Can learning to play guitar be turned into a game, and can that process be made fun? That’s what Rock Band 3 by Harmonix, and Rocksmith by Ubisoft both attempt to do.

The Tools

For Pro Guitar mode, Rock Band 3 lets you use an 112-button Fender Mustang controller, or the Fender Squier, a controller that looks, feels, and acts like a actual guitar. (The Squier is, sadly, no longer commercially available, but can still be found used in some places.)

While the Mustang controller is smaller, lighter, and not technically a real guitar, the Squier is absolutely passable for the real thing. In fact, if it weren’t for its neon blue power light and suspicious d-pad, an untrained eye could easily be fooled into thinking it was just another electric guitar. There is no secret to how the Mustang functions; combinations of button presses equate to guitar fingerings, which then register in Rock Band 3. The Squier is a bit sneakier. Since it is an actual guitar that uses real guitar strings, it communicates your command of the instrument in an ingenious way. When you press various strings down against the fret to form a chord, you close a circuit — the equivalent of an on/off switch. By playing the Squier as though you would a real guitar, your fingerings are sent back to Rock Band 3, allowing you to interact with the game by, basically, playing a real stringed guitar.

There is a side-effect to this form of “closed-circuit” playing. The heightened frets prevent the player from physically pushing the strings all the way down to the fretboard. This works against both the beginner and the expert. An amateur could be conditioned to develop bad habits, inadvertently muting all chords, which wouldn’t be audible until plugged in to an amplifier. A novice may also fail to develop the finger strength necessary to play correctly, once with real guitar in hand. Meanwhile, a professional player probably would try to push the strings all the way down to the fretboard, and while doable, it is not easy…and hurts a lot. After only a few minutes of playing some songs on the Squier (especially with barre chords), your fingertips — even calloused ones — feel like they are on fire. This fingertip pain is a side-effect of pressing too hard on the strings. Once you discover this nuance of the Squier, you can adjust your grip accordingly. Unfortunately, the concept of grip, posture, pressure on strings, muted chords, etc., isn’t taught to the player by Rock Band 3 at all. Fingerings are either on or off.

The hardware for Rocksmith, in comparison, involves no controller. Instead, a USB “True Tone” cable is provided with the game, which plugs directly into the output jack of any electric guitar. You can purchase any electric guitar you wish, and it is automatically compatible with Rocksmith. No special fingering tricks are required. The magic is in the cable, which sends the actual tones produced by your guitar to the game. Rather than expecting a multitude of on/off switches and translating them into chords in game, Rocksmith actually listens to the music you produce when you play your guitar.

The result is more natural gameplay than in Rock Band 3, but there’s also a catch: Because Rocksmith detects tones, there is a degree of latency ever present in gameplay. When you strum an F-Chord, Rocksmith must analyze, on-the-fly, if you’ve struck the appropriate strings, and produced the appropriate tone. Since that analysis happens in real-time, there are often noticeable delays. At times, you may feel compelled to play a chord early, but since the game adjusts your scores based on early/late chords strumming, this strategy is often futile — and not a good habit to get into, either.

Which way is better? Both styles have their strengths and weaknesses, but after trying both, I favor Rocksmith’s approach, which removes the need for specific (and, in the case of the Squier, discontinued) guitar hardware in favor of a simple cable that works with all guitars. It’s worth mentioning that the Rocksmith USB cable additionally works with a PC via ASIO4ALL*, which in turn, integrates with popular effect processing software like Guitar Rig, the value of which is quite significant considering the cost of amplifiers, pedals, cabinets, mixers, and their ilk.

Navigating the Game

You can navigate Rock Band 3′s interface using your game console controller. If you have the PS3 version, the d-pad on the two Fenders work well; for XBox 360 owners, the intermediary MIDI Pro-Adapter provides navigational control. In Rocksmith, navigation is handled via your console’s controllers, since you are already working with an actual electric guitar. Both systems work as well as they can. It’s awkward to be reaching for a game controller with a guitar slung across your shoulder, so players will have to learn to avoid accidentally driving the arm of the guitar through their TV while bending over to pick up a game controller when switching songs.

