I got all the stuff I was after. Bought the Beatles limited edition with the fake Hofner bass, a drum kit and a microphone. I also bought some cymbals for the drum kit.
The first thing that jumped out at me is that in all the pictures, it looks like there's a little fake bass-drum that says "beatles" on it, like Ringo's set circa 1963/64. However, what's in the box is actually a piece of fabric you can put on the drums. I haven't put it on.
Setup was very easy and intuitive. Took maybe 20 minutes to set up everything including the aftermarket cymbals.
Nobody had the Madcats 3 cymbal set around here. I bought two of the 2-cymbal sets. The way you play the game, it has 4 different colored drum heads. (Yellow, Red, Green and Blue) and the bass drum pedal.
During the songs, if you get, say, a high-hat part, you play it on the yellow drum head, which is your mounted tom. Makes no sense. Or, if you have cymbals (which you pay extra for, and which don't come with the kit), you can hit either the yellow drum head or the yellow cymbal. The game scores them both the same.
So, I unpacked the cymbal kits and discovered that you can only mount two of them on the rock band drum kit, itself. Not a biggie for me. I went upstairs and got a cymbal stand from my studio and used it for the hi-hat. I wanted the hat mounted to the left of the "snare", anyway, so I can play hats and snares cross-hands.
It all feels like a cheap toy drum set, but hey, that's what it is.
I fired up the game and it had some tutorials, but I think you learn just as fast by just diving in. The easiest mode was actually sorta hard to play. You didn't have to play that many notes, and although they were in time with the music, they barely made any sense.
As you went up in difficulty, the drum parts started matching the ACTUAL drum parts much more closely. So, they started making more sense. Problem is, they also got a lot more difficult to play. Coordinating with my bass-drum foot was the hardest part for me. I was playing "Getting Better" and there's one section with a repeating syncopated bass-drum beat. I still don't think I got it.
They measure you on your overall accuracy. And if you're in game mode, if you do poorly enough, they end the session/concert, and you just sorta fail. Otherwise, you finish the song and you get a percentage rating on how you did.
The drums were just a blast and a half.
I did find that it wasn't that easy to hit them and score. You had to be relatively in rhythm. At first, I tried playing it like a video game, reacting to the screen. However, the more I just tried for some musicality, and learned the pattern, the better things got.
I don't get the feeling that this teaches the fundamentals of playing actual drums, but it does teach some basic music fundamentals. It has some educational value.
My son came down and wanted to try out the drums. He's my pretense for getting this thing to begin with. So, I had to let him play. I figured I'd try the hofner bass. You can play either a "bass" part or a "guitar" part with it. All I can say is, as a guitar player, it was the stupidest experience I could ever imagine. It made no musical sense at all. It had nothing to do with music or playing a guitar. You probably could learn to play guitar faster by learning to type.
I heard somebody once say that a friend of theirs had so much fun playing guitar hero that they went out and bought a regular guitar in order to learn to play it. After having experienced it, I just don't see any possible way that this transitions to actual guitar playing in any way. It has zero in common. Actually, worse, it does things that are so unlike a guitar that it likely would make learning to play an actual guitar much harder.
So, after one song, I have pretty much resolved that I will never touch one of those fake plastic guitars again. What a stupid idea for a game. No wonder I was against these games for so long.
Finally, they included a microphone so you could sing along with the song on the TV. As you sang, it measured your pitch, and if you were close you got rated just as if you were playing the fake drums or fake guitar.
So, the verdict? Singing along was mildly entertaining. Playing the drums was a barrel of monkeys. Playing that guitar-thingie was a nightmare.
Total cost to buy the game system (which doubles as my only blue-ray player), with the beatles rock band and the extra cymbals was about $650, including all the tax.
Probably not the best investment, but half of that is the PS3, which is going to do double duty as a blue-ray player. Also, I enjoyed playing the game. So, even if my son is lukewarm to the idea, that's fine. I'll get my money's worth of enjoyment out of it.
And it'll give me an excuse to get some V-drums here in a few months.
Showing posts with label roland v-drums. Show all posts
Showing posts with label roland v-drums. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
The Rock Band Blog Entry
No, you juvenile degenerates, not "Rock Band" the game. I'm mean "rock band" as in "people who get together and play music"... and... well... rock band the game, but more on that later.
The Beatles just had their 9-9-09 launch of their remastered discs and their Rock Band game. I ordered the remastered boxed set from Amazon and they said they can't ship it for 3 more weeks. So, I've cancelled the order for now and will cruise Costco and Sam's Club today to see what's available.
