Per a late-breaking entry on Wired’s game blog, Guitar Hero: World Tour will work with the Rock Band drumset! Well, at least on the Xbox 360, anyway.

At Activision’s E3 press conference Tuesday, Guitar Hero director Brian Bright told the crowd that if they already owned guitar controllers and drum controllers from “previous games” on the Xbox 360, they’d work with Guitar Hero World Tour.

Here’s how it’ll work. Speaking with Bright after the conference, I found out that the game’s five-button drum track, shown above center, will be compressed down to four inputs if a Rock Band drum controller is inserted.

There’s also a MIDI jack on the back of the drum kit, Bright said, which will allow gamers to play Guitar Hero with any electronic drum kit by simply plugging it into the controller. You can also hook up a second drum pedal if you want to play two bass drums.

This is a surprising turn of events, as previous Guitar Hero games have gone out of their way to ensure incompatibility with Rock Band peripherals, despite Harmonix’ calls for (and implementation of) open guitar peripheral compatibility. I presume this means Guitar Hero: World Tour will also work with Rock Band guitars, too.

Still, the prospect of being able to limit yourself to just one set of fake plastic drums instead of two is big news indeed. Kudos to the Activision team for not being jerks about it this time around.

The game Guitar Hero: Aerosmith was recently released to moderately positive reviews.

I’ve heard the skill progression is much improved over Guitar Hero III, which was punishing on Expert. Now that I’ve learned the difficulty level is more sane, I’ll probably pick up a copy of this game up in a week or two. I’ve been an Aerosmith fan for years. In fact, my very first concert experience was an Aerosmith concert, in the “Dude Looks Like a Lady” era.

There’s an interesting bit of information buried in the Wall Street Journal article Aerosmith Stars in Guitar Hero Videogame:

The success of Guitar Hero and Rock Band have made them important new sources of income for bands. Irving Azoff, whose Front Line Management manages Aerosmith and other major artists, says videogame deals can be “much more lucrative than anything you can do in the record business.” Industry executives say bands can receive millions of dollars up front, plus a generous royalty on sales. A person close to Aerosmith says the band expects to make more money from the game title than it has from any of its dozen-plus studio albums.

Since the last versions of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, game companies have paid artists a royalty on sales of their games in exchange for rights to use their master recordings in the games. Before that, music games typically featured covers of famous songs by sound-alike bands.

Mr. Azoff says music videogames can also help his clients by boosting traditional music sales. Sales of Aerosmith’s “Same Old Song and Dance” shot up 130% in the week following the release of Guitar Hero 3, which included the track, Activision says.

Clients including Van Halen, the Eagles, Steely Dan and Guns N’ Roses “all have deals of varying types in the works with one or the other or both of these companies,” says Mr. Azoff, referring to the makers of Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

I was shocked to learn that music games can be “much more lucrative than anything you can do in the record business.” I guess fake plastic rock is bigger business than I thought!

Several good previews of Guitar Hero World Tour emerged this weekend:

1. IGN Guitar Hero World Tour Preview
2. GameSpy Guitar Hero World Tour Preview
3. GameSpot Guitar Hero World Tour Preview

I highly recommend reading the IGN article as it had the best information, but I’ll summarize so you don’t have to.

The biggest news was probably the first detailed pictures of the new guitar! It’s a fairly substantial upgrade over the Les Paul, which was already excellent.

It’s definitely larger than previous fake plastic guitars — probably a nod to the Rock Band Stratocaster, which more accurately mimics the size of a real guitar.

It also contains a touch-sensitive pad on the neck!

What will this be used for? GameSpy’s Sluggo explains:

The big new addition is what Neversoft is calling the “touch strip.” Essentially, it’s a touch-sensitive section of the guitar neck right next to the standard, multicolored buttons. The touch strip doesn’t stand out from the rest of the neck, so you might not even realize it’s there if you’re not familiar with your new hardware. What this touch strip does is act as a multipurpose tool for several inputs and effects. One use is finger-tapping guitar solos, but you can also swipe your finger along it, side-to-side, to mess with the sustain on your held notes and provide a sound very different from the whammy bar. You can also use it to affect the synth sounds during songs with heavy keyboard usage.

The start/select and star power buttons have been moved to the “bridge” of the guitar along with a new rectangular “star power activation” button. It not only looks more authentic, you can palm the star power button and activate while playing, if you’re not into the whole “tilt the guitar up” thing.

The Xbox button is also reimagined as a knob, again, for a more authentic feel.

The faceplates and detachable neck are clearly preserved, from what I can see of the photo. I am a fan of the detachable neck, even though it can cause button connectivity issues, because it allows us to have custom faceplates. Here’s hoping they’ve redesigned the neck connection to be more reliable.

