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:

1. 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!
2. Improved (but still 100% compatible) versions of the guitar and drums will be released with Rock Band 2. Lots of room for improvement here!
3. 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.

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:

1. 29 Fingers
2. Say it Aint So
3. In Bloom
4. I Think I’m Paranoid
5. The Time we had
6. Mississippi Queen
7. Here It Goes Again
8. Creep
9. Blood Doll
10. Wave of Mutilation
11. Should I Stay or Should I Go
12. Maps
13. Gimme Shelter
14. Brainpower
15. Sabotage
16. Blitzkrieg Bop
17. Celebrity Skin
18. I’m So Sick
19. When We Were Young
20. Black Hole Sun
21. Wanted Dead or Alive
22. Learn to Fly
23. Seven
24. Orange Crush
25. Main Offender
26. The Hand That Feeds
27. Day Late, Dollar Short
28. Epic
29. Suffragette City
30. Ballroom Blitz
31. Dead On Arrival
32. Pleasure
33. Train Kept a Rollin
34. Are You Gonna Be My Girl
35. Paranoid
36. Timmy & the Lords of the Underworld
37. Welcome Home
38. Go With The Flow
39. Dani California
40. Nightmare
41. Don’t Fear the Reaper
42. Reptilia
43. Electric Version
44. Vasoline
45. Detroit Rock City
46. Can’t Let Go
47. Next to You
48. Cherub Rock
49. Tom Sawyer
50. Enter Sandman
51. Green Grass and High Tides
52. Outside
53. Highway Star
54. Foreplay/Long Time
55. Flirtin With Disaster
56. I Get By
57. Run To The Hills
58. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

There are two sound activated modes:

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

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

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

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

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.

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!