Guitar Hero VS Real Guitar

Yesterday another teacher and I were joking and talking about "the whiners," and it's always guitar hero kids going, "But this is hhhhaaaaarrrdddddd!!!!" And how some days you just wanna tell the kid, "then go back to playing guitar hero and quit whining and wasting my time!"

The whining gets so annoying. Seems like all the kids now want you to feed their ego and tell them they're doing awesome even when they're not. I've dropped students if they don't improve after a few months. If after 4 months you still can't move your fingers, play a chord or one scale, I don't even want to mess with you anymore.

And the lying gets to me too. "Did you practice?" "oh yeah! everyday, for hours!" "really?" "Yeah sure did." "Then how come you don't remember any of your chords, any of your scales, or anything at all? How can you have completely forgotten everything you've spent HOURS practicing?" "well I was really busy this week....."

This goes on for months with some students.

Quote from a board member at Strat-Talk: "He really thought that winning guitar hero took a lot of effort..."

I've seen that too. People all proud of themselves that they won a video game with a guitar shaped controller. It's an easy, and rather silly, game. My girlfriends friends love to play it, I don't even mess with it anymore.

Matter of fact I've gotten into arguments with my GF because we're at a friends house party which turns into a Rock Band/Guitar Hero party, and then she wonders why I'm suddenly bored out of my mind and just want to go home. I've told her a million times, "I actually play guitar, this is boring and stupid."

She does accounting work, I tried to tell her it'd be like going to a party where people plug in fake calculators and start playing Virtual BookKeeper. Would that be fun? Seeing your job turned into a dumb party game that people expect you to play because you can play an actual guitar? Then get mad at you when you're playing it on Hard because anything other then Hard puts you to sleep?

I've actually somewhat grown to hate that game. It was fun at first, and I thought it'd be great for guitar because more people would make the jump to a real guitar, but I actually see more people making the jump back to the fake plastic one once they realize a real guitar doesn't have 5 buttons that make everything happen.