Inside, I noticed there was a little flyer about dealing with lag, which I thought was important enough to share. Click through for a larger, more readable version:

Before setting up the game, you should first follow these steps to ensure your HDTV system is optimized for Rocksmith:

1. Follow the Display Lag Correction instructions found in the in-game manual.
2. Make sure your console is set to match your TV’s native resolution (1080p, 720p, etc.) and your TV is set to match your console’s native resolution.
3. If your TV has a PC or Game mode, select it. For more information, check your TV’s manual.
4. If your TV does not have a PC or Game mode, access your TV’s Options menu, disable image scaling, and turn off all processing effects. (This is effectively what “Game mode” or “PC mode” does.)

We never recommend using HDMI as your primary sound source. If you are experiencing lag and are using HDMI for audio, try switching to Component cables. Alternately, you can use the appropriate Audio Adapter Cable for your console with an external audio source like speakers, headphones, stereo, or home theater system. If HDMI is your primary sound source, we recommend that you do not use your TV’s speakers for sound.

Note that for best results, you need to have discrete audio and video outputs from your console — and the worst results are from a combined input to a single television.

I thought you could also use a Y-splitter on the 1/4″ guitar output — routing one side to a real guitar amplifier, and the other side to the Rocksmith USB adapter and your console. However, it appears you need a true powered / buffered signal splitter device for this to work, and those are not cheap…

They were still coy about exactly which songs would be in Rocksmith at the time, but now that the game’s on the verge of release, here’s the full track list, courtesy of the gaming vault.

Click through to see YouTube videos of any song, if you’re not familiar with it. There’s also DLC planned, of course. Two DLC tracks have been pre-announced, Free Bird and Radiohead’s Bodysnatchers.

A good song list, but a bit … obscure at the edges. Some of these artists I’ve honestly never heard of, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but probably reflects the licensing difficulties they had. On the other hand, picking up not one but two Muse tracks stings a little because of the running “more Muse please!” joke within the Rock Band community for the last year.

Rocksmith will be available in just a few days on October 18th, and comes in either a $199 full guitar bundle, or a $79 game and USB adapter bundle for Xbox, PS3 and PC.

I’m looking forward to getting my copy this month!

I took the opportunity to invite a friend of mine, Martín Marconcini, who happens to be a decent novice guitarist, far far beyond my meager guitar skills. Together we spent about an hour playing the Xbox 360 version of the game.

The official Rocksmith bundle guitar, the Epiphone Les Paul Junior ($129 MSRP) was the guitar we used to play the game — you can see Martín holding it in the picture. Remember, this is a 100% real guitar, no game elements whatsoever! (In fact, the game comes with fret number stickers to place on the top of the fretboard, and our guitar had them applied.)

I was a bit skeptical going in, but I have to admit: Rocksmith definitely works as advertised!

Rocksmith truly does reliably detect what you’re playing on an analog guitar, and in real time. Both Martín and I agreed on this; at no point did we think the game was screwing up, any time we made a mistake it was clearly us playing the wrong notes. There was no real compromise that we could see with the analog detection approach. Even subtle little mistakes like being off by one fret or one string were displayed correctly.

Because of the analog approach, you get a significantly different and arguably more musical experience compared to Rock Band 3 Pro Guitar mode:

1. You can’t even play the game without begging, borrowing, buying, or stealing a real electric guitar. Everything starts with putting that electric guitar in your hands and plugging it in to the provided USB interface. It feels good!
2. Every time you touch the guitar, you are making actual guitar sounds. This is in stark contrast to almost every other rhythm game where if you play correctly, you get the original audio track, and if you get it wrong, you hear generic guitar mistake noises. What really, really struck me when playing was that I was learning to hear when my notes sounded wrong. I wasn’t just learning about finger positioning, there was a very direct correlation between what my ears heard and what my hands were doing. Once I got a good basic pattern going, I could tell when I screwed up because I heard it before I saw it. That’s HUGE!

(Also, I was concerned that tuning the guitar, which is required before each new song, would be a tedious chore. But I was fascinated to discover that these pre-song tunings were kind of, dare I say, fun? Or more like … something I needed to learn to do properly because as a musician, of course you want your guitar to sound in tune!)

