Guitar Hero III Analysis

Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock Analysis

Guitar Hero III utilizes motion capture to recreate each band member's movements onstage and to show how they interact when playing different songs. The recorded movements and facial expressions are then digitized and placed into the game.

The sound team for the Guitar Hero games spends hours in the studio recording various instruments and lots of different songs. Each instrument of each song in the game has to be recorded individually before being placed into the game. Sometimes the actual musician plays it but for the most part its the sound engineers of Guitar Hero.

The number of buttons assigned to musical phrases and riffs are what lend to the various levels of difficulty. The player can choose to be on of the Rock Legends or they can battle against them. GH3 is the first of the Guitar Hero installments to feature player vs Rock Star battles and online play.

Harmonix Team of Engineers

The music tracks, on-stage motions, stage lighting and effect synchronization were created by the Harmonix team of developers who were all musicians and had previous experience in note tracking. The note tracks were developed by placing notes in time with the song; for sections that had difficult parts to track within the game's engine, they opted to use sequences of notes that would seem to the match the music but still be playable. Hammer-ons and pull-offs ("HOPOs") for the previous games were automatically placed by the software. This allowed the engine to manually place HOPOs to make it easier to create certain effects in songs, such as sustained string bends. A separate team came up with the concepts for the various stages and arenas in the game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_Hero_III:_Legends_of_Rock