The big news from E3 was the prevalance of games that attempt to actually teach guitar, rather than mimicing it in classic five button Guitar Hero style.

My pals at RockBandAide and PlasticAxe had outstanding roundups of their recent hands-on time with a bunch of these new real(ish) guitar controllers at E3:

• The Real (and Real-ish) Guitars of E3
• Hands-On Impressions of New REAL Guitar Peripherals at E3

But before you click through, let’s take a trip back in time … way back, to 1994. When Windows 95 was the latest OS sensation, the Sony Playstation was a hot new console, and the Nintendo 64 was still just a rumor.

The 1994 PC game Quest for Fame was the first (that I know of, anyway) game that attempted to use a full-size guitar peripheral.

The Unsung Story of Quest for Fame documents the game’s brief and somewhat sad history.

Players plug a “virtual guitar” into the computer to make music in the game. Fritz still owns a couple; they’re almost the same size as a real electric guitar and fairly heavy. Unlike the make-believe instrument in Guitar Hero, the Quest For Fame virtual guitar has strings, and there are no colorful push buttons on its neck.

A player watches a window in the computer monitor as a red line scrolls past a series of green blips, like pulses on a heart monitor. When the red line crosses a blip, the player strums the virtual guitar’s strings, and the computer’s speakers respond with Aerosmith hits like “Eat The Rich” or “Walk This Way.” Hit the strings too early or too late, and out come discordant notes and insults from on-screen characters.

Quest For Fame was a hit with critics. “I have seen the future of interactive multimedia, and it rocks,” wrote Stephen Manes in The New York Times. The game acquired a number of avid fans, like Ian Hughes, a virtual worlds evangelist for IBM Corp. in Hursley, a town south of London. “It was wonderful,” said Hughes. “I liked the immersion in the music. You’re in the music and feeling the music.”

If you’re wondering how the game works, I found a video of the game in action via the old British TV show Bad Influence — the Quest for Fame demo starts at 8:20 or so.

Quest for Fame certainly predicted the eventual appearance of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith 10 years later.

Here’s hoping the current crop of virtual guitars …

• Peavey HeroMaker
• Power Gig: Rise of the Six String controller
• Rock Band 3′s Squier Stratocaster and Fender Mustang Pro
• the You Rock Guitar

… fare a bit better than Quest for Fame’s virtual axe did.

One of the most exciting Rock Band 3 announcements is Pro Guitar Mode.

But how does it work?

This video of a Bang Camaro member playing Rainbow in the Dark on Pro Guitar Expert — while a Harmonix team member describes what’s happening — is the best explanation I’ve seen:

If we look at the frets on the Fender Mustang Pro Guitar …

There are 17 rows of 6 buttons — a total of 102 buttons in all.

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the fret buttons are numbered in each row along the top, where you’d expect to see colors on the simpler 5 button guitars. They start at 17 closest to the strum area, decreasing down to 1 at the far end.

So there are a few things on the screen in pro mode, starting with the actual six guitar strings as the “note corridor”.

The bars that come toward you tell you what you’re supposed to be doing with the 102 fret buttons and 6 strings at that time in the song:

1. The size and location of the bar represents the chords (strings) you’re supposed to cover with your left hand.
2. The number on the bar represents the lowest fret button your left hand should be on.
3. The color of the bar (green, red, orange, blue, yellow, purple) represents the strings, red being the lowest string and green being the purple being the highest.
4. The shape of the bar connotes a chord, and the rough ‘shape’ your hand should be while playing the chord, as noted below.
5. (as a little notational bonus, if you know how to read music, the actual musical chord you’re supposed to be playing is also printed next to each chord, to the left of the corridor.)

Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, the “left hand position wave” shows in realtime on the note corridor.

The left hand position wave is telling you where your left hand is:

The number (shown in the wave) always represents the lowest fretted number your left hand is on, and the shape represents where your other fingers are supposed to go. It’s important that you know what your left hand is doing, without having to look down, at any time. The left hand position wave will outline the shape your left hand represents in its current position — if that shape matches the shape of the bars are in the corridor, they will “fit” through!

As for skill level, pro guitar mode runs the gamut from easy to expert, just like classic five button guitar mode:

• Pro Easy just doing single notes, the correct notes at the right time.
• Pro Medium introduces chords.
• Pro Hard is the full guitar part, but stripped down a bit to be more fun and playable in real time.
• Pro Expert is every guitar note in the song, for better or worse. Chords, notes, arpeggios, hammer ons, pull offs, slides. The whole enchilada!