I was very worried about latency going in, and I’m happy to say that latency of note detection was not a problem. But there is a latency issue — it’s just not what I thought it was. When you play electric guitar in Rocksmith, the console is your amplifier. That is, the signals have to go from the guitar, to the console, and then back out through your sound system. It’s no different than the latency problem in vocals in Rock Band 3 which have to go through the same path: out of your mouth, into the mic, through the console, then back out of the speakers. This takes time, and you’ll notice a bit of lag between “playing a sound” and “hearing the sound you played”. But the advantage is that your console is in some ways the ultimate super flexible guitar amp in Rocksmith. You can apply effects, pedals, different guitar sounds, etcetera. It’s really cool and it even works during loading screens in the game, you can noodle around on the guitar while you’re waiting. Great stuff.

One permanent workaround for the audio latency is to get a real amplifier and hook it up, like for example the Roland Micro Cube Guitar Amplifier I have. Maybe not for everyone, but it’s definitely authentic, will solve the audio playback latency completely, and heck — shouldn’t you have a guitar amp anyway for your electric guitar?

Another thing I was very interested in is the automatic difficulty scaling in Rocksmith. That is, the more notes you play correctly on the guitar, the more notes it will give you — if you’re totally nailing the song on beginner mode, it will eventually scale you on up to medium and hard and beyond completely automatically. This also worked seamlessly for me, as I mastered the very simple beginner phrases they slowly got a tiny bit more complicated and more representative of the actual song. This did not last, because I truly suck at guitar, but the scaling up and down of difficulty was very gradual and smooth; not disruptive at all.

Now, not everything I saw in Rocksmith was great. For example the navigation UI in the game was pretty darn abysmal in my opinion, and the track list was solid, but can’t possibly compare with the hundreds of Rock Band 3 tracks available even if you just limit to the Pro Guitar capable tracks. There’s definitely enough room for improvement that I can see a Rocksmith 2 in there already. But the important bit is that Rocksmith does what it says it does and it is a very satisfying experience when playing the songs. For any music game, that’s really the only thing that matters in my book.

I also learned a few nuggets of news worth mentioning:

• Two player guitar will be supported though I didn’t get to see it; it will be a splitscreen top/bottom sort of affair and will of course require two real guitars and two USB interface cables. Definitely looking forward to that.
• An aggressive weekly DLC schedule is planned, though details on specifics were scarce. That’s very encouraging to hear.
• The obvious where’s the bass guitar support? question came up. Apparently they have special plans to deliver bass guitar support through DLC and this may include unlocking bass guitar charts for the existing songs in the game.

I was already tentatively excited to play Rocksmith and had it pre-ordered before I got hands-on time with the game. But now that I have, I went back and pre-ordered the full guitar bundle, which is now available for $199. (That bundled Epiphone Les Paul Junior we got to try is a surprisingly solid axe, and the game is $79 alone … so I figured why not.)

Bottom line, Rocksmith rocks! It offers a uniquely musical, hands-and-ears-on approach to the rhythm genre that we haven’t seen before. It isn’t perfect, and it’s no party game, but it totally works as advertised for learning guitar and having fun while doing it, too. I have no problem recommending it highly to anyone who has an electric guitar gathering dust somewhere in their house — or anyone who is serious about learning electric guitar in general.

Rocksmith should be available later in October, and comes in either a $199 full guitar bundle, or a $79 game and USB adapter bundle for Xbox, PS3 and PC.

So buy the game, add a real guitar … and start playing.

Now, this isn’t exactly new, since Rock Band 3 has a fantastic pro guitar mode which also allows you to play on a real guitar, so long as it is one of the special MIDI capable ones supported by the game. Rocksmith is the first to focus exclusively on real guitar and the first to work with any guitar you happen to have lying around.

This IGN preview does the best job so far of showing off what the game is, and how it works. I definitely recommend checking it out.

The Wired preview has more details on the required tuning prior to each song (?) and some of the freeplay amp modes.

Only a handful of tracks have been revealed for the game so far, but it does include some fairly major artists, and all original master tracks; it’s no slouch in the soundtrack department:

• House of the Rising Sun – The Animals
• Sunshine of Your Love – Cream
• High and Dry – Radiohead
• Rebel Rebel – David Bowie
• (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – Rolling Stones
• Vasoline – Stone Temple Pilots

There’s also this clever viral ad for the game with a vaguely creepy baby guitar prodigy showing off his chops:

Rocksmith will be available on Xbox 360, PS3, and surprisingly enough, even on PC. Not sure what that means for any DLC plans, but it’s certainly convenient for a PC gamer like myself; the last “modern” rock gaming title that runs on the PC is moldy old Guitar Hero 4.