Choosing a song in Rock Band 3 is easy; you can sort your library various ways, and quickly jump from song to song, either by difficulty, artist title, song title, or one of a handful of other options. Additional filters to remove specific songs from the list (such as ones that are not Pro-Guitar** compliant) make the navigation a breeze. Unfortunately, Rocksmith song navigation is not as flexible. Players must scroll horizontally from one end of the song list to the other. One might have had the foresight to add a “wraparound” feature, letting us press left once, which would hypothetically jump to the end of the list…not the case. The years of work Harmonix poured into refining their games is evident in the Rock Band 3 UI polish, and sadly, Rocksmith suffers mightily in the UI department. But on the plus side, this gives them lots of room for obvious improvement in Rocksmith 2.

Rocking Out

Rock Band 3 and Rocksmith have two vastly different delivery methods for rocking out. RB3 utilizes the traditional, familiar “scrolling highway”.

Players watch multi-colored bars of light scroll toward them, strumming when they cross a line at the base, close to the bottom of the screen. In Rock Band 3, the scrolling highway now displays all six strings of the guitar, and the multi-colored bars of light are replaced with aqua blue “mountains and valleys”. These aqua-colored blobs don’t convey their meaning as concretely as the multi-colored bars did. The player is forced to spend time in the lessons and tutorials to understand their true meaning. Ultimately, the aqua blobs represent a combination of fret placement, finger spacing, strings to strum, and direction to strum (up or down). The benefit of Rock Band 3 is that, when strings are pressed down, the number of the fret lights up in-game on the scrolling highway, telling you where your fingers currently reside, so you can adjust without having to look back down at your guitar.

Additionally, names of chords will display along the side of the vertical guitar arm, so seasoned guitarists can see chords like “Em7” and “Csus4”, and know immediately to play an E-Minor 7th, or a C-Suspended 4th, respectively. The visual chords are immensely beneficial, especially as a learning tool, teaching new players what chords sound like as they are being played. However, there is one important caveat: RB3 only cares about the one specific way the chord should be played within the context of the current song. Experts beware: when the game asks you to play a G chord, make sure you pick the correct one of nineteen different fingerings. Choose the wrong one, and Rock Band 3 logs it as a miss.

Learning what the strange aqua “mountains and valleys” represent takes some getting used to. Harmonix was clearly constrained by trying to fit real guitar into the existing scrolling highway visual interface of previous Rock Band and Guitar Hero-like games, trying their best to come up with an intuitive way of describing fingerings. True, the numbers denote fret placement, but the blobs’ girth only provide generalizations of how far apart your fingers should be. And unfortunately, Rock Band 3 is not a game about generalizations, but pinpoint accuracy. Play the wrong fingering — even if it’s the right chord — and it’s counted as a miss. So, while the tutorials provide the necessary mechanism to learn each song, complete with every specific fingering, the aqua blobs racing toward you in-game are less than adequate to convey the same information. Players will have a very hard time “jumping in” to new songs without first spending significant time in the song’s lessons.

Rocksmith, on the other hand, doesn’t force the player to sit in song tutorials first. The gameplay interface is a new horizontal bar which reflects the arm of the guitar. Using this horizontal representation, every fret can be shown at once, allowing the player to accurately see the exact placement of their fingers for a particular chord. The guitar arm intuitively zooms smoothly in and out during the song as necessary. Every 3rd fret is numbered, matching up with the dots on the physical guitar arm held by the player. This unique interface, once the player is accustomed to it, becomes a joy to work with. It makes matching fingering a cinch. There’s never any guesswork, because it’s clear exactly where each finger should be placed on the fretboard. Rocksmith also displays real chord names alongside the fingerings, too, so as you play you can begin to associate certain hand positions with proper chord names.

The beauty of the Rocksmith interface isn’t just the switch from vertical to horizontal but the constant feedback loop it provides. In Rock Band 3, when you have practiced The Hardest Button to Button to the point where you feel like you’re ready to step on stage, if you botch certain chords or notes, all you get is a “miss” in-game. Your bonus multiplier resets and your score is impacted. That’s it. You have no way of knowing what it is you truly messed up. Did I pluck the wrong strings? Did I have the wrong fingering? Was I too early or too late? Is the game just being a bitch?