Harmonix has invented a whole new set of music notation to teach guitar — but you’ll need a copy of Rock Band 3 and a compatible pro guitar — either the Fender Mustang or the Squier Stratocaster — to learn!

I apologize for the lack of updates, I’ve been busy, yadda yadda … anyway, the big news is, Rock Band 3 was announced and it’s ohmygodamazingincredible!

I know, you’ve heard it all before. But just watch this video. And have some new underpants handy. Because you’re gonna need ‘em.

You can see the “other” pro guitar, the one with a zillion buttons, in action in this full band E3 stage demo. (They play Bohemian Rhapsody in the latter half, so don’t tune out in the middle.)

Yep, that’s seven people in one band. In fact, there’s so much awesome in Rock Band 3 I have a hard time figuring out where to begin:

• An all-new keyboard instrument, with 5-key basic and 26-key “Pro Mode”
• Guitar / Bass “Pro Mode” where you play the actual guitar hand positions in the real song
• Drums “Pro Mode” where you play pads and cymbals
• Three part vocal harmonies (ala Beatles Rock Band)
• Massively improved song sorting / selection / filtering to support enormous song libraries
• Drop in or out of play on any instrument at any time

It also works with all your existing Rock Band and Guitar Hero hardware, of course; the pro mode stuff and new keyboard instrument is all strictly optional.

I’m as giddy as a Japanese schoolgirl at a Hello Kitty convention. Rock Band 3 isn’t just another cookie cutter sequel — it redefines the entire genre of fake plastic rock. Literally!

Only 26 of the ~80 on-disc songs have been announced, but even as a partial list, it’s epic:

You can (and I just did!) already preorder Rock Band 3 with the new instruments:

The “Mustang” Pro Guitar (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii)

Wireless Keyboard and Rock Band 3 bundle (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii)

(I haven’t been able to figure out availability of the doubles-as-a-real-guitar Squier Stratocaster guitar yet, but I will surely update the blog when I do.)

Ladies and Gentlemen: the fakereal plastic rock revolution begins October 31st, 2010.

Sure, you can kill zombies with your keyboard, but did you know you can kill zombies with your Guitar Hero or Rock Band guitar, too? Behold Rock of the Dead!!

There are mindless beasts that take basic three- or four-strum combos to take out, but then there are ones that’ll lob projectiles at you – these knives/bombs only take a couple of fret flicks to get rid of, but unless you take down the guy that’s throwing them out at you, you’ll just be endlessly downing those objects. When the screen fills with a half-dozen beasts at once, you have the ability to discriminate and target specific ones by “typing” out the combo of the one you want – the game’s smart enough to know which beast you’re “aiming” at because it locks in on the enemy as you’re pushing out its fret button code.

Periodically you’ll have to take down larger enemies in rhythm fashion: this is basic Guitar Hero/Rock Band gameplay as the notes must be played to the beat of the background music to take down the threat.

The game has extra geek cred because it features voicework by Neil Patrick Harris and Felicia Day, too. If you don’t know who those people are, I forgive you.

Unfortunately this game is Wii-only, which means I won’t be able to play it — but it sounds awesome, and I totally support destroying zombies with the power of fake plastic rock!

updated: yay! Rock of the Dead will be available for the Xbox 360 and PS3 this October!

Here’s some recent footage of the game in action courtesy of our friends at RockBandAide:

So the Rock Band Network should launch any day now, and per the always excellent RockBandAide, we can look forward to these announced downloadable tracks and artists on launch day:

• Steve Vai
• Widespread Panic
• Gov’t Mule
• Reverend Horton Heat
• Stroke 9
• Bif Naked

• Evanescence – Going Under
• All That Remains – Days Without
• All That Remains – Forever in Your Hands
• All That Remains – Undone
• Flight of the Concords – Business Time
• Flight of the Concords – Demon Woman
• Flight of the Concords – Most Beautiful Girl in the Room
• Ministry – Let’s Go
• Ministry – Life is Good
• Ministry – Watch Yourself

I am a huge, HUGE Flight of the Conchords fan and I cannot WAIT to bust out some Business Time on the mic.

As originally promised, RBN also opens the doors to more experimental stuff and new genres of fake plastic music, like this full-on Jazz track by Bill Bruford’s Earthworks. Check it out: saxophone as vocals, piano as guitar!

Don’t think a sax could actually play those vocals? I beg to differ! Witness a trombone player scoring a perfect on the vocals to the execrable “I Get By”.

Sorry Honest Bob fans, but that song is a crime against music. A trombone is the best thing that could have ever possibly happened to “I Get By”.