Learning with Power Gig : Lesson One

This kicks off the beginning of an undetermined journey I am taking. If you didn’t see the article on Friday then I will recap you. Basically I will be dedicating at least 3 hours a week to playing Power Gig and see if I can truly learn how to play guitar.

So far I have soaked in about 4-5 hours for this week and other than barely being able to play Rock Band on hard I have no previous experience so I am as pure a student as they come.

When I first started I was in amazement strictly on a technological standpoint. I couldn’t believe that I was able to hold down a string in a certain area and it registered as button presses or that to cycle through the menus you actually plucked strings. The nerd in me was amazed before I even played.

I started off simple by calibrating my sound and such to the game in the options and then I hit the tutorials. I checked out the basic ones that explain how to hold the strings and hand placement. This was straight forward enough for me to get a little grasp on the gameplay and actually try it out.

The game has a campaign/story to it which is a ridiculous epic tale supposed to be overly epic and is sort of over the top but you can ignore the story for the most part. The way it works is that you have to play songs that are basically “owned” by three different clans that are working together to unleash a magical power called Mojo that is being controlled by the enemies called The Headliners. Then you play the certain songs to earn experience or something for that clan to fill up a progress bar. Or at least that is what I grasped from it.

The cool part about it is that it its a mix of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The campaign is just you picking songs and then doing gigs from a menu but the menu differs from the venues you choose and you are given stereotypical rockers. You also can play through it with friends allowing you to use the instruments from the other music games but I do not believe you can both play guitar. So grab a drummer and vocalist and you can bring your friends.

So I played a few songs but I was on a difficulty level above easy but there are a few difficulty levels so it was like an easy/medium area and I only used the 2/3/4 strings. I tended to struggled with the 2 and 3 string because it wasnt registering very well with the way I was pressing them down.

I am not blaming the game for that yet because I have a strong belief that I am holding the strings down incorrectly so I am blaming myself still.

Worth noting though is that it will feel weird at first to strum the guitar if you have played a lot of Guitar Hero or Rock Band. Just hitting the strings on a real guitar while playing it just seems so odd but when you get into a groove it feels so much cooler to play a game and feel like you are truly playing.

Towards the end of my first lesson though I went back to the tutorials to start learning power chords. This area is all about learning real guitar. So far I learned a 5 and 6 chord and the open chords. It taught me what chords to hold down and what strings I could strum with them.

I know I am not even close to playing full songs until I get all of them down and memorize them but the way they presented the material and how they walked me through playing them I felt myself memorizing it immediately so right now I have very high hopes that I can learn this.

This was sort of the overview with my first experience with the game but from now on we have decided on turning these into videos so you can get a better idea and actually see this terrible guitar playing evolve.

Here are some fun little things that I have liked so far:

1. You do not get booed off the stage or feel like killing yourself when you miss notes. No loud annoying noises or “failing out” of songs so you can focus on getting better rather than always aiming for perfection.

2.The song selection is pretty awesome. I haven’t heard a lot of these songs but it is loaded with Alt-Rock  and just a softer rock. It was as if Seven45 studios realized that it didn’t need to fill the game with hard rock and metal for the basement dwelling fans of their competitors. I have even heard songs for the first time that I found myself loving so much that I looked up an downloaded their music.

3. The notes are all connected on a string so while you are playing you hit a note and their is a neon string that is the color of the next note. So as you play you follow this neon rope as it zig zags from the different chords and gives you more guidance than other titles.

If anyone has any tips or things they would like to me try to try out don’t hesitate to put it in the comment section. For example if you have any advice on holding down chords or anything that could help it would be appreciated.