In Rocksmith, however, you constantly get feedback from the game on what you’re doing incorrectly as you play the song, so you can repair the damage on-the-fly. Here comes a fifth fret E, but you accidentally play a fourth fret E. In-game, the E string glows bright and an arrow flashes to the left, indicating that you need to move your finger down a fret. If you’re lucky, and it happened to be a sustained note, you might actually be able to fix the note quickly and get a partial score. In Rock Band 3, there is no concept of “fixing” a mistake — you either hit or miss. You’re either amazing … or completely inept. In a game built around the incredible complexity of playing a guitar, something that takes a lifetime to do well, and lots of practice to get better at, Rock Band 3 provides no gray area whatsoever. You either play the song exactly as described, or you get booed off the stage.

The Verdict

Rocksmith is fun to play because its gameplay is completely built around the steep inherent complexity of learning real guitar. It dynamically eases the player into the songs in its library; no one particular song is too difficult to start with, and it provides an interface that is both intuitive and precise. While Rock Band 3 provides multiple levels of difficulty to the player — albeit via a far greater library of titles — there are some songs in the library that an amateur (or even an intermediate) player has absolutely no business starting with. The “easy” versions of the RB3 songs are definitely easy, but even stepping up to “medium” or “hard” is often a massive undertaking that requires concentration, patience, and repetition. The game interface is imprecise, forcing you out of the game and into lessons just to learn new fingerings. Every Rocksmith song you play improves you without the need for separate tutorials or lessons; the gameplay is the lesson, and that’s what you are judged and scored on. Conversely, when you play Rock Band 3, you’re playing a game for a full band that just happens to include great — but not perfect — real guitar support, too. You’ll be judged on how accurately you pluck every string, and play every chord. Though it provides the tools necessary to learn guitar, integration into RB3 gameplay is awkward, and the result often forces you to dump out of the song, restart lessons, pause for correct fingerings — all of which add up to an experience that isn’t nearly as fun as it could be.

* ASIO stands for “Audio Stream Input/Output”, and is a digital audio protocol which accesses audio hardware directly.
** Detailed tutorials on how to play a particular song only exist for Pro-Guitar songs, and only a subset of songs in the RB3 library are Pro-Guitar compliant.

Week 1

I had already taken it upon myself to learn the drums via Rock Band, investing in the entire Ion Drum Rocker kit, and after playing through hundreds of songs across Rock Band 1, 2 and 3, I was ready to explore new territory. The weapon of choice: a Mad Catz wireless Fender Mustang pro-guitar controller. Now, just in case you’re still getting caught up, this isn’t the Guitar Hero controller of yore. Gone are the five colored Simon buttons along the neck. In their place are 102 buttons along the length of the guitar neck, allowing you to completely reproduce finger positioning for guitar chords. And you don’t strum a bar-button–you pluck the actual six strings at the base of the guitar. For all intents and purposes, it is a perfect representation of a real guitar, though won’t necessarily make much music if you try to play it outside of Rock Band (unless you hook in to its MIDI interface). This controller would be my gateway into the world of playing guitar. The question was, would RB3 be an appropriate tutor?

The Mad Catz wireless Fender Mustang Pro-Guitar Controller

Right from the main screen in RB3, the game immediately knows I have a Pro-Guitar controller, and it takes me directly into a series of lessons. The lessons are very basic: perfect for someone who has never picked up a guitar in their life. Within minutes of watching the introductory videos, I’m playing my first chords: E5, A5, G5; simple chords that only require two fingers. I spend about 10 minutes going over the initial tutorials, which are a breeze. By the fifth tutorial, RB3 begins to start having me move back and forth between two finger fingers, and plucking individual strings. It takes a little longer to adapt, but I eventually get it. Twenty minutes in, I’m through the first section of tutorials and am ready to play my first song: The Hardest Button to Button by The White Stripes.

