Zakk Wylde Comments On Guitar Hero
February 13, 2009 by Scott
Zakk Wylde commented on Guitar Hero during a recent interview with Live-Metal.net. A lot of people in metal use the “F” word. I spent a while in the military so I am prone to using it quite a bit, but this dude it as if it’s going out of style.
Live-Metal.net: You just mentioned Guitar Hero. What do you think about that game, in general?
Zakk: It’s amazing. I think it’s gonna inspire a whole generation of guitar players. Kids are eventually gonna just, “I’m gonna do it for real. I’m gonna pick up a real guitar and try it.” I think it’s fuckin’ great. You never know, you might get the next fuckin’ Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads, Jimi Hendrix or Dimebag popping out of there. It’s like, “Yeah, I used to play Guitar Hero and that’s when I decided I wanted to be a guitar player.” So yeah, I think it’s fuckin’ brilliant. Fuck, half these fuckin’ kids wouldn’t know who these fuckin’ bands are if they wouldn’t have picked that thing up. They wouldn’t know who Jimmy Page is or fuckin’ Tony Iommi — all these brilliant, amazing guitar players — unless they picked that thing up.
Now that he has said that, let me talk about Zakk Wylde and Guitar Hero: World Tour. Guitar Hero: World Tour sucks. A handful of good songs and nothing more. You get to unlock Zakk Wylde and then you can use him to play Linkin Park and all sorts of crap that you could never imagine Zakk Wylde playing. At the end of every song he does this stupid dropping of the guitar, takes a knee, does a hail Mary thing and punches the floor…every-song! It becomes quite annoying. Guitar Hero: World Tour is geared toward everyone else besides metal fans. It was designed to sell to a broader buyer than the first 4 (including Rock The 80’s). I certainly hope Guitar Hero Metallica is much better.
The interview also goes on to talk about a Black Label Best Of. People on Blabbermouth spout off ignorant things about “No Ballads, just metal”. Some of Black Label’s ballads are black labels best songs. I said it before that ballads are metal. Not in the way that they are heavy, but in a way that even the hardest metal fan can appreciate a good ballad in the mix of 12 heavy hitting songs.
Image: Newscom.com
zakk, as always, doesn’t think twice what he says.
\zakk/
I’m glad to see Zakk has a good opinion of Guitar Hero. Wouldn’t have expected anything less, as he’s in the game. But a few musicians here in Austin take a more negative stance. Rather than seeing GH as inspiration for actual guitar playing, they think that GH doesn’t compare to the real thing and lulls people into a false sense of skill.
I tend to agree more with Zakk.
In one way, those people that look at it in a negative way are right. Some get this false sense of skill as you said and when they pick up a real guitar they are discouraged because they find it tougher than they thought. Others may progress at it to a point where they become bored with it and want to take on a new challenge and pick up a real guitar. I think it is great in that 1) it exposes kids to more music and the first guitar heroes are great for Rock and Metal. 2) it teaches them rhythm and timing and 3) hand-eye and hand-hand coordination that can later lead to other skills.
I think learning guitar helped me become semi-ambidextrous in using my left hand a lot more than I may have before. Of course breaking my right wrist when I was younger forced me to use my left a lot more too.
You can also look at the drum sets on Rock Band and GH. It’s not easy to play and I think learning how to play the drum set on GH and RB is a lot more similar and beneficial for someone that may want to play real drums.
It takes a lot of patience to learn to play guitar, so maybe 1 in 10 will follow through, but hey! That’s one more that otherwise might not find the inspiration. Guitar Hero makes you feel like your playing in the band, and the music kind of carries you away.