Last night, saw Heart in concert. For a bunch of 50-somethings, they're amazing. Okay, the two sisters are amazing. The rest of the band is a bunch of younger road warriors that they put together as the most recent incarnation of Heart. One thing I noticed: the biggest difference between these road warriors and your garden variety cover band that plays at bars and parties is that the road warriors have an unbelievable rhythm section. The difference in the caliber of all the players is pretty obvious, but when it comes to bass and drums, the contrast is really, really vivid, in my opinion.
Which brings me to Rock Band. My son has Guitar Hero for the Wii. I didn't know until he told me the other night that the reason he never plays it is that he only has one guitar controller for it. So, he can't play it with his friends. He's not the kind of kid who plays video games by himself. He's just too social. He'll throw a baseball against a wall for a couple of hours, but won't waste hours on video games. I'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible. However, I might spring for another game controller for him. Especially if I can get one of the Stratocaster ones. It would at least reinforce how utterly cool a stratocaster really is.
Some of you who know me already know that I rail against the utter stupidit of people spending hours upon hours playing fake guitars in a manner that doesn't remotely approximate making music. If today's kids spent that sort of time playing actual guitars, we'd be raising an entire generation of Jimi Hendrixes and Jimmy Pages. Instead, we just continue to raise entire generations of fat dimwits who lack the life-skills to work at McDonalds because they fried their farging brains on video games for a decade and a half before graduating High School.
[/grumpy old man mode]
The other heartbreaking thing to me is that electric guitars are more affordable now than they ever were when I was a kid. When I was a youngster in the late 70s / early 80s, a standard Stratocaster (just called "a stratocaster" back then) cost about $450. Today, they've moved production of standard strats to Mexico. You can buy brand-new ones for $399 at everyday retail prices. I've played American strats of my era and Mexican Strats of the modern era and the mexicasters are better, period. (I actually have two of them.) Better sound, quality and playability. Adjusted for inflation, the $450 Strats of my childhood would be over a grand, today. (Which is about what the modern American Strats go for.)
Now, we also didn't have e-bay back then. So, you can't get the SCREAMIN' deals today that you could get on used stuff back then. A friend of mine once got a Gibson SG and a Peavey 250 watt combo amp for $250. I bought a 1959-ish Gretsch Chet Atkins for $160, once.
For most of my childhood, despite doing things like skipping lunch and saving my money for years on end, I couldn't afford a decent guitar. (Or ANY guitar, decent or otherwise.) I was lucky that my buddy, Stu, had a guitar that he'd let me play, and he knew enough about playing that he could teach me quite a bit. It wasn't until I graduated High School and got a job that I could afford decent instruments.
Not only that, but finding music to play was a chore. If one person knew a song, it spread through the neighborhood like wildfire. There weren't all these guitar magazines filled with tab transcriptions of rock songs back then. You had Mel Bay books with songs like, "Oats and Peas and Barley Grow". Kids today can get note-for-note transcriptions of every song Hendrix ever played! Not to mention youtube videos where people post how things are played.
So, for kids to be growing up in an era when the affordability of guitars is better than ever, and accessibility on how to play is better than ever, and instead be wasting their time, gaining no skills at all, playing a guitar-ish game just galls me.
[/grumpy old man mode off]
The bright side to all this is that my son is showing an interest in drums. I won't force him to play an instrument. However, I'll make it available to him to learn one and take lessons as he pleases. Every time somebody pronounces rock bands as totally irrelevant to young people, an act like the Jonas Brothers comes along and proves to the world, yet again, that a teenage boy is at the height of his powers if he's playing a guitar in a band.
I've been doing some researching and it turns out that in expert mode, these games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero are actually showing kids something analogous to the real drum parts of the songs. The basic plastic kits made for the games are basically like toys. However, there's an aftermarket drum kit called an Ion Rocker made by Alesis that is like an inexpensive electronic drum kit. Finally, you can buy converter boxes that let you connect your Roland V-drums, or Yamaha DTX kit to those video games and then you're playing actual drums (okay, actual "electronic" drums).
If he shows an interest, I can easily see making the trip to Dave's Drum Depot in Toledo to get him lessons and some real skins.
So, mission for today is to see if I can get the Beatles Boxed Set, a PS3 (it allows the most drums and cymbals for Rock Band of any of the platforms), the Beatles limited edition premium bundle (which includes a fake plastic Hofner bass controller), and a 3 cymbal expansion pack.
I'll gauge Logan's interest and if he really shows some interest, I'll be setting him up with some V-drums here, soon. Of course, they're for him... you know... wouldn't spend that kind of money just because I'd like them, too. That'd be extravagant and self-indulgent.
The Beatles just had their 9-9-09 launch of their remastered discs and their Rock Band game. I ordered the remastered boxed set from Amazon and they said they can't ship it for 3 more weeks. So, I've cancelled the order for now and will cruise Costco and Sam's Club today to see what's available.