I actually don’t do half bad on my first go around, scoring 3 of 5 stars, having practiced a few play-throughs first. Learning a song in RB3 is extremely convenient, because it has a built-in tutorial for every pro-guitar song in the game. This allows you to learn fingering, slow the song down (if necessary), and focus on the key parts of the song one step at a time. After a 2nd attempt of another 3 stars, I’m convinced I can improve. On my 2nd day, I complete a few more tutorials, and return to the song in “Medium” mode, thrusting myself back onto stage. Again, 3 stars, but barely. Each song is divided into four levels of difficulty: Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert. As you choose higher difficulties, more and more chords are expected. By the time you reach Expert, you should be playing the complete song as if the original artists themselves were playing up on stage. I give it five plays at “Medium” before I decide to crank it up even further. At “Hard” mode, it’s now expecting a lot from me. And this is where my wrist begins to ache. I get 3 stars on Hard mode and call it a night, granting my wrist some relief.

Rock Band 3′s in-game Guitar Trainer

The third day I come back to Rock Band, I’m determined to play the real song, taking it all the way up to “Expert”. After a couple of Hard mode completions to warm-up, I enter the song’s tutorial for Expert. All at once I realize this is not going to be easy. I slow the tutorial down and very carefully focus on every individual string and chord that must be hit, and I play them again and again. My kids ask me how many more times they have to hear the song. “Until I can do it,” I reply, hoping they pick up on my dedication. With my wrists aching, I exit out of the tutorial and get on stage. I complete the song twice, once with 3 stars and once with 2. I can barely feel my wrist at this point. I want to go again but decide to take a break and let what I’ve learned sink in.

By the fourth day I’m executing tutorials with much greater accuracy and am ready to explore new songs. The next ones on the list are: I Wanna Be Sedated by The Ramones and The Beautiful People by Marilyn Manson. I get through them without much trouble on “Medium” but keep pushing myself to crank up the difficulty. On days 5 and 6 I continue working through the tutorials and songs, and by the 7th day, I’m able to complete the tutorials and get through the songs at “Expert”, earning a suite of achievements. The first week of guitar is a success.

Week 2

The next week I spend exploring a few more songs in “Warmup” (the easiest in RB3), such as In The End by Linken Park and Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode. None pose a real threat, and by now, having spent about 30-40 minutes. a night practicing, my wrist has toughened up. However, this comes to a crashing halt when I try Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part 1 by The Flaming Lips. The culprit? A low barre F chord, requiring all five of my fingers in place on the neck of the guitar. The positioning is painful; I have to physically move my fingers on my right-hand (remember, I’m a lefty) with the help of my left hand, into their proper placement. I think to myself, there’s no way I’m going to be able to switch to this chord as the song plays. On top of the regular wrist aches, I’m now getting pain in my thumb, more than likely because of how I’m barring (holding) the chord in place. This is where RB3 could do a much better job of explaining how you should hold the chord; showing the fret fingering on-screen is vital, but doesn’t speak to your grip or provide best-practices. This is essential for learning guitar, because as it turns out, you can develop a lot of bad habits early on if you learn the instrument wrong, and eventually, you’ll have to unlearn those bad habits.

The painful barre F chord

I get into a rhythm of practicing a set minimum amount of time each evening, hoping it pays off like it did years ago when I was in high school band. Each night consists of warming up with a few of the tutorials, practicing scales, chords, finger exercises. From there, I move to the songs I know (but never in the same order), replaying them, practicing them, trying to improve a little bit each time. I continue to work on broadening the scope of songs I can play, adding such classic to the list as Blue Monday by New Order, and Get Up, Stand Up by Bob Marley and the Wailers. I knock these songs out of the park, but The Flaming Lips song still haunts me, the barre F chord preventing me from completing the song with any degree of proficiency.

I also develop a pet peeve with the Mad Catz controller; at times, I notice that one of the 102-fret buttons stays partially depressed, long after my fingers have left the chord. This, of course, eats into my accuracy, and I usually don’t realize it until I notice my score plummeting and the crowd booing me off the stage. It doesn’t happen a lot, but it happens enough to force me to review the controller between songs–and can be solved by dragging my finger up the length of the neck, resetting all the buttons in the process. As the 2nd week of playing guitar ends, I’m able to play through six songs at “Expert” difficulty.