Interface wise, it turns the fretboard on its side — literally. So instead of strings pointing up, ala Rock Band 3 Pro Guitar mode, we get strings pointing to the side.

Pretend you’re playing guitar in front of a mirror, and you get the idea. It’s an interesting design choice, and I suppose it might make it easier to see some hand positions on the neck of the guitar this way.

Rocksmith’s 100% focus on real guitar out of the box, and the nifty dynamic difficulty scaling mechanism as you play, are welcome additions to the genre. (And the skill building guitarcade mini-games are genius!) But I have some serious concerns about the choice of analog guitar input to control the game, which means:

1. Your guitar must be perfectly in tune for this to work at all, by definition. Not really a problem, just means you have to tune your guitar before playing. Guitars should be in tune anyway, right? Absolute worst case scenario the game ends up being a glorified $80 guitar tuning software package. Hardly the end of the world.
2. The note detection absolutely, positively has to happen in real time. That is, when the game converts what’s coming over the USB cable from raw guitar sounds to “the user pressed these strings”, if there is significant lag, this is a dealbreaker. In music, timing is everything. Lag is a serious enough problem with existing digital 5 button guitars in Rock Band and Guitar Hero; input lag on an analog guitar would be absolutely brutal.

Worryingly, the lag issue is specifically called out as a problem in the IGN preview, with vague promises that they’ll fix it up before the October release. It’s not like Ubisoft is the first company to ever dream up the idea of a simple analog to digital real time note conversion. This has been tried before with little success. I can’t help wondering if there is a reason Harmonix used far more complex digital detection for Rock Band 3 pro guitar mode.

There are also some murmurings about a $199 Epiphone Les Paul Junior guitar + game bundle, but there’s no place to order it yet. Until then, Rocksmith is $79 with the USB cable included, and will be available for Xbox 360 and PS3 this October, and PC later in the year.

Squier® – Rock Band 3 Game Guitar – Black

In fact, I own two of ‘em!

If you are truly interested in playing a real guitar in Rock Band 3 and haven’t bitten on this deal yet, you should before they run out of stock, because once they’re gone — they’re gone forever. Don’t worry, the guitar will be supported indefinitely in RB3 and future pro guitar DLC, and presumably Fender will honor any warranties on them, so it’s safe.

It’s a blast playing Pro Guitar mode with a real guitar. But don’t take my word for it — listen to this guy. Please!

Of course, the MIDI interface specific to your platform is required to use the guitar in Rock Band 3:

• Rock Band 3 Midi Adapter for Xbox
• Rock Band 3 Midi Adapter for Wii
• Rock Band 3 Midi Adapter for PS3

These Midi adapters may be platform specific, but they aren’t instrument specific; you can also use them to hook up Midi drumsets and Midi keyboards for play as well.

On Wii and PS3, the built-in controller buttons on the guitar also function, but not on Xbox (due to controller licensing restrictions). Fortunately, the Midi adapter can be cleverly mounted on the guitar itself so you don’t have to go digging around on the floor for it to push the green button. Flip the little plastic adapter on the back around, and it hooks into the strap peg for the guitar, like so:

Based on my experience, in addition to the guitar and the midi adapter, you might want a few other things to maximize the guitarpocalypse.

Since the Midi adapter and the Midi port are so close together now, it’s best to use a 1 foot Midi cable to connect them; the default Midi cable included with the guitar is far too long. A real guitar is heavy and wired enough without 6+ feet of unnecessarily long looped Midi cable hanging off your guitar as you play … or should I say try to play.

The pro guitar tutorials do a fantastic job of easing you into being a totally awful beginning guitar player. One word of warning: you will get blisters on your fingers. You’re pressing those tender digits against unforgiving steel braided wires, and something has to give. There’s a reason Ringo mentioned this, and boy, will you ever know why.

As far as strumming goes, I recommend playing with a pick. Some folks like using their fingers, but I found I had better accuracy with a pick. The guitar comes with 2 starter picks so you can decide for yourself. There are also some nifty aftermarket picks available on Amazon. They come in thin, medium, and heavy — and a variety of colors, including this beautiful celluloid abalone.

