Drums: the realest Rock Band instrument

Probably the biggest knock on video games is that no matter how much time you devote to them, the skills you acquire while playing don’t much translate back to real life. It’s always a little sad to hear about the guy who won the Madden NFL challenge, earning the title of best video quarterback in the nation, or the kid who cannot be outflanked in the newest army game. Champion or otherwise, get them out on a real gridiron, or a live battlefield, and it would be game over before the end of the first scream. 

Lee Olson playing Rock Band drums. (Courtesy L. Olson)

That’s why it’s so strange and compelling to pull up a YouTube video of Lee Olson playing virtual drums on Rock Band, one of the class of smash-hit music games —  in which gamers play along to real songs with simplified instruments — that’s remaking gaming culture and giving a huge revenue boost to the music industry. His hands are a blur as the drumsticks flash around the pads to nail the beats, rolls and fills in perfect time. And equally difficult to see is the line between this virtual drumming and the real thing.

The idea of Rock Band is simple: The game delivers the notes of each song to the player in the form of a conveyor belt of colored dots. To keep up with the song, players must “strike” the note on their toy instrument at the moment it’s about to fall off the end of the belt.

Think about it a minute, and you realize how well drumming is suited to video game simulation. A Fender Stratocaster has six strings and 21 frets — that’s 126 individual notes and tens of thousands of chord combinations, a variety not quite represented by the Rock Band guitar’s five oversized buttons. A standard drum set, however, only has about eight surfaces. The Rock Band set has five. And unlike stringed instruments, horns or winds, you don’t need to learn complicated fingerings, or how to breathe, blow, bow, strum or pick. All you gotta do is bang.

Olson, 30, plays on the game’s expert setting, where the player has to hit most or all of the notes from the real song. In a metal rock cut like System of a Down’s “Chop Suey,” that means hitting 1,232 notes in a little more than three minutes.

And that’s exactly what Olson does. Flawlessly nailing 100% of the notes in a Rock Band song is called an FC — for full combination — and in this game, that’s the badge of stardom. Olson, an experienced drummer in real life, has FC’d about half of the nearly 500 songs Rock Band has made available. Many of those performances are archived on YouTube, where Olson’s videos have been viewed close to 6 million times.

    The DrumRocker from Ion, built by real e-drum engineers.

“There are a lot of really great drummers online — famous drummers,” he said from his home in Virginia, referring to drummers who play “irl” — in real life. “But I’m getting a lot more views than most of them. And that’s just the weirdest thing.”

Yet it makes sense if you think about it, he said. “It’s a deadly combination. People love video games, and they love drums. Even people who don’t play are fascinated.”

Which about sums up the weird brilliance of Rock Band, a new form of entertainment that plugs into two major culture currents at once — video games and pop music — by giving people who’d never pick up an instrument the illusion of being a long-haired axmaster for a day. It’s air guitar turned up to 11.

But Rock Band drummers won’t let their instrument be dismissed with a rimshot.

“It’s easy for people to say it’s not real drumming — it’s just a plastic drums set. But it’s a lot more like drumming than most people like to think it is,” Olson said. “It really completes a lot of what you’d need to learn how to play for real.”

Ian Drennan — gamer code name v1g1lance — is proof positive of that assertion. Drennan bought Rock Band last November and began playing at the medium difficulty setting. After two months of practice, he’d hit the expert level and decided he liked playing enough to buy a set of real electronic drums. (E-drums are the equivalent of an electric guitar or electric keyboard — same basic shape as the acoustic kind.)

“As much as I like to say I would’ve eventually bought a kit,” said Drennan from his home in Atlanta, where he’s a software designer, “I don’t believe I would have, had I not actually picked up the game and started playing it.” Rather than seeing the game as a substitute for the real thing, Drennan sees it more as a tool to speed up learning, and make it fun. “I don’t think learning drums in Rock Band will make someone a good drummer. But it’s a really good way to build that initial limb independence, timing and coordination that you need to become one.

“If you play a song in the game enough, you get the muscle memory down,” he said. “So when you take it upstairs to the real kit, you’re just changing what you’re hitting, you’re not changing when you’re hitting it.” The game’s elite drummers hasten to point out that Rock Band’s drums are still a simplified version of the genuine article. The small game kit — basically just four pads and a pedal for the kick drum — not only breaks often but is missing a few key parts, and doesn’t permit much nuance with volume or rhythm — the elements of what drummers call groove.

