In December 2008, I got hooked on Guitar Hero. Since then, I've amassed a collection of Guitar Hero and Rock Band games and instruments across two gaming platforms. I've created this section of my site to record my best scores.
Guitar Hero is a series of rhythm-based video games. Using special controllers modelled after musical instruments, the player must attempt to accurately "play" the scrolling "notes" in time with music, ranging in genre from classic rock to heavy metal to country. For every song, (at least) four difficulty levels exist per instrument; higher difficulty levels are more demanding of the player's skills, and typically offer much higher scores for your trouble.
The franchise began with lead guitar as the only playable note tracks, but later expanded (in competition with Rock Band) to include bass, drums, and vocals.
Guitar and bass tracks are played using a guitar controller. There are five "fret buttons" on the neck of the guitar, and a "strum bar" on the body. Playing requires holding down the fret button(s) corresponding to the colored notes as they scroll down the screen, and strumming when the notes reach the strike line. Each note hit earns points; streaks of successive notes hit with no misses earns a score multiplier, and the use of Star Power (accumulated by successfully completing certain portions of a song without missing a note) doubles the current multiplier, leading to even higher scores. Lead guitar is typically the portion of a song which lends itself to ridiculously high scores, as songs may contain hundreds of notes.
With the use of a microphone, players sing along with the music, attempting to match the pitch displayed on-screen. Accuracy in pitch and duration of notes increases your score and multiplier. Unlike guitar and bass, vocals aren't scored by individual notes, but by "phrases". Your score and multiplier are based on your accuracy during these phrases, use of Star Power, and creative use of the "Freeform" sections where you earn free points for improvising lyrics or just humming in tune with the song. Because performance is judged by whole phrases instead of individual notes, "streaks" in vocals typically do not exceed 100, and vocals tend to be the lowest-scoring portion of a song.
Using a controller that simulates the layout of an actual drum set, a player can rock out like their favorite drummer. Drums are by far the most challenging instrument, as all portions of the drum kit are in use at every difficulty level. I use the Band Hero drum kit for Wii, which has five drum pads and a bass kick pedal; it functions for almost all band games for Wii, including Rock Band 2, even though RB2 only charts for four pads.
Note that I have Rock Band for PS2, but I do not have a PS2 Rock Band drum kit. This is why the scorecharts for Rock Band are missing a drum score table.
Each time I play a song on guitar, bass, or drums, I will attempt the song up to three times, restarting when I miss a note. If I succeed in scoring 100%, I mark that difficulty for that song as cleared. If I fail to score 100%, I record the score for my third attempt, and come back to that song and difficulty again later.
Each time I sing a song on vocals, I will generally only make one attempt. I will only restart the song (up to two times) if I find myself deep in the red and about to fail out.
For all instruments, if I fail a song three times in a row, I will mark it as "SONG FAILED" on the scorechart for the difficulty in question. When I fail a song, I only record the date of the failure, not the specific time.
Additionally, you will notice that I attempt Guitar and Bass performances at higher difficulties regardless of whether I clear 100% at a lower difficulty. This is because the higher difficulties for these instruments afford new challenges and thus the opportunity to develop and improve your skills. For vocals, however, the main difference in higher difficulty levels is that the pitch detection meter is increasingly more anal-retentive, and therefore there is no incentive to attempt a higher difficulty without first scoring 100% on a lower one; therefore, for vocals performances, if I don't FC a song on one difficulty, I won't bother attempting it on a higher level.
Special Note: Unlike many of the "100% FC experts" posting their lameness on YouTube, I actually attempt to sing the song rather than just la-la-la'ing on pitch. The only exception is when a song is not in English or any other language I have a degree of skill in; until I'm able to learn the lyrics properly, if I'm not used to the language the song is in, I'll fake my way through it. As of 1/3/10, the only songs I have done this on are "Nuvole E Lenzuola" (which is in Italian) and "Antisocial" (which is in French).
The scorecharts are arranged alphabetically by song title, rather than by game. The records are displayed as follows:
| Song: | "Song Title" | ||||
| Artist: | Artist Name | ||||
| Game: | Game Title | ||||
 | |||||
| Difficulty | Score | Accuracy | Max. Streak | Performance | Date |
| ----- | ----- | --% | --- |  | --/--/-- --:-- |
Song Title: Self-explanatory.
Artist: Also self-explanatory.
Game Title: Which game this song is featured in.
Instrument Bar: The instrument(s) on which the song was perormed.
Difficulty: The difficulty level at which the song was played. I don't play at "Beginner", so scores will only be recorded for "Easy", "Medium", "Hard", and "Expert".
Score: The total points scored on the recorded attempt.
Accuracy: The percentage of notes correctly hit during the attempt.
Max. Streak: The highest number of consecutive notes/phrases performed without error. (For some entries, you may see 'FC' here instead of a number. This marks a song where I scored a 100% FC but for whatever reason didn't receive or write down the streak number, such as when I manage to FC a song in party play in GH5. Also, this column is absent from all Rock Band 3 songs, due to RB3 not displaying streaks on the score screen.)
Performance: The star rating given for the attempt. Five gold stars (100%/Full Combo) is the best; three stars is the worst possible grade for a completed attempt. Failure obviously does not award a star rating.
Date: The date and time of the recorded attempt; the timestamps are Central USA time, and rounded to the nearest 5-minute mark. (Don't ask why, it's arbitrary.)
A special note on GH5 songs: For some bizarre reason, Neversoft decided to implement a sixth review star in GH5. If you FC a song, you get six stars instead of five. Since reworking my graphics to accomodate this would be way too much trouble, I've decided to ignore it and continue to use 5 gold stars for 100%/FCs on GH5 scores.
Note that I don't bother with records for "guitar duel" songs (from GH3 and GHWT). Also, some listed records for some games may be missing stats. This is due to the idiotic manner in which Career Mode duel challenges and encores interrupt the normal results screen.
Certain songs are featured in two or more games. Guitar Hero World Tour and Rock Band 2 are especially notable for the amount of setlist overlap. For songs which occur on multiple games, the score table will be split vertically in order to take up less space and be more easily readable. Note that multiple instances of the same song will still be counted towards the Overall Stats chart on the index page.
The total number given for full-band songs in the Overall Stats is comprehensive of all songs that have more than one instrument track; please note that there are songs which lack one or more instrument tracks (for example, instrumentals with no vocal track; "Imagine" in RB3 which has no guitar track.)
I refuse to play "Visions" in RB2. EVER. It is the most offensive onslaught of noise I have ever heard.