Also, there is some hidden adjustability in the guitar; remember this is a fundamentally analog instrument pulling some clever tricks to appear digital, so calibration might be necessary. Both of mine worked fine out of the box, as far as I can tell, but for completeness, here’s how to adjust:

In the battery box, there are two very small phillips head screws. Unscrewing will give you access to 6 gold on blue sensitivity potentiometers. Turn them counterclockwise to increase the sensitivity and clockwise to decrease. This means if you feel like the top string is not being picked up, “loosen” the potentiometer (and if you feel the bottom strings keep ringing, “tighten”).

You can also use a screwdriver to adjust the bridge height; bringing the pickup closer to the string can improve responsiveness if you are having issues.

Once you get your feet (er… fingers) wet (er… with blood), you should be itching to hear what your horrible guitar skillz will sound like when properly amplified. While playing in Rock Band 3, you must use the mute for detection accuracy, but there’s no reason you can’t unmute and take those same awful, hideous, terrible guitar licks and pipe them through an amp.

Since my amp probably won’t get a ton of use — I am planning on sucking at guitar beyond all human comprehension for the forseeable future — I did some research on small or mini amps and came up with the Roland Micro Cube Guitar Amplifier. I like it a lot!

Nicely compact, has a lot of neat amp simulation modes and a handful of effects, and can also optionally run on batteries — but the power adapter is, thankfully, included. It’s also available in red or black. You’ll need a standard 1/4″ instrument cable to hook your guitar up to the amp, too. I wouldn’t go fancy here, so anything in the appropriate length will do.

If you decide to go the real guitar route in Rock Band 3, your neighbors are totally going to hate you, man. Oh, and if you’d like some great starter guitar lessons to go with the in-game pro mode training, give justinguitar.com a shot.

Remember the feeling of playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band for the first time? Remember how you didn’t care if you recognized the song you were playing? You just wanted to play and have fun. Move your skill level up on the ol’ 5-button axe and feel like a rock star for a while.

After a few years with Rock Band’s ever-expanding library of DLC and import options, some of us have fallen into the comfort zone of only playing the songs we like and know. Rather than learning and mastering new songs we may have just gotten a little lazy. A bit complacent.

Enter Pro Mode

Pro Mode is a whole new challenge on a completely different scale. It brings the excitement back. It makes you want to play the same song you’ve never heard before over and over again until you can ace it. No more worrying whether you actually know the next track in the setlist, but the attitude of “I don’t care what song I play, I just want to play and have fun doing it!” Funny thing is, you usually end up liking the songs and expanding your personal taste in music! Remember that feeling?

Do you play:

• Rock Band Drums?
• Rock Band Lead Guitar?
• Rock Band Bass Guitar?
• Rock Band Keyboard?

If you answered yes to any of those choices then Rock Band Pro Mode is for you!

It’s a Gateway Drug

Rock Band Pro Mode bridges the gap between plastic instruments and real instruments. Rock Band Pro note charts are nearly 100% comparable to the actual notes played by musicians. Harmonix claims that if you can conquer the Expert Pro tracks on your plastic instrument of choice, then you are prepared enough to play the song on a musical instrument. Rockstars, I couldn’t agree with them more!

If you can shred Ozzy’s “Crazy Train” on Pro Expert guitar or bass then you can recreate the guitar parts on a real electric. If you can master the Pro Drum charts on expert on Rush’s “Working Man” then you can beat the skins on a real drum kit. The Pro Keyboard Expert Pro charts are the notes that just your right hand plays, so that will only get you halfway to becoming a Piano Man (or woman)…but still, all of this is enough to impress your friends, and even learn some music theory along the way! Rock Band can now teach you how to play real instruments.

Rock Band’s pro mode is very thorough and will pay back what you put into it. It features the four standard difficulty levels: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert. The higher the difficulty level, the more notes you will have coming at you. There is an excellent tutorial mode built into the game, and every song in your library that is Pro instrument capable — and remember every song on the Rock Band 3 disc is Pro guitar and bass capable — features a training mode that breaks down main riffs or passages of the song for your learning pleasure. There is also the standard practice mode for practicing the whole song at once. One minor gripe here is that when learning sections of a song the game will only let you slow the passage down to about 60%. This makes it difficult when there are a ton of notes coming out you.

One possible alternative is to obtain song tablature for the song that you are learning. Guitar tablature is a numbering system that tells you what notes to depress on the fret board and what string to strike with your picking hand. This is essentially the musical notation that Pro mode utilizes, but with a few tweaks. Kids, don’t expect to pass these songs on the higher difficulties by sight reading. Just as when you are learning new music — memorization and practice, practice, practice develops that all important muscle memory! No joke about it, the learning curve for Rock Band Pro mode is steep.

