“Drummer girls are hot.” It should almost be cliche now, or one would hope. There have been quite a few female drummer role models around for years now: Kate Shellenbach, Meg White, Claudia Gonson and the 9-year old Rachel Trachtenburg all spring to mind, not to mention the classic heartthrob that made me gasp “whoa…. she is sooooo coool” when I was 11:
I’d like to assume that the macho rock days are mostly gone, but it wasn’t too long ago that a percussion-pounding lady I used to date would constantly get stopped at the door because bouncers on the Lower East Side didn’t believe she was the drummer in a band with four guys. Sadly, I’m sure those attitudes still persist in some circles. So… I actually don’t have any exciting media links to share with you about women being stereotyped as bass players or otherwise dismissed in the music industry. I mostly wanted to talk about Rock Band, the fantasy make-believe land where I’ve been playing a lot of drums lately, and generally pretending to be Watts. (I looked it up, and Watts has no first name! Nice.)
If you haven’t already heard all about this game, Amanda at Pandagon had a good review. (Among other things, she covers how Harmonix, the developers, have kept their branch of the “rock simulator” genre less sexist than the new direction of their previous franchise, Guitar Hero. The third incarnation of that series was turned over to a different developer (Neversoft) who stuck the female characters in bikinis, blew up their boobs, and strategically inserted sexy dancing girls.) In Rock Band you and up to three of your friends play a band; two people strum and finger the bass and lead guitar parts on plastic guitar controllers, while one person singing karaoke style and the last person plays the drums.
The Rock Band drum kit is why this game comes in the biggest box of any video game I’ve ever seen. It has four plastic drum pads with piezoelectric sensors that measure force of strikes, just like actual electronic drums, as well as a bass pedal with a little switch underneath it. They’re not as sensitive or variable as a Roland V-Pro Series TD-20S and they don’t bounce as nicely as mesh drum heads, but they also cost approximately 100 times less… and paired with the Rock Band software, they’re pretty damn fun. Back in the days when Guitar Hero was the best music game on the market, I was really into the plastic guitar. I played all the songs on all the difficulty levels and even took second place in a local tournament. But these days, I feel like I’m getting much more addicted to the drums, even though the learning curve is much steeper. For one thing, I find hitting things, even in a relaxed way, incredibly cathartic and good for releasing tension. Had a bad day? Go home and pound “The Hand That Feeds” or “Celebrity Skin.” The other reason I’m liking the drums is something I used to think I’d never say… they’re more realistic.
Back when Guitar Hero first came out, I used to have arguments with perplexed friends who couldn’t understand why anyone would want to spend their free time playing and practicing and mastering a toy guitar when you could put the same amount of time towards playing actual music on a real guitar. The answer I gave them was based on a quote from Alex Rigopulos, the CEO of Harmonix: Guitar Hero isn’t really a substitute for playing the guitar. It’s a simulation of something entirely different, meant to give you a very different kind of experience than actual guitar lessons or performance; Rigopulos described it as a “rock star simulator” but even that doesn’t quite get at the most important nuance. It’s not a matter of trying to create an experience that’s as close as possible to “actual guitar playing” because of course, then you might as well actually play a guitar. Guitar Hero planted its flag at a spot quite a ways away from actual guitar, and part of the pleasure of playing is about feeling and exploring all that space that separates the reality and the plastic, virtual version.
Another way of thinking about this is to look at what the point is of art that imitates or reflects life — or any kind of simulation at all, really. Do simulations or artistic representations necessarily get better because they’re more like what they’re representing? Sometimes, yes. But what’s left out is just as important. A raised-relief map shows you more realistically what the elevation of terrain is like, but it’s not necessarily “better” than a flat map that can be folded up and carried more easily. And maps in general are not “better” when they’re closer in scale to the real thing, especially as you approach 1:1 and the whole possibility of a map vanishes. A wise game-design mentor of mine once gave a speech where he used the earliest human art as an example: “a cave painting of a bear would not be improved if the painting could actually maul you with sharp claws, and neither would the word ‘bear’ which you can yell at your friend. These representations of an actual bear are both useful precisely because they can’t maul you.”
The upshot is, I think it’s slightly missing the point for people to lament that kids or adults are playing Guitar Hero instead of actually playing guitar. It’s like saying that Pulitzer-Prize winning graphic novels about World War II are a shame because people aren’t reading actual war histories. Apples and oranges, different purposes.
So that was then, this is now. Harmonix has subtly shifted their philosophy with Rock Band and weirdly, I find myself drawn along with them. They’re a company composed mostly of people who play music in actual rock bands, and their latest game expresses a philosophy that’s far more about simulating reality than Guitar Hero ever was. That “gap from reality” is still there and important as ever, but it’s a decidedly, deliberately smaller gap. You can see part of their new approach in the artwork, characters, and even the stage props; they’re less cartoony and caricatured, and your musician no longer gets abducted by aliens at the end of her tour. Also, due to the overwhelming popularity of these games, more of the music is actually master recordings rather than covers by a studio band.
