Freestyle Games' Jamie Jackson hands me an odd, beige coloured slab of plastic, a shrunken facsimile of semi-hollow Gibson 335 guitar. It's non-functional, but it's easy to see where the six buttons spread over two rows at the bottom of the fret board are meant to be. On the body there are several knobs, along with the familiar strum bar of the Guitar Hero series. Made during rapid prototyping on a 3D printer, the brittle guitar (I'm warned not to drop it several times) never made its way into full production. With plans for pearl inlays, multiple non-functional knobs, and gold-coloured detailing resulting in the guitar costing over £60 ($100) just to manufacture, it was deemed too expensive by the powers that be at Activision.

At one stage, Guitar Hero Live—the first new Guitar Hero game since 2010's Warriors of Rock—didn't even have a guitar controller. Early prototypes used console camera systems in an attempt to turn drunken air guitar (admit it, we've all done it) into a game. Unsurprisingly, it didn't work. But this was all part of the process, a 'washing off of what Guitar Hero was,' as Jackson tells it. Other prototypes would follow, including the first iteration of what would become the Guitar Hero Live guitar, which was made out of the plastic trunking that lines the walls of Freestyle Games' Leamington Spa studio, and some buttons ripped out of an old controller.

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Real Guitar Game

This wasn't an entirely foreign process to Freestyle Games. As the studio behind the cult classic DJ Hero, it had been down a path of rapid prototyping before. Many of the original prototypes for DJ Hero were built inside Jackson's garage, the product of smashed up Guitar Hero controllers and some shoddy soldering. By building a guitar out of trunking—something that would later become known as the 'Frankentar'—the team could easily toy with different configurations, moving the buttons around to mess with the fundamental mechanics of the series. By switching to two rows of three buttons, the awkward pinkie presses of old—something even real guitar players have a hard time with—were removed, making gameplay more accessible, but also allowing for the introduction of new, complex chord shapes.

This was the breakthrough moment. Paired with some basic graphics—a '1980s Atari type thing' I'm told—the basic gameplay of Guitar Hero Live was born. Oddly enough, Jackson didn't see the magic at first. 'I'll be totally honest with you: when the team presented it to me and Dave Osborne the design director, we looked at it and were like 'what the fuck are you doing? You can't change the buttons!' explained Jackson. 'But then we sat down and played it, and thought 'that was really cool, we take it back.' The end result is a game and a guitar that's comfortingly familiar, yet very different to the Guitar Hero games of old.

While notes still stream in from the top of the screen to the bottom along a note highway, now there are two different colours for notes: black for the top row of buttons and white for the bottom. Even for those that were Guitar Hero pros, this presents quite the challenge, particularly as chord shapes are introduced. Pushing down across a single row represents most power chords, with extensions on the bottom row adding in higher notes. Songs with open chords ape classic fingerings like the three-finger spread of an open C, or the claw-like grip of a G.

Despite this added complexity, the game remains true to its Guitar Hero roots. You still activate star power by tilting the guitar (or hitting a button by your palm), while jiggling on the whammy bar to add vibrato to those extended notes for extra points. The retail design of the guitar—the final product from all of Freestyle's prototyping—also maintains the same distance between the buttons as in Guitar Hero guitars of old, while also sporting a similar profile and body shape. It was very nearly bigger, though, like that earlier beige prototype. But Freestyle got its way with at least one love-it-or-hate-it aesthetic decision: the flashy gold highlights remain.

A game of two halves

It's the sole addition of bling to a game, and a studio, that prides itself on being—for want of a better word—real. It's hard to imagine a game on the scale of Guitar Hero Live, which is attached to one of the biggest games publishers on the planet, being made in such humble surroundings by a team of such personable human beings. But there's evidence of Live's impending release scattered around the studio: meeting rooms filled with computers and TVs for last-minute play testing, and computer screens in the kitchen that stream debugging information for Guitar Hero TV Virtual dj pro 7 mappers download. , the game's ambitious always-on music TV service.

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In another room a team of musicians—most without any games industry experience—create note highways in MIDI software. They show me how, for each of the six buttons on the guitar and the open strum bar, there's a line of MIDI information for the note highway. Programming the timeline is as simple as clicking to input a block of MIDI information. The musicians start with the expert level—a note-for-note transcription to Live's six buttons—before stripping out notes to accommodate less skilled players. A peer review process ensures that, despite the missing notes, the song's basic rhythmical structure remains. When the song needs to be play-tested, potential note highways can be exported to a PC version of the game in seconds.

Real Guitar Vst

Elsewhere there are sound designers bashing out some Judas Priest on expert, testing the game's 70/30 (front/rear) 5.1 surround mix, while upstairs there's a newly formed analytics team amassing gigabytes of data on what songs people are playing, and how often they're being played. With a team of 180 people behind the scenes, it's a complex operation for a complex game. Divided into two parts—the online music video channel Guitar Hero TV (more on that later), and the offline campaign Guitar Hero Live—development at the studio is split down the middle: the former got a crash course in running a TV station, while the latter became film directors.

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Live's high-concept aesthetic, that of 'stage fright,' has resulted in a look that's quite unlike the Guitar Hero games of old. Instead of staring at an oddly animated 3D band, you get a full, live-action sequence of walking through Spinal Tap-like winding corridors of the backstage area, past the stage hands, and the groupies, and your fellow bandmates, before leaping up onto the stage in front thousands of adoring fans. Eventually, when the song gets underway, you're provided with an an eerily accurate first-person representation of playing the guitar in front of a live audience.

Real Guitar Demo

The live-action footage looks modern in a way that even the most well-animated of 3D models never could, but for a studio used to pixels and polygons, it presented a huge technical challenge.