I guess I'm not the norm when it comes to this issue, but then again, when have I ever been normal. I started "trying" to play the guitar long before Guitar Hero came around, but quit soon after, relegating the guitar to the closet. However, my Guitar Hero II controller is proudly displayed out in the open, and I can rock pretty well...as long as it's no normal. However, the game isn't enough for some people, and thus the game has resurrected the art of the guitar and rock. Long live rock!

From the article:

Shaffer and others in the music business are dubious of the video game's effect on young people's musical abilities. In the past few weeks, though, I've interviewed several guitar teachers about the game, and some speak of it as the most revolutionary thing to hit the world of guitar since Jack White learned his first scale. "Guitar Hero" is introducing millions of young people to the possibility of playing the instrument, and it's also teaching them important skills they'll need to play. And not only that: "Guitar Hero," perhaps more than any other piece of modern entertainment, is juicing kids' interest in guitar-heavy music. What could be better for the guitar, after all, than hordes of young people learning to love "Smoke on the Water"?

Though "Guitar Hero" is meant to entertain and the Fretlight is meant to teach, they rest upon a shared insight -- when you pick up a guitar for the first time, you can't play a thing. A decade ago, back when I was still in thrall to Billy Corgan, I scrounged up $200 and bought a cheapo electric from my college town's guitar hotspot. I think I managed three lessons before I gave it up; the gulf between what I could do and what I wanted to do looked depressingly unbridgeable in any reasonable length of time.

Shaffer invented the Fretlight to ease that feeling. He learned guitar the old-fashioned way, from a book, constantly having to look back and forth between the fretboard and the text to adjust his fingering. When he finished college with a degree in mechanical engineering, he tried to improve his skills -- but the book, he found, was getting him nowhere fast.

Read the full article over at machinist.salon.com