OK, you’re never going to headline a stadium tour, however thanks to Guitar Hero II, you can still be a superstar in your own living room.
Below you’ll find 4 awesome Guitar Hero tips that will help you learn how to strum and slide your way to the highest level.
If you practice these 4 simple tips daily, you’ll be a professional Guitar Hero shredder just in time for the release of Guitar Hero III, Legends Of Rock.
1. Challenge yourself.
No pain, no fame. Skip the easy level (which requires just three fingers) and opt for medium. It’s important to get your pinkie playing as soon as you can.
Try “Hangar 18″ and “Misirlou,” along with bonus tracks “Six” and “The Light That Blinds.” These songs are fast and among the least pattern-based, so you’ll get better quicker.
2. Perfect the hold.
There are more buttons than you have available fingers. Use your pointer, which is your most coordinated digit, to operate both the red and green buttons up top.
Also, while it’s generally OK to down-strum, you’ll have to strum up and down on really fast passages, like those in “Misirlou” and “Six.”
3. Learn patterns.
If you’re struggling to get through certain solos, check out the training mode. It lets you break down a song into sections and practice difficult solos at a slower speed, allowing you to spot patterns like three-button runs.
4. Maximize star power.
You’ll score more points if you’re smart about your star power. Though it seems practical to wait until your meter is full to start using it to get double points, start at the halfway mark.
A full meter lasts longer, but then you’d miss out on more potential bonuses since you can’t earn star power while using it.
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There’s also the super-secret patented “button mash” which is used to pass super fast solos that you can’t actually play yet. You won’t score many points but you’ll hit enough of the notes to not fail.
At expert level (the only level that’s actually worth playing) the real difficulty is with fatigue, the majority of the songs are actually pretty easy.
Here’s a tip from my friend at Activision (which, for all I know, is actually in the instruction booklet): If you’re holding down two buttons and the game is only looking for one, it will read the input as only holding the button closest to the guitar’s body. For instance, if you’re holding down red and blue, it will play like you’re just holding down the blue button. I can’t remember if that works for more than two buttons, though.
It takes some getting used to, of course, but it comes in real handy on some faster songs.
Yeah, that one’s in the manual and it doesn’t work on chords. The real trick is recognising which notes are okay for hammer-ons and pull-offs, I think they’re generated by the game once the notes reach a certain proximity so they actually work for some chords too.