More subtly, Rock Band has gone in a slightly different gameplay direction than Guitar Hero III. Neversoft, the new curators of the guitar-only franchise, chose to include more crazy shredding in their song lineup, meaning a lot of metal and ludicrous finger-bleeding solos, the crowning piece being some insane “Nintendo metal” called “Through the Fire and the Flames.” At the same time, they made it easier to play these crazy Yngwie-Malmsteen-esque riffs by adjusting Guitar Hero III‘s timing windows so that you have a greater margin of error to hit the notes. You can flail around a bit more, in other words, and still earn a high score. Actually, in some ways you’d think that this would make the guitar controller feel more “realistic,” since actual guitar playing doesn’t demand quite as meticulous rhythmic precision, but somehow it doesn’t have that effect. Again, the two types of playing are too different.
Rock Band, on the other hand, has opted for more mainstream songs, often with slightly simpler tablatures — but they’ve also kept the smaller, more precise timing window that Harmonix used in Guitar Hero II. What’s more, the instruments for Rock Band are also clearly designed to look and feel slightly more like actual instruments than toys, although they’re still a fraction of the weight. The Fender Stratocaster replica that they include no longer has bright colored buttons on the front of the fretboard; the color-coding is now hidden on the side, oriented towards the player’s head. The strum bar is lighter and can be played with a “picking” motion as if you’re holding the bar like a pick, or brushed past like a string. There’s still a huge gap (as there should be) between reality and fantasy here, but they’re deliberately trying to narrow it — and have said as much in the media.
I find the drums most interesting of all, because all of these games basically fall into a genre known quite correctly as “rhythm action.” The computer or game console tells you when to press a button, and you have to do it at the right time; pair this with music and a steady beat, and it’s surprisingly fun. This kind of game has only been around in its modern incarnation for about ten years, but it’s rapidly become one of the most popular and accessible forms of gaming. Similar to all the excitement over the Nintendo Wii, rhythm action is an area where it seems like games could really break through to larger audiences. Rock Band is especially good at this; every time I’ve played with a group of people, a surprising number of non-gamers want to get up and try the various instruments out, even more so than with Guitar Hero. In part this is because the vocal element of Rock Band is basically just karaoke that scores you for being on pitch and shows you if you’re not — a lot of people know how to do karaoke, including my younger sister, who’s been providing vocal accompaniment for my percussion all week.
When it comes to realism, Rock Band‘s drum set is almost unavoidably more “realistic” than any other part of the game, because you’re pounding out the actual rhythm of the song on actual simple electronic percussion instruments, as part of a game that judges you based on rhythm. Rigopulos, who’s an accomplished drummer with a real set, has claimed that at “Hard” difficulty and above, Rock Band drummers are more or less playing real drum parts — a claim that’s been confirmed by comparing the note charts for the game with the songs’ actual drum tabs. (Of course, there are only four drums and one bass pedal… which makes playing some of The Who‘s songs very rough on the ankles, unless you plug in an extra pedal.)
This is the reason why the drums have a steeper learning curve than the other fake instruments, why players with experience on the drums have been finding they have a head start, and why online guides have been popping up advising Rock Band drummers to learn proper bass pedal foot positioning and left-hand / right-hand sticking technique. I’m only 2/3 of the way through “Hard” difficulty myself, but I will definitely admit to having experimented with better seating, ergonomic arm height, and foot positions to be able to play better. And I always make sure I’m holding my sticks the right way so I can do rapid sequences with my wrists, not my elbows.
I have to say, the most fun part of Rock Band for me is developing muscle memory. I’ll play a song and have difficulty with keeping my foot moving separately from my hands, or figuring out a weird triplet that plays havoc with the time signature. But as with many physical activities, you can sleep on it and improve if you come back later; while you’re asleep, your neurons make new connections you’re not even aware of. The weirdest, most magical moments are when my conscious brain expects that I’ve completely screwed up and lost the beat, but my arms and right leg somehow know what they’re doing without my input, and I just keep on playing, following the rhythm and pounding it out. I keep saying “Whoa, I didn’t miss those! How the hell did I do that?!” The funny thing is, if I didn’t have a video game screen in front of me telling me exactly how I’m doing, I’d be far less aware that I’d done something odd!
So… will I get an actual drum set at some point? Harmonix certainly has always encouraged players of their games to do so, with messages that pop up once you’ve played more than a certain amount, suggesting you get a real guitar or a real drum set. It’s clear where their allegiances lie, even if their own artistry lies in making a different form of entertainment, the “rock star” simulator. As for me and actual drums, it seems unlikely at this point — I live in a small New York apartment, and my neighbors already complain about the noise! Of course there are ways, even in the city. I’ll have to see, once I finish “Hard” and “Expert” and trounce another few dozen adolescent gamer boys online, if I’m still hungry for more drumming challenges. If I am, well… maybe at some point I’ll hop over that fascinating, funny gap between entertainment and reality. At which point I will discover how much I truly suck, especially at getting my sticks crossed.
If anyone else is playing Rock Band online with an Xbox 360… let me know your handle and maybe we can jam!