And not all drum teachers are on board with the game’s virtues, either. When I told my own instructor, Jonathan Brown, about how neat I thought the game was, his skepticism was clear.

“Kids today more often than not will take the easy way out on things,” he said. “To become half-decent at any instrument takes hours of weekly practice for years. But you can master Rock Band in a couple of weeks. You do the math.”

So I might skip the trip to Best Buy this time around. But even Brown’s  concerns might be addressed eventually. The limitations of the game drum sets are already vanishing. The digital instrument maker Alesis just built a kit for Rock Band that’s more or less indistinguishable from lower-end electronic percussion products the company has been selling for years.

Twenty-year-old Calin Scoggins of Dallas even figured out how to plug his $2,000 Roland electronic kit directly into the game. He’s taken advantage of the professional-quality kit’s fidelity to widen the gap between himself and the competition. Scoggins — alias Someguy913 — is ranked No.1 among the thousands of Rock Band expert drummers listed on Scorehero.com, the game’s de facto record-keeping site. Scoggins has the top score on nearly 80 different songs.

“You obviously want to have fun when you’re doing it,” Scoggins said. “Because if you don’t have fun you’re going to get burnt out really fast.”

See? He’s already starting to sound like a real rock star.

Comments

[mobotix309]

Gooooo lee!

[Tyler]

As a player of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games, there is only one part of this article that I disagree with. The statement "But you can master Rock Band in a couple of weeks," is either a huge exaggeration on his part, or he hasn't tried it himself. For the most part, yes, Rock Band has a lot of easy songs that are easy to master in the game, but as for mastering the game itself, that requires a lot more commitment. I've been playing the drums on Rock Band for about 8 months now (I'd really like to get a kit, but no room/money to get it, so it's kind of out of the question for now), and there are still lots of songs that I and many others find difficult to play, muchless mastering it. It also does indeed teach limb independence; I am a good example of that, myself. I started flailing at the drum kit on Medium, sometimes Hard, on the easier songs, and found myself failing quite a bit. After some practice, I taught myself to use the foot pedal seperate from my arms on the pads, and to keep both of my arms separated, I learned that I could hit the pads softly and be more precise, and recently, through Rock Band 2's velocity sensitive pads, I've begun fiddling around with different fills with differing sounds on each of the pads. To call it an "easy way out" may be true for most children of this generation, but not this one, I'll tell you that. =)

[Travis]

Not bad IBPH not bad at all... Good article. Doesn't talk down about Rock Band and toy instruments as much as others do. Nice to see someone actually explaining why this game is appealing and potentially productive. Also, had I not picked up Rock Band I wouldn't have been exposed to classic rock.

[Nate McCall (A_K1TTEN)]

OMG, LEEEEE! haha. this is a VERY good article, it tells what is REAL about the game, and doesnt focus on the fact that it is really A GAME.

[Markus]

Good article, pointing out some of the finer points of RB rather than just the "toy" factor.

While I certainly agree with your instructor, it's deeper than that. For one, if you have never picked up a pair of drum sticks in your life, your technique is gonna be awful. And it's not something that's going to come "automatically". In fact, if you are playing with a bad technique over a long period of time (even though it is on a game) it can have devastating effects if you decide to do the jump to real drums.

One thing I noticed is that you said "all you have to do is bang". Well yes, to the naked eye all you have to do is bang. But if you have any serious intentions of taking it to the real level, that's not the way you should look at it. Rock band will learn you the basics of separating your hands and feet(or foot, I guess). It won't teach you any of the finer points of percussion, such as rolls, double strokes, etc etc.

You won't be making music, there won't be any dynamic changes according to your hits (not yet, although that is coming).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you are planning to - as this article said - use rock band as "a tool to speed up learning, and make it fun" you should consult a drum instructor BEFORE you get down and dirty. By consult I mean not ask if it is "ok", but start taking at least basic drum lessons. Or you could just play it, you know, as a *game* ;)

[Cesar Garza (RawrSpoon)]

I'd beg to differ, Markus. There is the drum trainer to teach you how to do some basic rhythm and decent fills. The only thing I really disagree with is mastering rock band 2 drums in a few weeks. The commitment you need to master this game is amazing and there are very few of the "top" scorehero drummers that do not have a real drums background, meaning the mastering rate is extremely low if you have never picked up drumsticks before.

[Luis]

finally someone understands that rock band's drum kit does teach you something other than just being a toy. for the guitar i wouldnt say as much but can teach your fingers to move equally with your strum hand. I started off with rock band and am working up to real drums because ive seen it actually work