fakeplasticrock

Rock Band 2 Partially Revealed

Jeff Atwood — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:59:55 +0000

Finally, confirmation of Rock Band 2! It’s coming in September of this year for the Xbox 360, and a little later in the year for all other platforms.

Rock Band 2 to include new online modes, songs (Associated Press)
Rock Band 2: The Opening Act (IGN)

Both articles are rather sparse; it sounds like the juicy stuff won’t be forthcoming until E3 the week of July 14th, later this month. Still, we do learn a few key facts:

Rock Band 2 will support all Rock Band 1 downloadable content. This is what everyone was hoping, so glad to hear it confirmed. Let the Rock Band DLC content buying sprees continue!
Improved (but still 100% compatible) versions of the guitar and drums will be released with Rock Band 2. Lots of room for improvement here!
80 tracks of original music on the game disc

The new guitar looks basically the same to me. I was not at all fan of the old strat, so I remain unconvinced.

It sounds like they’re focusing on polishing the overall experience. Rock Band was such a fundamentally great game that I think this is exactly the right approach:

Rock Band 2 takes all the lessons we’ve learned from making a multi-instrument music game, addresses them, then adds some amazing new ways for you to experience your music library that have never been seen in a music game before. We’ve been scouring forums and parties everywhere for what people liked and didn’t like, and I’m pretty confident we’ve addressed everything I’ve heard people ask for.

We’ve taken almost everything people have asked for in Rock Band and added it to Rock Band 2, as well as including some “first time ever” features.

There are a few intriguing hints of deeper changes to gameplay, too:

… several new modes that not only provide new ways for you to experience your music library, but also new ways for you to transition from Expert to real instruments.

I’m glad to hear they’re expanding play options. In Rock Band 1, once you finish the World Tour, Quickplay is an unsatisfying way to experience the game. There’s no way to even save your high scores in Quickplay, except in the oddball PS2 and Wii versions of Rock Band.

A leaked vidcap screenshot of Rock Band 2 also revealed a few songs from the game’s tracklist:

Dream Theater - Panic Attack
System of a Down - Chop Suey
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Give It Away
Foo Fighters - Everlong
Kim Wilde - Kids in America
Motörhead - Ace of Spades
Cheap Trick - Hello There
Journey - Any Way You Want It
The Who - Pinball Wizard
Bad Religion - Sorrow

There are strong rumors that this will be the first rhythm game with an AC/DC track in it, as well.

More Information on Guitar Hero World Tour

Jeff Atwood — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:59:08 +0000

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

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.

The Ultimate Rock Band Achievement: The Endless Setlist

Jeff Atwood — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 10:47:55 +0000

If you enjoy Rock Band’s World Tour mode, eventually you’ll get around to the fabled Endless Setlist.

The Endless Setlist is a gig in Moscow. But not just any gig. This gig is 58 songs in length — that’s right, fifty-eight songs!

In order to complete this gig, you must play all 58 songs included with Rock Band — at medium difficulty or higher — without powering down your console or exiting from the gig.

Sure, any band can enter the Hall of Fame in World Tour. But few bands have the intestinal fortitude to complete the grueling Endless Setlist. It is the ultimate gig, the pinnacle of World Tour mode.

(Pro tip: be very, very careful when navigating the menus if your band foolishly chooses to embark upon the Endless Setlist! The disconnected controller menu is particularly dangerous since it contains only two menu items, one of which will exit you from the setlist. Also remember that the Xbox has a dashboard setting to automatically power off after some hours of inactivity. We kept our Xbox running overnight after completing 40 songs, so as to complete the rest in the morning, then woke up to find it had powered itself off. So we had to start over from the beginning, and our 58 song set was really more like a 98 song set. Sigh.)

What do you get for all that effort? A lot of cash (we got around $32,000), a few new fans, and an achievement:

	10	Vinyl Artist Finish the Endless Setlist in Band World Tour on Medium. requires 600 stars; play all 58 set songs, and the game cannot be saved, only paused thus “endless”
	20	Gold Artist Finish the Endless Setlist in Band World Tour on Hard.
	25	Platinum Artist Finish the Endless Setlist in Band World Tour on Expert.

You’ll get a nice message about how you’ve achieved Legendary Status and your in-game icons will be upgraded to a different (and cooler) visual style to represent the difficulty your band completed the endless setlist on — either platinum, gold, or vinyl.