Last night, saw Heart in concert. For a bunch of 50-somethings, they're amazing. Okay, the two sisters are amazing. The rest of the band is a bunch of younger road warriors that they put together as the most recent incarnation of Heart. One thing I noticed: the biggest difference between these road warriors and your garden variety cover band that plays at bars and parties is that the road warriors have an unbelievable rhythm section. The difference in the caliber of all the players is pretty obvious, but when it comes to bass and drums, the contrast is really, really vivid, in my opinion.
Which brings me to Rock Band. My son has Guitar Hero for the Wii. I didn't know until he told me the other night that the reason he never plays it is that he only has one guitar controller for it. So, he can't play it with his friends. He's not the kind of kid who plays video games by himself. He's just too social. He'll throw a baseball against a wall for a couple of hours, but won't waste hours on video games. I'd like to keep it that way for as long as possible. However, I might spring for another game controller for him. Especially if I can get one of the Stratocaster ones. It would at least reinforce how utterly cool a stratocaster really is.
Some of you who know me already know that I rail against the utter stupidit of people spending hours upon hours playing fake guitars in a manner that doesn't remotely approximate making music. If today's kids spent that sort of time playing actual guitars, we'd be raising an entire generation of Jimi Hendrixes and Jimmy Pages. Instead, we just continue to raise entire generations of fat dimwits who lack the life-skills to work at McDonalds because they fried their farging brains on video games for a decade and a half before graduating High School.
[/grumpy old man mode]
The other heartbreaking thing to me is that electric guitars are more affordable now than they ever were when I was a kid. When I was a youngster in the late 70s / early 80s, a standard Stratocaster (just called "a stratocaster" back then) cost about $450. Today, they've moved production of standard strats to Mexico. You can buy brand-new ones for $399 at everyday retail prices. I've played American strats of my era and Mexican Strats of the modern era and the mexicasters are better, period. (I actually have two of them.) Better sound, quality and playability. Adjusted for inflation, the $450 Strats of my childhood would be over a grand, today. (Which is about what the modern American Strats go for.)
Now, we also didn't have e-bay back then. So, you can't get the SCREAMIN' deals today that you could get on used stuff back then. A friend of mine once got a Gibson SG and a Peavey 250 watt combo amp for $250. I bought a 1959-ish Gretsch Chet Atkins for $160, once.
For most of my childhood, despite doing things like skipping lunch and saving my money for years on end, I couldn't afford a decent guitar. (Or ANY guitar, decent or otherwise.) I was lucky that my buddy, Stu, had a guitar that he'd let me play, and he knew enough about playing that he could teach me quite a bit. It wasn't until I graduated High School and got a job that I could afford decent instruments.
Not only that, but finding music to play was a chore. If one person knew a song, it spread through the neighborhood like wildfire. There weren't all these guitar magazines filled with tab transcriptions of rock songs back then. You had Mel Bay books with songs like, "Oats and Peas and Barley Grow". Kids today can get note-for-note transcriptions of every song Hendrix ever played! Not to mention youtube videos where people post how things are played.
So, for kids to be growing up in an era when the affordability of guitars is better than ever, and accessibility on how to play is better than ever, and instead be wasting their time, gaining no skills at all, playing a guitar-ish game just galls me.
[/grumpy old man mode off]
The bright side to all this is that my son is showing an interest in drums. I won't force him to play an instrument. However, I'll make it available to him to learn one and take lessons as he pleases. Every time somebody pronounces rock bands as totally irrelevant to young people, an act like the Jonas Brothers comes along and proves to the world, yet again, that a teenage boy is at the height of his powers if he's playing a guitar in a band.
I've been doing some researching and it turns out that in expert mode, these games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero are actually showing kids something analogous to the real drum parts of the songs. The basic plastic kits made for the games are basically like toys. However, there's an aftermarket drum kit called an Ion Rocker made by Alesis that is like an inexpensive electronic drum kit. Finally, you can buy converter boxes that let you connect your Roland V-drums, or Yamaha DTX kit to those video games and then you're playing actual drums (okay, actual "electronic" drums).
If he shows an interest, I can easily see making the trip to Dave's Drum Depot in Toledo to get him lessons and some real skins.
So, mission for today is to see if I can get the Beatles Boxed Set, a PS3 (it allows the most drums and cymbals for Rock Band of any of the platforms), the Beatles limited edition premium bundle (which includes a fake plastic Hofner bass controller), and a 3 cymbal expansion pack.
I'll gauge Logan's interest and if he really shows some interest, I'll be setting him up with some V-drums here, soon. Of course, they're for him... you know... wouldn't spend that kind of money just because I'd like them, too. That'd be extravagant and self-indulgent.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)