Did I mention that real electric guitars have 6 strings and 21 frets? This gives us a possible 126 “buttons” that our left hand is responsible for and 6 strings that our right hand is accountable for.

From 5 Buttons to 12 Notes

There are 12 notes on a guitar, which is quite a jump from our old 5 button guitars.The majority of songs that Rock Band covers use guitars with “standard tuning”, which means the open strings are tuned to certain typical notes, and that’s the context of this lesson.

The guitar is a great instrument because it takes the same 12 notes and lets you play them on different frets on different strings. So, I can play a low sounding E note or a high sounding E note. They are the same note, but the octave has changed. Technically, I can play the same E note at different physical areas of the fretboard, but they will sound slightly different.

When holding the guitar in your lap you could play an E note by depressing the A string on the seventh fret, then strumming the A string. There you go, an E note. Or, you could depress the B string on the fifth fret and then pick the B string. Technically — an E note, audibly — a higher pitch E note than we first played with our fretting hand in a different position than the first note.

The guitar, in essence, repeats 12 notes over and over again … it’s just up to you where to play the notes. This is why there are so many “buttons” on a real guitar. Of course, when you’re playing Pro mode, you will need to hit the notes on the fretboard that Rock Band tells you to because they are the boss; I’m just trying to explain why we’re going from 5 to 126 buttons! But you will develop some musical knowledge and technique if you decide to take on the challenge that is Rock Band’s Pro mode.

The payoff can be extremely satisfying, but don’t expect to master an instrument that’s been around for centuries in a week.  Half of the fun is learning, and the other half is being able to play guitar to impress that hot chick at the party. But enough music theory, let’s play some video games!

Mustang vs Squier

There are two Pro guitar controllers available for Rock Band at this time: The Fender Mustang and the Fender Squier. There is a review on the horizon for the Fender Squier, but we’re going to focus on the Mustang for now.

Now, the Squier is a real guitar in every sense of the word. That is, the Squier is fully functioning electric guitar with Rock Band guts. You can plug it into your favorite guitar amplifier, turn the volume up, and keep your neighbors up all night, or fire up your video game console and take your video game band on tour to Europe. Sweet! The Squier controller is for you rockstars that will spare no expense in creating the most realistic Rock Band experience! The flagship guitar of Pro mode!

The Mustang, on the other hand, is a plastic replica guitar with faux strings and an all-button fretboard. It’s close to being a full size electric and much lighter. After hearing about the Squier you may be wondering what this plastic axe has to offer, but if you don’t want to spend the money, or prefer more of a “Lite” Pro mode experience, this guitar satisfies. It’s less than 1/3 the price of the Squier, and it’s a good barometer of how much you will enjoy Pro mode. If you enjoy playing on the Mustang, then chances are you will eventually move up to the Squier controller. And if you hate it, or find it too challenging to realistically make any progress … well, you just saved 250 bucks compared to starting with the Squier.

Playing The Mustang

The Mustang features all of your regular face buttons for navigating menus depending on what console your guitar is for, and also features a midi port — which I have never used, but can function as a midi guitar controller with the proper equipment. The Mustang is wireless and runs on 3 AA batteries, comes with a guitar strap and two guitar picks.

Remember when we said that guitars generally have 126 “buttons”? Well, the Mustang has 102. The Mustang has 17 frets and 6 strings. This isn’t as many frets as the Squier, but provides every bit as much of the Pro experience as the Squier does.

The “touch-sensitive” fretboard provides visual cues in relation to what buttons you press in real time. This helps in not having to take your eyes off the screen to look down at your finger placement too often. When you press down on any of the buttons on the fretboard the corresponding fret number will show up at the bottom of the note highway. It’s the same as pressing down the green or red button on the standard controllers before it’s actually time to play the note- you can see where fretting hand is by noodling around on the buttons in between charted notes. You won’t be penalized for this unless you strike one of the strings.

The 6 strings on the guitar run only the length of the strumming area which is around five inches. The strings themselves have a good responsive feel to them, but don’t feel strung as tightly as a real guitar does. For some they may have too much of a “rubber band” feel to them, though I think they are more than satisfactory in providing physical feedback as well as a sizeable area to strum.