Oh yes, and if the endless setlist is the last gig in Moscow, you’ll also get the “Big in Moscow” achievement for an additional 10 gamerpoints. And a crappy t-shirt of Rasputin for your character.

Our band Jooky! just completed the endless setlist on hard guitar and hard drums, and I reckon it takes about 4 1/2 hours in total if you don’t take any breaks. We did it in three sessions, with about an hour break in between.

The songs are mostly in difficulty order, but not quite. Here’s the actual Endless Setlist:

29 Fingers
Say it Aint So
In Bloom
I Think I’m Paranoid
The Time we had
Mississippi Queen
Here It Goes Again
Creep
Blood Doll
Wave of Mutilation
Should I Stay or Should I Go
Maps
Gimme Shelter
Brainpower
Sabotage
Blitzkrieg Bop
Celebrity Skin
I’m So Sick
When We Were Young
Black Hole Sun
Wanted Dead or Alive
Learn to Fly
Seven
Orange Crush
Main Offender
The Hand That Feeds
Day Late, Dollar Short
Epic
Suffragette City
Ballroom Blitz
Dead On Arrival
Pleasure
Train Kept a Rollin
Are You Gonna Be My Girl
Paranoid
Timmy & the Lords of the Underworld
Welcome Home
Go With The Flow
Dani California
Nightmare
Don’t Fear the Reaper
Reptilia
Electric Version
Vasoline
Detroit Rock City
Can’t Let Go
Next to You
Cherub Rock
Tom Sawyer
Enter Sandman
Green Grass and High Tides
Outside
Highway Star
Foreplay/Long Time
Flirtin With Disaster
I Get By
Run To The Hills
Won’t Get Fooled Again

If you’re frightened after scrolling this far, you should be. It takes a special kind of crazy to complete the Endless Setlist.

Perfect Score on the Hardest Guitar Hero III Song

Jeff Atwood — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:59:40 +0000

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.

Adding Stage Lighting to your Fake Plastic Rock

Jeff Atwood — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 05:50:59 +0000

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:

Many stage lights are sound activated and include their own embedded microphones, so they “just work” out of the box.
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:

Mode 1 switches between all the available colors
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!

The Official Rock Band Blog

Jeff Atwood — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:18:13 +0000

Have you visited the official Harmonix Rock Band Blog? If not, you should. There’s a great entry on one of my absolute favorite bits of DLC so far, the complete first 1978 album from seminal pop new wave band The Cars.

The producer of the first Cars album was Roy Thomas Baker, an Englishman best-known for his mile-high production work on the first four Queen albums. But although the album sounds like an immaculate studio production, Hawkes says the recorded versions are pretty close to how the songs sounded live. “We were the same arrangements we id on the demo—The most obvious difference is that we added the multi-track backing vocals, and did a fair number of overdubs. I do remember that on ‘Just What I Needed,’ Roy suggested we do two choruses at the end instead of just one.” By then Hawkes had already come up with the song’s trademark keyboard lick.

“That was a lucky combination of finding the perfect sound for that little melody. And I have to admit, it happened partly because we made cassettes of all our rehearsals and every show we played. When I heard them over again, my style would start simplifying. I’d be saying, ‘Okay, it’s getting busy in here. Maybe I don’t need to play during that verse, and it’s more effective if I wait till the chorus’. That’s the drudge work of being in a band.”

There’s a lot of great insider information on the weekly downloadable content, as above, plus some truly excellent in-depth entries like the following:

Battle of the Lyrics
There’s a heated discussion raging on our message boards about certain lyrics used in Rock Band, and whether those jibe with the ones that are sung on the records. Most of the talk concerns Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” and whether Kurt Cobain sang “don’t know what it means” or “knows not what it means”. It’s true that Kurt sang both versions, though not necessarily at the points where the lyric sheet says. For what it’s worth, producer Butch Vig did a lot of cutting and pasting with Cobain’s vocals on that album—One rumor I’ve heard is that he sang “Here we are now, entertain us” only once; and that clip used in every chorus of the song. Sounds that way to these ears, but that’s one studio secret that may never be revealed.
Inside Rock Band’s Sonic Secrets
Even a seminal punk band like the Clash yielded some surprises. Even wonder why the drums sound so good on “I Fought the Law”? Because there’s two drummers on it (or more likely, drummer Topper Headon recorded his part twice)—something that became clear when Brosius picked the mix apart. Thus, the drum parts you play in Rock band are a composite of those two original drum tracks. The Spanish backup vocals that you’re used to hearing on the middle verse of “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” originally ran through the whole song; and the parts are still there on the tapes—You can hear a little more of the Spanish bits on Rock Band than you can on the record. And listen to the way the two guitar parts intertwine on the chorus—Play the song on expert and you’re doing guitar bits that Strummer and Jones had to work together to create.
Behind the Legend of Sailor Jerry
So why did Sailor Jerry wind up connected with Rock Band? Because sometimes the original is still the greatest. And there are real-life, tattooed rockers on the Harmonix staff who wouldn’t dream of getting inked with anybody else’s designs. When you think about old-school tattooing—the tough-guy imagery of anchors and skulls, inscribed hearts, tigers and dragons, and well-proportioned women—you’re thinking Sailor Jerry. Though Jerry himself (real name, Norman Collins) died in 1973, his designs are still worn around the world. And despite Jerry’s personal tastes, his images have become an essential part of rock’n’roll culture.

I can’t recommend the official Harmonix Rock Band Blog highly enough. This sort of authenticity and attention to detail is precisly why Harmonix has been so enormously successful with Guitar Hero 1, 2, and now Rock Band.

Long may we all rock.

Guitar Hero and Rock Revolution Join the Rock Band Party

Jeff Atwood — Fri, 30 May 2008 07:55:46 +0000

It was long rumored that Guitar Hero IV would include vocals and drums to compete with Rock Band. Well, now it’s official: we have Guitar Hero World Tour. The game was demonstrated for the first time at the All Things Digital 6 conference, with this unintenionally hilarious introduction from Kara Swisher:

Kotick: We have a new product coming out in the fall called Guitar Hero World Tour, which is the first time you’ll have multiple instruments — drums, mic, bass, a different guitar …

Swisher: It’s called Rock Band, I think.

Kotick: (pauses) We’re calling it Guitar Hero World Tour.

Heh. On to the demonstration. And yes, that is Tony Hawk on guitar!

It’s a little scary how exactly Guitar Hero World Tour copies Rock Band. Take a look at a still of the user interface captured from the video.

I’m actually fine with the blatant plagiarism, because I adore Rock Band (and its weekly downloadable content schedule). I can hardly bear to go back to just guitar these days when Rock Band offers so much: more instruments, far more songs, better presentation, smoother difficulty progression. The more Guitar Hero remolds itself to resemble Rock Band, the better, as far as I’m concerned!

But there is one problem — the drums.

The Guitar Hero drum arrangement, while cool, will almost certainly be incompatible with the current Rock Band drums. Which means fans of the genre are stuck with two different and incompatible drum sets cluttering up our houses! That sucks. Still, there are some cool features here, as documented in the promotional Guitar Hero World Tour drum video:

The drums are pressure sensitive, so the harder you hit them, the louder the drum sound in the game. (likely a software issue, as the piezo sensors in all electric drums are 99% the same.)
More realistic arrangement of the drums, with two cymbal pie slices mounted above.
It’s wireless!

I’m reasonably sure that existing Rock Band microphones and Rock Band / Guitar Hero guitars (at least on the Xbox 360) will be compatible. But it also looks like there will be a new fake plastic guitar design — probably as a result of the Gibson lawsuit against Activision. These will be “generic” unbranded guitars, no longer the Gibson Les Paul, Xplorer, or SG models of previous releases. They’ve been coy about releasing any details, but images captured from the Guitar Hero World Tour website and the Guitar Hero World Tour promotional trailer provide some clues:

These guitars are significantly larger, perhaps to mirror the the more realistic size of the Rock Band stratocasters.
Based on the white outline, I’m hoping these guitars will continue the Les Paul tradition of removable, customizable faceplates.
The first image also implies that there will be “solo” fret buttons, again aping the Rock Band stratocasters.

It’s no secret that I greatly prefer the Guitar Hero guitars; the Rock Band stratocasters have what I consider to be crippling flaws. I’m willing to give Activision the benefit of the doubt on the new hardware, even as I’ve resigned myself to the drum incompatibility.

Pricing information for Guitar Hero World Tour is as follows.

