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.

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:

1. 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.)
2. More realistic arrangement of the drums, with two cymbal pie slices mounted above.
3. 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:

1. These guitars are significantly larger, perhaps to mirror the the more realistic size of the Rock Band stratocasters.
2. Based on the white outline, I’m hoping these guitars will continue the Les Paul tradition of removable, customizable faceplates.
3. 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:

1. 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.
2. Drums have six oddly shaped, irregular surfaces (as seen above) plus the kick pedal.
3. The Wii version will allow using the Wii controls for “air drum” and “air guitar” play.
4. Like Guitar Hero World Tour, includes freeform modes that allow creating original tracks.
5. During drum play, there is no penalty for improvisation (aka extra notes) throughout the entire song.
6. 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.

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!

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 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:

1. 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.
2. 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?

1. 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.
2. 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:

1. solo guitar/bass requires approximately 1.52 x the 5 star score. See detailed list.
2. solo drums requires approximately 1.45 x the 5 star score. See detailed list.
3. 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!