Transcript: What is Guitar Hero?
In this video clip, Derek Robertson demonstrates how to use Guitar Hero, with help from a pupil.
Derek Robertson: We’ve even got guitars. It’s not a real guitar, but it’ll go round the neck. It’s like the dance mat in that respect, you’ve got five coloured buttons here that, when you actually strum the guitar, you’ve got to press down the buttons at the appropriate time in order to play a killer guitar performance on a rock track.
This is the guitar for Guitar Hero. It's a really popular game. We’re not saying this is going to teach you to play the guitar, although you do need a degree of kind of musical ability in order to be successful at this. But we’re looking at this in ways in which it can be almost a context for collaborative learning, for project learning, so … But let me just show you how this works in the first instance. Two guitars hooked up to the Sony PS2, we’re on this screen here, and I’m going to select Multiplayer. And all I do is I press the green button to select it. Now Julie here is going to be my competitor, and so we’re going to do a pro face-off. So we’re going to play the same song against each other. Okay? And you want easy level don’t you?
Female pupil: [nods]
Derek Robertson: Right, so what Julie needs to do now is select her character. So she uses the white controller to move up and down to select who she wants to be and then presses green. And I’m going to choose, there he is, my look-a-like. Okay. And do I want gauntlets or gargoyles? I’m going to go for gargoyles. Suits me. Okay, now you need to choose your guitar, so if you choose the guitar you want. Okay. Let’s … I’m going to select the Flying V. So now we can also select which venue we want to play at, and when you play this the graphics are fantastic. The rich contexts that there are for writing, for art and design, for drama, there’s lot of ways in which we can actually explore this. Fantastic context. As you can see, we’ve got the blackout bar. Let’s play, let’s play the Rat Seller. Okay, so we’ve to select a song now. So let’s pick one that maybe most people would recognise. We’ll go for a Guns 'N’ Roses song, okay. Sweet Child O’ Mine? You selected that, yeah [laughs]. Okay, we want easy. So before we start it, what we’ve to do, folks, is that you see it coming up on the screen, there’ll be the colours along here will be in the bottom of the screen, and as the, the song progresses coloured circles move towards us. And as they go over the colours at the bottom we’ve got to touch the … press the same colour and strum at the same time. Okay? So let’s have a go at it, on easy, here we go. Colours at the bottom. Because we’re on easy you only need to do the first three colours ...
[playing music]
And when you see the ones with the stars, if you hit them in succession you get star power. And the difficulty about this is that you can’t look at your fingers, you’ve got to keep your eye on the screen.
[playing music]
Now I’ve activated star power, so I do some rock 'n' roll bravado and turn my guitar up, rock 'n' roll. There we are, I’ve activated more points. Now the beauty of this great game, great context, I think it can be used for creating context for writing, for number work because there’s a career you can have with this as well: be a guitar hero. There’s lot of ways in which we can explore this in terms of kind of cross curricular themes.