and while it does your score multiplier will be doubled (up to a max of x8). While your star power is active you will not gain more SP, even if you go over the top of another star section (except in Rock Band where you will). Star Power also increases the rate you recover your Rock Meter, so on hard songs it's good to save up for the tricky sections; it'll help you get past them.
Tip: activate SP when you think there's a lot of notes coming up, and you have a 4X multiplier.
Advanced skillz:
Skipping: see ign.com...
Actually skipping is useful when you are stuck on a song, are sick of it, but can't get further in the set list without finishing the stupid thing. Generally you can use Star Power to cover this, but some songs have more hard bits than SP will provide for.
Skipping simply involves not playing all the notes. Rather than try and hit a pile of difficult notes / chords (e.g. GY->GR->YO, repeat), mess them up and fail the song, you can just ignore one of the chords and hit the rest (play GY->GR->skip, repeat). Your Rock Meter is still going to go down, but much slower, so if you have it in the green before the tricky bit you should be able to scrape through.
Not how you get a high score, but it can get you onto greener pastures and away from painful calumny. I'm looking at you, Freya.
Hand Positions:
Once you've been playing for a while you should find there are three general positions you will be switching you hands between. These are 1G2Y3B4O, 1R2Y3B4O and 1G2R3Y4B. While you can play the whole game from the first position / second position, you should at some point try learning how to fluidly switch to/from the third. It's handy for bits like Monkey Wrench's GR/GY alternating chords.
The only other position you'll use is the horror of 1G2R4O, but this isn't a positions so much as one of the distressing three-note chords that GH80 and GH3 like to punish you with. And don't forget GH3's super-special-awesome-funtime 1G2R3B4O moment.