The microphone is unremarkable. Nothing to report there; your typical USB handheld microphone. It sure would be nice if the microphone was wireless. It’d also be nice if it had built in controller functions, so the vocalist didn’t have to locate a controller every time he or she wants to make a selection. But not this time, unfortunately!

A few new bits of information on the drums:

• The cymbal “pie slices” can be rotated and repositioned to taste.
• To activate star power on drums, hit the yellow and orange cymbal at the same time.
• Drum heads are 8 inches, slightly larger than the 7 inches of Rock Band drums.
• Drums have a silicone surface, so they’re (reasonably) quiet right out of the box; no modifications required.
• Wireless! Yay!
• Speed sensitive; slam and you get a loud note. Tap and you get a soft note. This will make drumming much more expressive.

On to the game itself:

• Brings back all the characters from Guitar Hero II, in addition to the ones featured in Guitar Hero III — hello Clive and Pandora!
• Added sixth bass note on top of the five colored buttons; you can strum with no buttons held for an “open strum”. This should make playing bass more interesting, I hope.
• Five careers: Guitar, Bass, Drums, Vocals, Band.
• Boss battles have been restructured as call and response, and their role minimized in the main game. Thank goodness they listened to the criticism on that one. Boss battles in Guitar Hero III were universally hated by most gamers, including me.
• New “Beginner” difficulty that’s even easier than easy, suitable for children or total neophytes. This’ll be a nice option for parties and people who protest they can’t possibly play well enough to join in.
• If you get stuck on a song in the career mode, you can downgrade your skill level without restarting the whole career. Nice.
• Quickplay will now earn you cash and bonuses for your character, as long as you’re logged in. Even more reason to practice!
• You can create song sets as “gigs” of up to seven songs for your band, rather than being kicked back to the song select screen after each song.

There’s also a very complex music studio for creating your own “songs”, minus vocals. I applaud the effort, and it looks impressively complex, but I’m skeptical this will be much more than a fairly involved toy. I doubt it will result in anything musically interesting for the average player. I’m much more interested in a strong collection of DLC.

Based on these previews I’m really looking forward to Guitar Hero World Tour. Many of the features they’ve announced are features people have been clamoring for in the still-unannounced Rock Band 2.

In particular, the hardware looks outstanding, and it exploits the one big weakness of Rock Band — the sub-par, flaky guitar and drum hardware. Somehow, I’m doubting Rock Band 2 will include any new hardware, so the Guitar Hero franchise appears to be solidly extending its lead in this area.

I suppose it was inevitable — someone achieved a perfect score on the most difficult song in Guitar Hero III, Dragonforce’s “Through the Fire and Flames”, on Expert difficulty.

It’s an astonishing 3,722 note streak for a final score of 987,786!

I can’t even finish the Expert campaign in Guitar Hero III due to rampant skill level inflation in the series, and I’d have no hope whatsoever of completing “Through the Fire and Flames”, which is absurdly difficult.

Kudos to iamchris4life!

I hope this doesn’t result in even more skill inflation in future installments of Guitar Hero. I sort of wish they’d add a new skill level beyond Expert for the ScoreHero crowd, something like “Insane” or “Professional” skill level, rather than constantly moving the Expert goalposts.

After writing about The Fake Plastic Rock Stage Experience, I immersed myself in the strange, fascinating world of stage lighting effects.

I found out two things that drove me to buy my own stage lights:

1. Many stage lights are sound activated and include their own embedded microphones, so they “just work” out of the box.
2. There’s an emerging set of DJ lights that use low-power LEDs instead of hot, dangerous 100 or 200 watt bulbs.

That’s a perfect combination for our rock band room! No messy cables (other than the power cable), no extra heat, and it will automatically sync up to whatever music we’re playing. I couldn’t resist!

I finally settled on the American DJ LED Color Changing Light Bar. Here’s a short video clip I recorded of it in action to some music:

There are two sound activated modes:

1. Mode 1 switches between all the available colors
2. Mode 2 has 40 different “programs”, with lots of variety. You’re seeing one of those programs in the above video.

As you can see it’s plenty bright — almost too bright for our smallish room with the projector! Fortunately, I can select some of the less bright sound activated modes so it doesn’t overwhelm the video screen. It’s also programmable via the DMX-512 programming standard, though I’m not sure I’ll ever bother because the sound activated modes work so well.

It includes convenient wall mounts, but it also has large hand screws on each side so you can quickly unscrew it and take it to your next fake plastic rock “gig” as well. I grabbed it and took it with me to a recent remote Rock Band jam session, and it went over great!

The American DJ LED bar wasn’t exactly a cheap accessory — I shopped around and found it for $180 shipped — but it sure feels about ten times more freakin’ rock in that room now with the awesome extra lighting effects!