When I first heard about Guitar Hero, my reaction was “why spend all that effort getting good at Guitar Hero when I could spend it getting good at the actual guitar?” Of course, to date I have done neither. So I’m not a big Guitar Hero guy; I’ve never played it and I’ve only played Rockband once.

However, if you hang out on the internet enough and have friends of a certain age, it’s impossible to avoid knowing that DragonForce’s song “Through the Fire and Flames” is the hardest song on Guitar Hero. Or at least one of the hardest. Of course my Guitar Hero playing friends send me those videos of some teenager getting a perfect score on Through the Fire and Flames on Expert difficulty:

Let me explain what’s going on here, mainly for the benefit of my mom. (If you know how Guitar Hero works you can skip this paragraph.) Those colored dots flying down the screen are notes. When the notes hit the bottom of the screen, they have to be played on the guitar controller. Notice there are five rows of dots corresponding to five buttons on the controller — but you only have 4 fingers to play the game with. You can see how next to impossible this is.

Okay, that’s enough of that, it doesn’t get any more exciting after the first couple of minutes.

But the other day, I wondered what the real music video for Through the Fire and Flames looks like. Behold, my new favorite Youtube video (and, improbably, Peggy’s new favorite song!):

It starts out impossibly fast, and then come the sonic barrage of 64th notes. But after about 45 seconds, all I could think was “The hair! The exuberance!”

(The fact that Peggy likes this song is even more odd when you consider that before we were married, fully half of her CDs consisted of Bach flute sonatas.)

Don’t miss the guitar solo in the middle! Notice the backlit guitarists are jiving around, flipping that guitar around like nobody’s business — but the inset video of them playing the actual solo stays totally level. Note also the second Herman Li solo with the wah — notice how he moves his lips around with the wah — when I do that I get mercilessly teased.

And finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t also link to the best DragonForce cover on Youtube:

which gives me an excuse to link to Reg Kehoe and his Marimba Queens:

Don’t miss the headbanging bassist @ 1:10!

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