Week 3

Week 3 introduces me to my first guitar solo, complements of the infamous grunge track from the 90s, Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. The solo kicks my ass. I’m not pleased with my performance. I end up spending an exorbitant amount of time in the RB3 trainer, playing the solo over and over. I repeat this process for extended periods of time over Week 3. The solo is unrelenting. Each time I think I have it down, I get on stage, and it completely unravels, missing nearly every note. One of the contributing factors to this “fail-out” of the song, is due to the design of the Mad Catz controller. Since I am a lefty, I hold the guitar so that I strum with my left hand, and provide chord fingering with my right. When the controller is flipped over, the directional game pad, start button, back button, and XBox power/sync button are at the top of the guitar, rather than the bottom (well out of the way). So, when strumming, the meaty part of my thumb is constantly brushing up against these buttons, often pausing the game and bringing up the XBox menu, completely throwing my concentration off. With concerted effort, I can improve my posture and avoid touching these buttons, but as songs become more difficult, it becomes harder to focus less on “complete the song accurately” and more on “avoiding pressing buttons accidentally”. This is a depressing design flaw of the controller, and is something I simply have to learn to live with.

The perils of being a southpaw

Frustrations aside, I’m determined to continue practicing, with the knowledge that, over time, I’m going to improve bit-by-bit. This proof comes on the 3rd day of Week 3 when I surprise myself and earn consecutive 4 of 5 Star completions in “Expert” mode on We Belong by Pat Benatar and Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Knicks. This gives me the boost of courage to get back into Nirvana, and bust out the solo, which ends up earning me the Pro Guitar Streak (100) achievement.

Week 4

By week 4 my confidence with the guitar is building, still having never actually picked up a real guitar. Out of the 25 songs in the “Warmup” category, I’ve completed 13 in Expert mode, with 5 at 90% accuracy (or better). I still have one major speed bump, however: That damn song with the barre F chord. I continue going through the tutorials and trainer, practicing finger exercises, trying desperately to program my brain to place all my fingers on the chord at once. Then, during one session through the trainer, I have an epiphany: as I am playing the D-minor chord (which precedes the barre F chord), I figure out that I can pivot on my middle finger, leaving it on the fret board, as the middle finger’s position for both chords is the same. I try this technique out, and am amazed to see the results; it boosts my accuracy from a measly 32% all the way up to 79%. At last, I finally feel like I am getting it, and find my thoughts wandering throughout the day, contemplating the possibility of actually buying a real guitar.

I have a long to way to go before becoming the next Eddie Van Halen, but the first four weeks of learning how to play guitar with nothing but a video game and a massively buttoned guitar-shaped game controller has proved surprisingly successful…and fun! The Mad Catz Mustang is a convenient toy that works very well as a learning tool, and aside from a few of the aforementioned pet peeves, I have to say that it has made the experience an enjoyable one, and provided me with the necessary motivation to explore a real guitar at some point in the future. I recommend it to everyone with any interest in music and guitars, and have a love of gaming.

Shawn Holmes is an avid gamer, programmer, and connoisseur of music. He can be reached at shawn.a.holmes@gmail.com or on XBox Live by his tag “Hanzo55″.

(by the way if anyone from Harmonix is listening, we’re still waiting for that song to appear as DLC..)

How time flies when you’re rocking, eh? In commemoration of Rock Band’s fourth birthday, Harmonix put together a ton of behind the scenes retrospectives and commentary. Hear the untold story of the original Rock Band, as told by the people behind the game!

Hear how the guitar, drum, and keyboard hardware almost never made it!

The companion blog post is Rock Band instrument prototypes and insider stories, where we learn what could have been:

We had this AMAZING folding drum kit that would fit under a couch. It had removable heads, integrated cymbal options and custom inserts that allowed to to change the quality of the strike sound so each pad sounded a bit different. It supported 3 pedals, a completely adjustable kick location. This thing was boss (and also would have cost over 200 dollars at retail).

There were SOOOO MANY strum bar prototypes. Clicky strums, spinny strums, smushy strums, stringy strums, clacky strums, invisi strums. We tried everything.

Another crazy idea we has was to attempt to modularize the wireless equipment for each console into a small box that could be plugged into any RB3 instrument. We wanted a way to reduce the total number of models in production, but at the volumes predicted for the RB3 launch and with all the legacy hardware already in the market, we couldn’t justify the additional cost of the Wireless Module. A lot of the tech/design made its way into the MIDI box, though.