Sliding up and down the fretboard isn’t as smooth as sliding around on real strings on an electric guitar, but the buttons do not require a lot of pressure to depress and I found I could still get around rather quickly.

So long 5 button Plastic Rock

The Fender Mustang body style isn’t very appealing to me, and overall the entire guitar isn’t visually impressive, but the real bread and butter is pairing this guitar with Rock Band Pro mode. It may not be the prettiest, but the Mustang just works. The buttons respond fantastically, and the only times I missed incredible amounts of notes and failed songs was due to my own silly mistakes, not the hardware.

The Mustang delivers in every single way as a gateway controller into the Pro world of Rock Band. The only fault I can find with it is the fact it has only 17 frets. For songs that have guitar notes that would go higher than the 17^th fret on a real world guitar, the Rock Band engine detects the Mustang controller and modifies note placement to account for the lack of frets 18 through 22. This won’t affect the majority of players and if you happen to conquer the solos in Crazy Train or The Beast and the Harlot on the Mustang, when you transition to the Squier controller or other full size electric guitar, some of the notes you’ve memorized may not be technically correct. Again, this isn’t even close to being a dealbreaker.

If you haven’t tried Rock Band Pro mode then now is the time! Rediscover the feeling of mastering a new controller and interface by advancing from 5 button rock to the 107+ buttons and real guitar hand positions of Rock Band Pro. The transportation is here for your journey: The Fender Mustang!

I own two Squiers, plus the Mustang. I’m not ready to review them quite yet, but I have messed around with the Squier enough to verify that it performs as advertised in every way. That is, it’s a totally credible pro guitar game controller … and when plugged into an amplifier, it’s a respectable real guitar, too!

This is hands down the best review I’ve read so far of the Squier. If you enjoyed it as much as I did, check out the author’s band, Rose of Jericho.

Sure we’ve all played the Rock Band 1 & 2 plastic Stratocaster. With one of those slung around our necks we looked like some rock n roll giant who had equipped the comically undersized, plastic guitar after looting a small child’s bedroom. We stood there, shredding our favorite Rock Band songs with a child’s toy. Don’t shred too hard — the strum bar may begin to fail! Don’t throw your guitar across the room after failing Freebird again (guilty as charged, senor) — it may snap in two!

I didn’t know Rock and Roll had rules

The average lifespan, from my experience, of a standard Rock Band controller is about 5 months. I’m not even talking about smashing the guitar, or even mistreating it outside of normal usage. I’m talking about the “Trust Factor”. This is simply how much my trust will fluctuate for my Rock Band Strat between the moment I unbox it and 3-5 months down the road when I’m missing notes I’m not supposed to be missing. The Trust Factor is jeopardized because of one glaring issue: quality. After normal wear and tear the Rock Band Strats hardware will start to fail ever so slightly until it has reached unacceptable levels of..um..well, “fail”, and at this time we just buy a new one.

The decline in the Trust Factor is a product of strum bar misses or double strums, fret buttons not registering (or requiring more than modest use of force to press them down in order for the game to register), whammy bar breakage- internally or externally, and star power tilt sensor failure. This is in no way the fault of Rock Band or companies that produce these peripherals. I mean, if they made an everlasting guitar, they wouldn’t make nearly as much money because we wouldn’t ever have to buy a replacement guitar! We need something more reliable than a plastic axe that that will take a nosedive in the trust department twice a year. Would you buy a car that would degenerate over an incredibly short period of time until it was practically undrivable? Of course not! So whether it’s a $60 investment, or a $35,000 investment, we all want our expectations to be met.

I’m all for giving away money every 5 months, but …

Frankly, the Rock Band Stratocaster has not met my expectations. Aside from the quality issues we covered it just feels like a toy in my hands. Rock Band is all about having fun and pretending to be a Rock star. Ultimately, Rock Band itself is just a big toy -granted, but with so much cool Rock Band stuff on the market right now you can come close to making it one heck of a simulation! If you already own (or want to own) the Rock Band Stage Kit or Rock Band Ion Drum Set then you consider Rock Band more than just a toy and have already began moving down the “Rock Simulation” path. Welcome!

