either stall in technique or graduate
to real lessons.
Our guitar teaching tester saw particular
potential in the guitar if additional games were
released to encourage honing your technique
beyond learning the songs included in Rock
Band 4. As it stands, someone who is inter-
ested in picking up guitar for the first time
may be better served taking actual lessons to
develop their technique. “Is it better than get-
ting a real guitar and teaching yourself? No,”
noted our guitar teacher tester. However, if
someone is more psyched about playing a
game than playing guitar, this is an excellent
transition into learning.
A Beginner Guitarist and
Gamer’s Perspective
Perhaps the group most interested in the Squier
Stratocaster Guitar and Controller is players—particularly younger ones—who already
play both the video games and some guitar. In a
culture of instant gratification, the game delivers in ways that books and lessons can’t. It has
built-in motivators to keep players on task with
training modes for technique and for sections of
songs. Each training section runs in an unending loop as you try to score 100 percent to
move onto the next portion. This appealed to
our tester, who said, “I liked that the game has
training that keeps making you do certain notes
until you get them down.” Needless to say, getting a 13-year-old to appreciate practice is an
impressive feat—made possible in this case part
by the gratification of a “perfect score” that’s so
ingrained into video gamers.
Learning songs on the guitar was one of our
young tester’s favorite parts of the combination,
but he also recognized that it can be more difficult at times than learning from TAB books.
While you can incessantly loop sections of songs,
the loops are predetermined and zeroing in on a
particularly difficult part of the section is impossible. Still, the tester loved the guitar and experience—and didn’t want to give it back.
The category of people who would stand to benefit most from the Squier are gamers who have
maxed out their abilities on the games, but don’t
have the interest or motivation to start guitar
lessons on their own. Our strictly gaming testers
found the guitar and game combination intriguing, difficult, and motivating. If you’re just starting out, learning how to navigate the fretboard
and strings through the tutorials is a somewhat
lengthy process, but our testers reported that
time flew by when playing it. The tutorials lead
smoothly to the next without ever jumping up
to a difficulty level that caused them to abandon
the cause, and each ends with a song to keep
the gaming aspect intact. “Playing all the way