It’s also a little scary to think what the Rock Band logo could have looked like:

Harmonix employees reflect on their first Rock Band experience in Rock Band Fourth Anniversary Harmonix Stories, Part One and Part Two. And Harmonix podcast episode 56 focuses entirely on sharing their first Rock Band experience.

I distinctly remember waiting outside Best Buy at midnight to get my Rock Band 1 full game kit — and how deliriously fun it was to play as a full band for the first time.

What was your first Rock Band experience?

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!

But what about Guitar Hero II? This was a huge sequel, with so many improvements over the legendary original:

• Far better competitive two player modes. It’s easy to forget, but multiplayer in Guitar Hero was a tacked-on affair, offering only the oddball “you play a section, then I play a section” tug-of-war multiplayer mode.
• Cooperative two player mode with bass/guitar and lead/rhythm tracks depending on the song.
• A significantly larger on-disc tracklist, going from 30 core songs to 40 (48 on Xbox).
• A few of the songs were original masters, predicting the wholesale switch to all masters later.
• After a few months, finally available for the first time on a next-gen console as well as the original Playstation 2.

As far as I’m concerned, the “II” in the title stood for the best two player guitar game ever!

The Guitar Hero II soundtrack was killer, too. But it also predates reusable DLC song libraries by two years. So short of booting up the original game on a Playstation 2 or Xbox 360 — how can we experience these 48 classic tracks in a modern rhythm game? Let’s see:

(* indicates the song is exportable to be used as DLC in current Guitar Hero games. All Rock Band songs are exportable with very rare exceptions.)

By my count, out of the original 48 songs in Guitar Hero II, that’s …

For reference, the complete library of songs are officially listed for each game here:

• Guitar Hero music catalog
• Rock Band song finder

Unfortunately, the tale of the tape in this case is rather woeful — 43% of the Guitar Hero II tracklist is only playable in the original game. Here’s hoping we get a few more of these classic tracks as DLC in the future!

Most drum kits have two pedals standard: the hi-hat cymbal pedal, and the kick drum pedal.

All standard plastic Rock Band pedals, and even the fancy metal Roadie pedal included with the Ion drums, are more like hi-hat pedals than actual kick drum pedals. On a real kick drum pedal, there’s a chain pulling a beater which strikes the bass drum.

Drumming is very much about striking surfaces and having a kick drum pedal that actually strikes a surface is every bit as essential as having drum pads that you hit with a drumstick instead of pressing a button on a controller (or keyboard, for that matter). I was never into drum pedal fetishism, but after reading a bit more about it, and spending more time playing on the Ion drums, this important difference finally began to make sense to me. The Ion drums are otherwise quite authentic as a basic entry level electronic drum kit, with the notable exception of the pedal.

So I decided to order the following Ion drum “real” kick pedal upgrade kit from rockbandparts.com for $149:

• Yamaha KP-65 electronic kick drum
• SP500 kick drum pedal
• Roadie VTI Trigger Box

The Roadie VTI Trigger Box isn’t strictly necessary, depending on your configuration, but it does ensure that whatever drum and pedal combo you eventually use, it’ll work. It offers polarity, sensitivity, and duration tweaks that make most piezo drum trigger pads work with either the Ion drums (¼” connector) or the stock Rock Band 2/3 drums (⅛” connector). And all the necessary cables are included, too.

One thing I didn’t like about the Roadie box is that it adds quite a bit of complexity to the already-complex Ion drum configuration, seeing as how it needs its own power and has two adjustable trims. However, there is a solution — the KickWire.

The KickWire is a bit expensive at $27 plus shipping, but personally it was worth it to me for the much simpler configuration of just a basic wire (presumably with some kind of inline resistor) to connect the kick tower to the Ion drum brain.

The Yamaha KP65 was my choice because it’s quiet — about as loud as striking the Ion pads — inexpensive, reliable, and has a nifty built in sensitivity adjustment to boot. There’s a nice comparison video of the Roland KD-8 and the Yamaha KP65 here, if you want to hear and see it in action.

