There’s great new interview at the Onion AV club which covers Harmonix’ design philosophy in rhythm games. A few highlights:

On teaching people to hear music differently:

You can go to a really great sandwich shop and you can order an amazing sandwich and it just has one big name, and you eat it, and it’s [...]

This one’s fairly self explanatory.

Iron Maiden’s Run To The Hills on Expert, played on Rock Band drums:

Iron Maiden’s Run To The Hills on Expert, played on real drums:

Very cool to see how the in-game drum pattern correlates to play on real drums!

After looking at the note pattern, and playing this song on Hard drums all [...]

There’s been a lot of Rock Band 2 news, probably because the game is a bit closer to launch. A quick check of current release dates shows the following on Amazon:

September 14th
Rock Band 2 Xbox 360

October 19th
Rock Band 2 Special Edition Xbox 360

October 19th
Rock Band 2 Playstation 3

October 19th
Rock Band 2 Special Edition Playstation 3

November [...]

Via Engadget, a shot of the official Rock Band 2 cymbal add ons. These Cymbals plug into those mysterious red, blue, and green plugs on the back of the new Rock Band 2 drumset.

Pricing is supposedly $30 for a pack of 3 cymbals, or $15 each. They are from Mad Catz, technically, but they will [...]

Wondering what, exactly, the difference is between the new Rock Band 2 drums and the original Rock Band 1 drums? Me too. Engadget has a great set of photos from E3 that reveal all the new features. Let’s examine them one by one.

Reinforced bass drum pedal — check.

Neoprene or rubber drum surface for better “bounce” [...]