Disrupting Music Notation & Controllers

I often hear that "musicians won't switch" from their traditional instruments & notation to the Thummer and (optionally) ThumMusic System. Who cares? The success of Guitar Hero shows that a new instrument and notation can have phenomenal success without "converting" anyone.

Since the release of Guitar Hero in November of 2005, the number of instrumental music-makers in the USA has doubled.*

Doubled. In two years. Doubled.

Wikipedia describes Guitar Hero's controller, notation, and pedagogy as follows:

An extended guitar neck is shown vertically on the screen (the frets horizontal), and as the song progresses, colored markers indicating notes travel down the screen in time with the music; the note colors and positions match those of the five fret keys on the guitar controller. Once the note(s) reach the bottom, the player must play the indicated note(s) by holding down the correct fret button(s) and hitting the strumming bar in order to score points. Success or failure will cause the on-screen Rock Meter to change, showing how well the player is playing (denoted by red, yellow, and green sections). Should the Rock Meter drop below the red section, the song will automatically end, with the player booed off the stage by the audience. Successful note hits will add to the player's score, and by hitting a long series of consecutive successful note hits, the player can increase their score multiplier.

Guitar Hero (GH) doubled the music-making population by simplifying the tools of music education (instruments, notation, and pedagogy). It attained this simplification by applying the time-honored process of dumbing down.

GH's dumbed-down system enables players to climb the first steps of music's learning curve very rapidly. However, this same dumbing-down places a very low ceiling on what players can learn from GH. They can learn about rhythm, and about the separation of hand-functions on a guitar (one hand strumming, the other controlling the fret-board), but that's about it.

The problem with Guitar Hero is not that it's incompatible, but that its dumbed-down tools place such a low ceiling on the acquisition of musical skill and knowledge. Those GH customers who want to rise above this ceiling have to leave the GH product line.

But what if GH's tools did NOT impose this low ceiling? What if a serious student of music could use GH's (incompatible) controller, notation, and pedagogy to rise to unlimited heights of skill and knowledge, while still having as much fun as with the current version of GH?

If GH had no ceiling, then its 16 million American players would be marching right up its learning curve into serious musicianship right now, with tens of millions of additional music-makers joining that march every year. Soon, the number of music-makers who used GH-based tools would exceed those using traditional tools at every level of musical skill and knowledge. The percentage of musicians who used traditional instruments & notation would shrink every year, not because they were "converting" from traditional to GH-based tools, but simply because huge numbers of new musicians were using the GH-based tools. Sheer weight of numbers would define the GH-based tools as being the new de facto standards for music-making and music education.

All else being equal, simplicity trumps compatibility, and high ceilings trump low ceilings.


* The numbers: the US Census Bureau's 2008 Statistical Abstract cites the percentage of the US population that "plays a musical instrument" as a leisure activity at 5.3% (counting only those people who play at least as often as "once per month"). Given a US population of 300 million, that's 16.3 million people. In January of 2008, Activision announced that the Guitar Hero series (GH) had sold more than 14 million copies in North America. If one simply divides GH's total units sales (14 million) by the number of months GH had been on the market as of this press release (26 months), that's over half a million units per month, or two million more units since the press releases was issued, bring GH's unit total to 16 million. Now, the two sets of numbers aren't strictly comparable, in that the US Census Bureau's data is based solely on the US population of 300 million, whereas GH's sales numbers are for North America (and therefore include sales to Canada's population of 33 million and possibly to Mexico's population of 100 million). However, given the essentially flat sales of traditional instruments in North America and the exploding slaes of Guitar Hero, it's only a matter of months until the precise data catches up to the approximation used in this blog article.