The KP65 and the pedal can be “mated” together via a clamp on the front of the pedal itself, so they form one semi-solid unit. Here’s a picture of mine:

Having a pedal with a chain driving a beater, striking a kick drum surface, completely changes the feel of the pedal… for the better! For one thing, you can now hear and feel a solid “thwack” when you kick, and actually get a rhythm going on the kick by ear! Compare that with the stock Rock Band or Roadie Ion pedal, where at best you get the sterile click of an electronic switch being pressed down by your foot. It’s a very, very different experience, with a nice organic rebound based on the mass of the beater and the chain pull. Is it slightly noisier? Of course, but at least with the KP65 it is only roughly as noisy as a stick hitting an Ion pad, which is about as good as it gets.

The only downside of the real pedal configuration is the price — considering the Ion drum kit is $300 with the extra cymbal, adding a pedal ($50) and the electronic kick drum ($60) and the wire to connect them ($30) is almost half the price of the entire drum kit!

If you’re enthused about drumming enough to go for the Ion Drum Rocker, then I can definitely recommend a real pedal upgrade. However, it ain’t cheap by any means — you’ll have to decide if spending $450 versus $300 is worth it to you for that final essential bit of authentic entry-level electronic drumming.

Although I’ve been happy with the Rock Band 3 Pro drumkit (with cymbals), I finally decided to take my drumming to the next level and adopt the Ion Drum Rocker kit. One advantage of waiting this long, at least — the kit that was originally $299 is now only $249.

The Ion Drum Rocker, although super premium by gaming standards, is extremely low end in the real world of drums. I knew that, and I wasn’t expecting much when I unpacked the (zillion!) boxes. But my first reaction to the Ion Drum Rocker was “wow, this thing is rock solid”. It’s a huge step up in quality, construction, and feel from a stock Rock Band 3 pro drumkit. Consider that you’re going from this:

to this:

It is, in a word, beefy. One of the reasons I upgraded is because our 2.5 year old son enjoys whacking on the drums with us, and I wasn’t convinced the stock kit could continue to survive his tender mercies for a whole lot longer. Well, there’s no way any toddler can harm this Ion kit; it’s all ridged aluminum frame and multi-point bolted joints.

It’s also way, way more complicated than the simple Rock Band 3 kit. Check out the assembly diagram, below (click through for a larger version):

Here’s a full visual inventory of all the parts in the box. And after building it up, you’re not done — you still have to connect everything together, and that’s one distinct wire for …

• 4 pads
• 3 cymbals (the third cymbal is a highly recommended $45 addition)
• 1 pedal

… eight wires and eight connections all told, as you can see in this visual diagram.

Alesis, the underlying manufacturer, is known for inexpensive but good quality electronic drum kits; the Ion Drum Rocker is effectively their most inexpensive electronic kit. Given the heritage, it is every bit as reliable and satisfying to play as you might expect. That part didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me, however, was how ridiculously configurable this kit is.

Apparently not all real world drum kits are arranged in the layout of a Rock Band 3 drumkit! I’m sure this is totally obvious to any real world drummer in retrospect, but drum kit positioning is often a matter of preference, musical genre, even song! On the Ion drum kit, the frame, the pads, the cymbals — all can be adjusted, tweaked, and arranged in an almost infinite number of ways. (Not to mention that some drummers can have literally dozens of drums and cymbals in their kit.) This was a whole new world for me! If I’m going to spend the dough on a fancyish kit, I want to do this right — I want to learn something approximating real drum motions and proper standard drum layouts. But then I belatedly realized I have no idea what that is. So I asked a question on music.stackexchange to determine what the “standard” or “typical” drum kit layout is.

I’ll save you all the angst and give you the short version: the Rock Band 3 layout is fairly close to a typical drum kit, but the biggest difference is that the snare (red) drum should be under the first tom (yellow) and lower, between the drummer’s legs. And really there should be a pedal under each foot, too! As you can see in this diagram:

I’m still tweaking my layout, but the snare positioning and the general layout pictured above is what you want to shoot for. Bear in mind that most drum kits have four cymbals, which means two crashes (green cymbals) on the left and right. So at some level having just one green cymbal is kind of fundamentally incorrect, and you may feel it’s on the “wrong” side depending on the song. In a perfect world you’d have a duplicate green cymbal on the left, too.