GH: World Tour Super Bundle (game, guitar, drums, mic)
Xbox360 / PS3 / Wii - $189.99
PS2 – $179.99

GH: World Tour Guitar Bundle (game, guitar)
Xbox360 / PS3 / Wii $99.99
PS2 – $89.99

GH: World Tour (game only)
Xbox360 / PS3 $59.99
Wii / PS2 $49.99

A bit more expensive than Rock Band at $169 and $159 respectively, particularly since the prices for the Rock Band bundles have dipped significantly since launch. But the drums and microphone are both wireless, which is a nice touch arguably worthy of the extra $20. Do note that the Wii version of Guitar Hero World Tour is confirmed to have downloadable content support, unlike the current Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band ports for that platform. As usual, I’d recommend avoiding the Playstation 2 version like the plague, unless you have absolutely no other way to play the game.

I will definitely be buying the Guitar Hero World Tour Super Bundle on the day of release. What can I say? If loving fake plastic rock is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

The introduction of drums and mic to the Guitar Hero franchise isn’t terribly surprising. But Konami — the great-granddaddy of the music rhythm genre — announcing Rock Revolution certainly was! Konami kicked off the entire genre outside the US with Drum Mania and Guitar Freaks. Those games never got any traction in the US, but are clear spiritual influences on Guitar Hero. So perhaps they’re entitled.

But Rock Revolution is sort of.. weird. It’s playable by a maximum of three players: bass, guitar, and drums. Don’t pass the mic, leave it on the table. And take a look at the oddball Rock Revolution drum set:

Just what the world needed — a third extra-freaky fake plastic drum set.

It doesn’t help that the game looks incredibly.. generic next to Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

I strongly doubt that vertical 2D fretboard UI is going to scale to even two players, much less three.

Unfortunately, all the songs in Rock Revolution are covers — and a good percentage of them have been previously featured in Guitar Hero or Rock Band anyway. This is a huge disappointment as the general trend in the genre has been toward more and more original masters. It feels like a giant step backwards.

On the whole, it’s difficult to get excited about Rock Revolution. The prospect of a third player in the “band” genre isn’t all that appealing. Here’s what I know about it so far that could set it apart from the competition:

Will have its own unique guitar controller. The five buttons have different colors than the ones we’re used to. Compatibility is unknown, but highly likely.
Drums have six oddly shaped, irregular surfaces (as seen above) plus the kick pedal.
The Wii version will allow using the Wii controls for “air drum” and “air guitar” play.
Like Guitar Hero World Tour, includes freeform modes that allow creating original tracks.
During drum play, there is no penalty for improvisation (aka extra notes) throughout the entire song.
Does not introduce the drum kick pedal until medium difficulty level.

I might pick up Rock Revolution cheaply at some later date after its release, and play it as a standalone guitar game; a few of the covers do appeal to me. But there’s no way I can deal with three fake plastic drum sets.

At this point, Harmonix silence on Rock Band 2 is positively deafening. I’m anxious to see what they have in store for us now that everyone else has played their cards. Remember, kids, competition is good!

Well, except for the three incompatible drum sets.

The Fake Plastic Rock Stage Experience

Jeff Atwood — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:02:36 +0000

In Equipping Your First Fake Plastic Rock Band I described the essential accessories for a first class Rock Band experience. Seriously, read it. You will want a lot of that stuff if you’re serious about Rock Band.

But what about the non-essentials? Like, say… a killer fake plastic rock stage experience?

That’s what I’m talking about.

The above picture was taken at Microsoft’s MIX 08 conference, where there was a small Rock Band tournament. The people playing are my ex-coworkers from Vertigo Software, including our esteemed CEO on lead guitar.

I’m not sure if you can make it out from the picture, but there are four screens:

Two displays at the foot of the stage for the guitarists and vocalist
One dedicated display for the drummer
One dedicated display for the audience

Let’s inventory the rest of the items we’ve got going on here:

Elevated stage
Tinsel curtain in the rear
Scaffolding and lights above the band (I assume synchronized to the music in some way)
At least five rotating ground lights

But there are a few notable items missing from the fake plastic rock stage experience, too — where are the strobe lights? Where’s the smoke machine? Well, we’re in luck. The Xbox 360 Rock Band Stage Kit from PDP includes exactly those items.

