magic. As corny as it sounds, your guitar is like a sword, and you’re using your sword to cast spells on people—it’s one of the last ways of invoking any real emotion out of people anymore. In that regard I never wanted to sit there and devalue the emotions I was feeling by putting a number to it.
GW What led you to working with the Guitar Hero game series?
HENDERSON I knew this guy, a buddy of mine who’s a drummer and was working at Sun Microsystems in the Bay Area, and a buddy of his was an engineer for WaveGroup Sound—the best studio in the world, in my opinion—and he introduced me to the incredible Bill Frank, this engineer who was working on the first Guitar Hero game. Next thing I know, they’re asking me if I want to record a song for this video game, even though they couldn’t tell me what the game was. The told me what the song was: “Symphony of Destruction” by Megadeth, and asked how long I needed to learn it. I said, “Give me two or three days, no problem”—and then I went in and knocked out the song, and that was it.
GW Were you surprised by how successful the game became?
HENDERSON Definitely. It’s not the kind of thing you see in a store and go, “Wow, this is gonna be rad”—when you look at the box, you think, Are they making fun of us guitar players? But the game is straight-up, balls-out, in-your-face rock and roll, and it really speaks the culture of what we do and who we are more so than anything else that’s been out there. But it does blow me away that it would be as huge as it is.
GW Does it ever concern you that you’re not being recognized for your own music; that you’re essentially a highly successful cover guitarist?
HENDERSON In some regards, yeah—I don’t want to be typecast forever as that one guy who did that one thing and then disappeared. I’ve been playing guitar for 20 years, and ever since I first started my only goal was to be a famous rock guitarist. But the fact that there are millions and millions of people playing my work every single day across the globe is just mind-blowing to me. I could set down my guitar tomorrow and say, “I’ve made more of an impact with my instrument than I ever could have imagined.” But I’m not just here to hit a grand slam and say, “Goodnight everybody!” It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon—and the truth is that I’ll never be satisfied musically. I’ll always be looking for a situation that will enhance my playing or make me feel like I’m actually growing as a musician.
The great thing about Guitar Hero is that, not only is it an awesome outlet for my work to be heard, but it’s also really challenging for me. Each song is on a completely different level and it takes a completely different approach, and everything I do has to be done systematically. It’s requires a deep analysis of these songs, and I think that falls in line with exactly who I am. So it’s a really good thing that I have this gig, mainly because I care so much about the tone, I care so much about the game, I love all the people that play it—and I get to play guitar for a living.
GW Tell us about the process of recording these world famous rock songs for a video game.
HENDERSON A lot of the artists don’t want to be covered exactly, because it could make the final product watered down. Sometimes people bitch about the songs in the
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