It’s been a much more substantial upgrade than I ever expected; not only does it work great (and it’s surprisingly quiet, arguably quieter than even the Rock Band 3 Pro drumkit in play), but the kit has encouraged me to learn more about real world drumming. The only thing you give up is the wireless connectivity, and any semblance of easy portability. Neither of these are very important to an avid drummer so I heartily recommend the Ion Drum Rocker.

I have a few more tips for new Drum Rocker owners based on my experience:

• Once you get the kit, prepare to spend the first few days tweaking the layout to taste. Trust me, that little adjustment tool they include will be your best friend for a while. Just like a real drum kit, all those knobs and adjustments are fascinating — do not tie anything down until you’re absolutely sure you’ve got the layout just right!
• Use a silver sharpie marker to measure and mark intervals on the frame crossbars, so you can get the alignment just right. And if you don’t have a silver sharpie yet, for shame. Go get one! Silver sharpies = awesome.
• Only the foot pedal cable has a color band; I thought that was really clever and matched the colored inputs perfectly, so I bought some Scotch Vinyl Colored Tape in red, green, yellow, and blue to mark both ends of all the cables so I always knew which pad or cymbal it was going to.
  
• Rather than using the supplied zip-ties, I found it was simpler and faster to wind the extra cables around the frame.

I’m enjoying these baby steps into the world of real music and real musicians tremendously. In the end, with the Ion Drum Rocker you’re paying ~$300 (once you factor in that important 3rd cymbal) to get a reasonably complete, good quality basic electronic drum kit. It’s only a little more than 2x the price of the default Rock Band 3 pro drum kit ($129), and what you get is way more than 2 times as configurable, reliable, and realistic. That’s a great deal in my book!

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.

• Complete list of downloadable songs for the Rock Band series (Wikipedia)
• Official Rock Band Song Finder (Harmonix)

And who doesn’t have a sizable song library, now that there are over 3,000 DLC songs available, plus the opportunity to import the on-disc songs from older Harmonix games like Rock Band 1, Rock Band 2, Lego Rock Band, and so on?

Yes, Rock Band 3 made huge strides in sorting, filtering, and selecting songs from big song libraries, but how can you possibly communicate the breadth of your enormous song list when you can only view 12-15 songs at once?

That’s where Rock Band Karaoke List Maker comes in! Instead of scrolling through page after page of songs on screen to figure out what song to play next, you can present people with a high bandwidth printed list, like so:

It’s a fantastic way to get a “bird’s eye view” of your entire library so you can better decide what to play next. The layout is simple: just a list of songs, grouped by band, in multiple configurable columns and font sizes.

Even better, because it is printed, you can have upcoming players select songs from this menu while they’re waiting their turn to play — so they’re ready to hit the ground rocking! This paper stuff, it’s miraculous!

You can check out my list of DLC as of today, which is (almost) every non-RBN track ever released to September 4th 2011, in this public Google Docs PDF I shared. The awesome part is that this is thousands of songs (literally!) and the whole shebang fits on 5 pages if I use the maximum number of columns and the “small” font … and it’s still quite readable, because printers are extremely high resolution!

The service supports creating these PDF printable song lists from DLCQuickplay.com and MyRockBandSongs.com, so you must start by creating your DLC library on one of those sites first. Personally, I recommend DLCQuickplay as I had the best results there and prefer the simpler UI. It also has convenient “click once” checkboxes for bringing in full-disc DLC imports and collections.

One tip — make sure you properly indicate which platform and disc games you own when signing up, otherwise you won’t be able to select the correct songs under Songs | My DLC at the top of the page. The “Imports” tab is kind of subtle, and I didn’t find it initially, so be sure to look for it where I’ve highlighted below.

Of course maintaining an inventory of your DLC isn’t just useful for printing your song list, but also for comparing songs with other potential online players and bands, too!

So thanks to DLC Quickplay for making their site such a pleasure to use, even for people with monster DLC song lists like mine — and kudos to Troy Davis for putting together such a slick printable PDF song list creator that works with it, too!

I’ll be doing what I can to support both these services, but participation is the best way to begin!