A guitar you won’t have to constantly replace

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce the Wireless Mad Catz Fender Wooden Replica Stratocaster. Yes, a wooden Rock Band Guitar! The only plastic on this guitar is the pickguard. This fully sized replica of an authentic Fender Stratocaster weighs in at about 7 pounds and is the absolute Cadillac of 5 button Rock Band guitars. Per this excerpt of the product description from Mad Catz:

The guitar neck sports a high-resolution ‘Rosewood’ finish decal, concealing two sets of premium Fret Buttons. The premium Fret Buttons and Strum Bar deliver quiet operation and reliable game play, and have been extensively play tested to ensure that it is possible to achieve a 100% score in ‘Expert Mode’ should the players ability be up to the challenge.

Jeff already reviewed the Sunburst model, but this one is metallic candy apple red. And this guitar, my friends, is built to last. Long after you are inducted into the Rock Band Hall of Fame this guitar will still be functioning the way it was always supposed to. Straight out of the box the Red Candy Apple finish on the guitar was absolutely glowing.  Holding the guitar in your hands you can really feel the weight of instrument. A Fender Stratocaster built for the world of Rock Band! Real tuning pegs on the headstock, 10 low-profile fret buttons in their traditional Rock Band locations, a Guitar Hero style strum bar that gives the convincing “click” feels solid as a rock, 5-way effects switch, the Back and Start buttons disguised as a Stratocasters volume and tone knobs, an authentic metal bridge complete with real string saddles and traditional Fender tremolo system, and an output jack.

If you saw this guitar from far away you would think it was a real electric guitar without strings. Actually, that’s exactly what it is! Take all the guts out and replace with the Xbox electronics, take the strings off, and add a strum bar. BOOM! Now you’ve got yourself a Rock Band guitar you deserve! Every detail just screams quality. This guitar is made to last. It’s made so that you can play your ass off and not have to worry about how it will perform the next time you pick it up. I mean, if you’re not smashing TVs with it or crushing a burglar’s skull with it (I have 100% confidence that this solid wood guitar would win both of those fights). In other words, normal wear and tear will not be a problem for this guitar.

But how does it play?

The low-profile fret buttons allow you to play fast and fluidly up and down the neck. They don’t require much pressure to engage them and don’t make much of a sound when you push them into the neck. The strum bar is not of the mushy Rock Band variety. It’s the Guitar Hero click-click strum device that is louder than the Rock Band strummer, but is much more effective in providing physical feedback when strumming. I prefer the Guitar Hero style strum bar for that reason, and I believe it helps keep my playing accurate. Even when I can’t hear the clicky strum bar I can feel it. There are three ways to engage Overdrive. Just like the Rock Band plastic Strats you can:

• Tilt the guitar
• Press the Select Button
• Plug in your Electro-Harmonix Overdrive Pedal and stomp on it!

Only three concerns worth noting here.

1. The guitar may be a little heavy for some when having it strapped on for extended playing sessions. The best way to combat this is to buy a comfortable strap. I’ve had the same PlanetWaves locking guitar strap since my band playing days and because this guitar has genuine, metal strap buttons (the plastic Strats have, you guessed it, plastic strap buttons) a real leather or locking guitar strap will work perfectly.
2. The position of the whammy bar is a bit awkward. Though it’s mounted in the correct position at the bridge, the bar can be fully depressed and touch the pickguard.  When you’re rocking out hard using the whammy bar it’s easy to accidentally press the bar into the select button, which will trigger your overdrive if applicable. The solution to this is to slightly alter your whammy technique. I find angling the bar more towards the ceiling as I prepare to use it so it will clear the Select button and not trigger any ill-timed Overdrive power!
3. The regular plastic strats have the auto-calibration camera and mic feature onboard; calibration on this wooden guitar is totally manual.

Now go and be a Rock n Roll Giant!

The guitar really plays great and after picking up a few of my old plastic Rock Band guitars I really can’t imagine going back to using them on a regular basis. After playing Green Grass and high Tides on Expert guitar with my old plastic guitar and then this guitar I saw an increase of 3% in my instrument score. BOOM. This guitar means business! If you need a solid guitar that plays better than the stock Rock Band guitars this guitar is for YOU. It will not disappoint — and it’s also on sale for $99 while supplies last from the Mad Catz Store in Candy Apple Red and Sunburst.

The Trust Factor is alive and well!

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.

]]> http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2010/06/the-original-virtual-guitar/feed/ 6 http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2010/06/details-on-pro-guitar-mode/ http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/2010/06/details-on-pro-guitar-mode/#comments Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:20:44 +0000 Jeff Atwood http://www.fakeplasticrock.com/?p=1232 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!

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