It’s not exactly clear how this stuff will work yet, but it’s intriguing that the strobe light looks like an Xbox controller. That means it’ll plug into the console just like a controller, too. Will the strobe somehow be synced to the music through the controller? Who knows? There’s been a lot of criticism of this kit because it’s 99 bucks, and so obviously over the top. But that’s exactly why it’s so awesome!

Of course, there’s an entire category of Lighting & Stage Effects at Guitar Center if you want to create a truly rocktacular stage presence:

The above scene is from the awesome but unfortunately short-lived series Freaks and Geeks. Highly recommended.

I’m still debating how much of this I want to try in our “boom boom” room. I’m looking for advice. If you’ve created anything like this at your place, or have any links to images of great fake plastic rock stage experiences, definitely add a comment!

Competitive Fake Plastic Rock

Jeff Atwood — Wed, 21 May 2008 03:22:34 +0000

Scorehero is generally regarded as the ultimate source for competitive Guitar Hero and Rock Band online. And that’s in addition to the built-in online leaderboards in the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the games.

But worldwide competition can be a little.. intimidating. Did you know that someone recently full-comboed Guitar Hero I and II? That means they played every single note perfectly in every single song in the game, including bonus tracks, on Expert difficulty!

The mind boggles.

I’m a decent Expert guitar player, but I’m nowhere near good enough to compete with that.

If you’re looking for something a wee bit less intense, check out Angry Edison.

We host on-line bracket tournaments for Guitar Hero 3. The tournaments are completely free and open to all game consoles that can play on-line. The tournaments feature automatic scoring, enforced skill levels, and short play times amongst other things.

Whether you’re a pro that plays all day long, or a casual player that can only play a bit each night, the tournaments here will fit your schedule and your skill. Our tournaments are played for fun, but we do have prize tournaments most weeks where the winner gets a nice little prize.

They also have a fairly nice walkthrough of creating stickers for your guitar, as well as a link to the Flickr Guitar Hero designs group for showing off your work.

I do wonder, however, why they don’t support Rock Band — it’s very difficult for me to go back to Guitar Hero at this point.

The Elusive Gold Stars

Jeff Atwood — Mon, 19 May 2008 04:42:56 +0000

The scoring method for Guitar Hero and Rock Band is fairly similar — from 1 to 5 stars on each song depending on how high your score is. The scoring in Rock Band is more forgiving, however:

In Rock Band, it’s possible (barely!) to get a 2-star score and complete the song, which I’ve never seen in all my years of Guitar Hero play. In Guitar Hero, 3 stars is the minimum to pass, so the score range is effectively one to three stars.
In Rock Band, playing a chord or triplet counts as 2 or 3 notes respectively toward your streak multiplier, so it’s faster to build streaks up.

But there is something beyond 5 stars, something even more impressive:

Five gold stars!

How can you achieve five gold stars on a song in Rock Band?

Everyone playing must be on the “Expert” skill level. It is not possible to get gold stars on any other difficulty even if you play the entire song perfectly.
Obtain a score somewhere between 1.5 and 2.0 times the 5 star score.

As a general rule of thumb, don’t expect to get 5 gold stars unless everyone in the band scores well above 95 percent on the song and uses overdrive together effectively to maximize their score. Good use of overdrive is essential to achieving the highest possible score and bumping you into 5 gold star territory.

The exact five gold star cutoff value varies by instrument and composition of the band:

solo guitar/bass requires approximately 1.52 x the 5 star score. See detailed list.
solo drums requires approximately 1.45 x the 5 star score. See detailed list.
solo vocals requires approximately 1.52 x the 5 star score. See detailed list.

Combining instruments makes the gold star cutoff even harder to achieve, because the score values increase greatly through simultaneous band overdrive multipliers. For Guitar + Drums, it’s 1.58 x, for Guitar + Bass + Drums, it’s 1.67 x. With a full band, it’s closer to 2 x!

Be careful, though: for a handful of songs, it is mathematically impossible to achieve 5 gold stars.

In Guitar Hero, gold stars are much, much simpler — they simply mean that you hit every note in the song. This is called 100% (hundred percenting) the song and you can do it on any difficulty.

Note that 100% is not the same as a full combo. To achieve a full combo, you must hit every note and avoid playing any extra notes. It is possible to get 3, 4, or 5 gold stars by playing “extra” notes while still not missing any of the notes in the song chart. Strange but true.

Good luck and happy gold-starring!