Guitar Hero III Tab Book

Despite Guitar Hero III having been out for about a year now, the guitar tab industry has only recently finally published a compilation songbook containing a large number of the songs from the game. While the Guitar Hero I and II tab book has been out for awhile and therefore I've been using it with my students, neither myself or my students had ever played those two games extensively, so it never really was that great of a fit for our lessons. So, as you can imagine, when I saw the Guitar Hero III tab book at my local music store the other day, I nearly peed my pants in delight.

Since then, I've gone on to learn as many of the key riffs from the game as possible. Currently, some of my favorites to play are Barracuda, Cult of Personality, La Grange, Mississippi Queen, My Name is Jonas, The Number of the Beast, Talk Dirty to Me, and When You Were Young. And my favorite of them all: Tenacious D's "The Metal", whose riff is just really satisfying to play. Granted, I can't play all of these songs all the way through yet, but they're coming along.

The big surprise here is how much the game is making me like playing guitar again...it's having a similar effect to that of Fantasia concerning classical music. Of particular note is my newly discovered interest in playing solos...something I never really did much of (or all that well) before. So, maybe this video game will end up ushering in a new period of guitar fanaticism for me contrary to my fear that I was ultimately just getting good at a video game emulation.