From Beginner to Expert: How to Be a Guitar Hero

It's Saturday night, and some of your friends invite you over to their house for some fun. When you head over, your friend tells you they just picked up this new game called Guitar Hero (out for the Playstation 2 and Xbox 360), with some funny looking guitar controller. When you boot the game up and give it a shot, the last thing you want is to turn one of your favorite songs into a long series of squeaks and chirps. This guide should turn you from zero-to-hero with a few easy tips.

Before you can practice, you need to obviously purchase the game. You should see several guitar controllers next to the game in all shapes and sizes, each promising a different playing experience. Most of these are made by third party companies, and are of generally poor quality. Many problems of these guitars include non-responsiveness to your game console, fret buttons which stick, malfunctioning whammy bars and general low durability. Make sure you buy one of the official RedOctane guitars (either the guitar that comes with the game, or the Wireless white guitar), due to their superior quality. If you're a beginner I also recommend purchasing the original Guitar Hero, due to the song list and note charts for each song being generally easier.

First thing you should notice when you take the game out is the gigantic controller, which actually looks like a real guitar! It's around 3/4 the size of a real guitar, and it features 5 fret buttons at the end of the neck, one strum bar in the place of the strings, a whammy bar to stretch out notes, and "Start" and "Select" buttons, along with a strap. In Guitar Hero, you will see the neck of a guitar with five clear circles at the bottom, representing the five fret buttons. Notes in the forms of colored circles (each color coordinated to the colors of the fret buttons) will travel down the neck of the guitar on-screen. The idea is to hold down the fret button corresponding to the moving colored circle, then hit the strum bar up or down when the moving circle reaches the clear circle at the bottom of the neck. If done correctly, you will receive a certain amount of points, based on how many notes you've hit in a row. This is called your "multiplier," and increases every 10 notes until you hit the maximum of 30 notes (each note is normally worth 50 points, after 10 notes in a row they'll be worth 100 [2x multiplier], after another 10 they'll be worth 150 [3x] then finally after 10 more each note is worth a huge 200 points [4x]). Keep in mind you can hold down the fret buttons as much as you want, but if you hit the strum bar while holding the wrong note you'll be in trouble.

Start it up and try it out. If you're a beginner I suggest trying the Easy difficulty first, since every song in this mode has something in common: You only use three fret buttons. Place your pointer finger on the green button, your middle finger on the red and your ring finger on the yellow, all in a line. Notes are far and wide in this mode, giving you much time to recover between each note, in case of an error. After a bit of time with this mode, try medium, which adds the blue button into songs. For this keep your fingers in the same place as you did for easy mode and simply use your pinky to hit it.

For hard and expert difficulties a problem begins to occur, probably the hardest step to traverse in your Guitar Hero career: the orange button. Naturally you only have four fingers to use for the four fret buttons so far, but what to do with five? You can either use your thumb (which I cannot recommend, since not only does your thumb help you control the neck but wrapping your thumb around is plain uncomfortable), or learn to shift your hand over and hit the last button with your pinky too. You have to learn how to stretch your four fingers out to cover five buttons while still looking at the screen at all times, since the notes in these difficulties come at a much faster rate (and are more numerous) than the previous modes. Stretching your pinky out is hard at first, but with enough practice you'll eventually get it. I suggest playing "More Than A Feeling" from Guitar Hero and "Sweet Child O'Mine" from Guitar Hero II as practice for using the orange button, due to these songs having phrases which follow a very similar and easy-to-follow tempo, and sporadically use the orange button. After you've perfected using all the fret buttons congratulations, you're well on your way!

So now you're officially hot stuff, at least until you hit expert mode. Expert adds a slew of new notes to each song, and you'll find yourself playing almost every sound you hear! Regular playing methods can't really keep up with how fast some of the songs become, unless you want to strain your wrist. There are two things you can master to improve your note accuracy, called "Hammer- ons/Pull-offs," and "Alt-strumming."

First up are hammer-ons and pull-offs. If you look closely at each note, surrounding the base of the white filled-in circle at the top (above the colored portion of the circle) you'll notice a thin black circle. This is a regular note, and you must play it by hitting the strum bar. However, in some notes there won't be a thin black circle, meaning you can hammer-on/pull-off. With these notes you only have to hit the strum bar once, then you can successfully play each note by only hitting the fret button needed on queue, until you hit a note with another thin black circle. This will certainly save your wrist a lot of energy, and especially comes in handy during very fast sections crammed with a ton of notes. Remember, if you don't see a thin black circle, just hit the strum bar once and only hit the fret buttons.

The other trick is alt-strumming. So far you've probably played using a style called "Down- strumming," which is simply hitting the strum bar downward with your thumb or however else you may when you must play a note. Down-strumming can only do so much when you have to play several of the same note in a chain during short periods of time. For these phrases, you should use alt-strumming, which you can do by holding the strum bar and moving it up and down instead of just hitting it downward with your thumb. You can play several notes theoretically twice as fast as you could by down-strumming. Master these two styles and you'll become a pro!

Mastering Guitar Hero shouldn't take too long so long as you continue to practice. Songs in the game come in a great order for people learning, gradually increasing in difficulty. Keep practicing and keep rocking!