How to Play Guitar Hero III Songs

Series Summary

Western popular music of the last 50 years has been largely dominated by one of the most versatile stringed instruments yet produced—the guitar. Specifically, the electric guitar has been the seminal instrument of pop music since the 1960s. Adolph Rickenbacher introduced it to the world in the 1930s…and started a musical revolution.

Electric guitars are usually made with a solid or semi-hollow wood construction. Electromagnetic sensors called “pickups” are mounted on the face of the instrument to collect and transmit vibrations from the strings. From there, the real excitement takes place. The sound waves are interpreted as electrical signals and sent along a path from the guitar to any number of effects that distort, compress, and mutate what is played in real time; the result usually comes out of a very loud amplifier.

With the large array of sounds at its disposal, the electric guitar is almost the perfect vehicle for creative expression. It is no surprise, then, that electric guitars have driven rock and pop music in some very diverse and impactful directions, helping great artists like Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Eddie Van Halen, and Eric Clapton develop into icons that are still speaking to entire generations of people.

In this free video series, learn how to play songs from the popular video game, Guitar Hero 3.

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Joe Wiles with the Rock and Roll Conservatory on behalf of Expert Village. In this next series of segments, we're going to take key riffs from Guitar Hero III and I'm going to show you how to do them. This isn't an exhaustive list of all the songs on Guitar Hero III. It's abbreviated only because I chose certain songs that were known for their recognized ability of the riffs within the songs. We're probably going to go over one or maybe two riffs in each song. That should be enough. They key difference you need to know between Guitar Hero and playing a real guitar is that with a real guitar, you don't get points to play it. The cool trade off is with a plastic guitar you don't get chicks. Put down your plastic guitar, grab a real guitar, plug them in, and join me in our next segment. We're going to be learning how to play Slow Ride by Foghat."