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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

One of the methods of cheating that was used was "splicing": playing parts of the song separately, and then cutting and pasting the parts together so that they appear to have been played in one continuous session.

Pro musicians -- especially singers -- do this all the time in the studio though: there it's called "comping". Singers sing the same song multiple times, and the best takes for each part (sometimes very small moments of a few seconds) are put together to construct the best possible whole.

Somehow this is not considered cheating, but there is an ambiguity; how the performance was produced is either not known or willfully ignored by the consuming public.

Songs are like sausages. Or most things really. Better enjoy the end product and not worry about how it was made.

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> Somehow this is not considered cheating

because it's supposed to be an art performance, which everyone understands is recorded and edited to produce the best result. this was supposed to be a "feat of skill", so of course using that same method is considered cheating, because you are lying about the implication that you were playing the song in one go and "perfect"

Pro movie directors do this too. In fact, it's so ubiquitous, there are several millions of dollars per movie project that go strictly into editing.

One of the best known examples of this, from Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, notably did not even have a single real Balrog appear in their raw footage.

It's a shame he resorted to cheating - but what's strange is the trilogy is universally acclaimed as one of the greatest movie trilogies of all time.

It's not considered cheating because music is not a competition.

Of course music is a competition, in listeners' time, sales, streams, and awards.

...where musicians are graded on how dramatically they slap comedians before receiving their awards instead of how good their performance was, and comedians are graded on how well they take their slaps instead of how much the musician who slapped them just laughed at their jokes.

Is it so unfathomable to you that people make art for its own sake?

No, it's not; in fact I do it myself. That doesn't change the fact that all artists are competing for the public's attention.

Many are compelled from within to create and they have progressed and developed to the point where their art appeals to a large audience — they do not produce out of competitive drive, but out of an intense inward force that they can only satisfy through creative expression. They are those who create because they must, not just because they can.

Isn't considered cheating but it is at the edge.

If you just listen to the music at your home, it's ok. If you go to the show and the performance is poor, you feel you're missing something. If the singer is just dubbing, you'll feel fooled if you expected the real thing.

Some say that even in this case what's worth is the performance, the "experience". But if you find out that they were stunts with pre-record music, your "experience" vanishes.

Cheating is one of those things that depends on your expectation.

It's considered cheating when for example the "singer" is not doing the singing, and it's kept a secret.

There was a big scandal in France in 2006-2010 when the public learned that a 1977 hit record "ça plane pour moi" by Plastic Bertrand, was in fact sung by somebody else; see:

https://www.expatica.com/be/uncategorized/plastic-bertrand-a...

Milli Vanilli is an even better known example of cheating in this regard i'd say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli

Maybe, but apparently in their case the deception lasted about a year; in Plastic Bertrand's case it lasted about 30 years.

I feel like they were just a couple of naive guys who got used by the industry and then chewed up.

The big problem is when you cannot reproduce anything close to that performance live. There was this one band I used to like and on the album the singer had this deep, powerful, voice that really projected. Then I went to see them live and singer had a weak reedy voice the barely carried. It was a depressing and terrible show.

I had a recording of Paul Galbraith playing Bach on the guitar, and it was stunning. I went to a festival to hear him play live, and he really could barely struggle through the same works. He seemed on the verge of rage-quitting the performance, so maybe it wasn't going as he expected either? Hard to say, because I never went out of my way to hear him again.

Multi-segment, or tool-assisted, speedruns are legitimate. The problem wasn't that the guy made multi-segment runs--it's that he passed off multi-segment runs as single-segment.

Agreed. The concept of a "tech FC", where someone FC's all sections independently (or sometimes in groups of sections), is well understood in the GH community. There's also the straight element of deception - star power is not a mechanic in practice mode, where tech FCs are performed (Clone Hero allows you to see the SP phrases in practice mode, but you don't gain any SP and there is no way to actually activate it). The whole point of what Schmooey did was to pass these FCs off as actual full song runs.

Rhythm games aren't music - they're more like Tetris

GH has brought a ton of people into actually making music, though. There is a rich history of custom, made-for-GH songs, and a good number of them have ridiculously good production value.

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