Cataloggol

For Rock Band 3 on the Xbox 360, a GameFAQs Q&A question titled 'Can you use a real guitar for Pro Mode?' Rock Band 5 Promotional Artwork. NOTE: This is my personal FurSub/Futa fan-fiction writing for Rock Band 6, there are currently publicly announced plans for a Rock Band 5. Rock Band 5 is a not a real video game that has no relation to the 2015 music rhythm game smasher, Rock Band 4. The game isn't developed at all by Harmonix Music Studios.

Ars at E3 2015

When Harmonix got its start nearly two decades ago, it didn't focus on making games where you slavishly tapped pre-set buttons on a plastic controller to the beat of a song. No, early Harmonix was focused on tools that let you actually make beautiful music, without all the difficult technical challenges that are usually needed to become a virtuoso with a real instrument (see this video for more on that early Harmonix vision).

That history shines through in what is probably Rock Band 4's most interesting new feature, one that does away with the now-familiar track of 'note gems'—it allows you to really rock out your own way. More than anything else in the game, guitar solos have the potential to make Rock Band 4 relevant again to players who feel like they overloaded on the whole rhythm game concept years ago.

When guitar solos showed up in old Rock Band games, they just threw a lot of guitar notes at you at once. Rock Band 4's guitar solos actually put the player in control of the music. Strumming on the controller while holding any single fret or combination of frets during these solo sections will play a distinct note or a short, sampled guitar lick, sort of like a MIDI controller on the PC. Harmonix has worked to make sure those notes and samples are in tune and appropriate to the chords in the current section of the song, changing every bar or so to keep up with the backing track.

This makes it nearly impossible for your solo to sound really bad, even if you just flail away randomly. For those paying attention, though, some practice will allow you to pick out which frets activate which sounds and crank out a custom solo that suits your mood. Somewhere in the middle, you can pick out the general rhythm and tone you think would sound good at any one point and play accordingly, letting the game do the hard work of making you feel like a guitar virtuoso. I tried all of these methods at a recent hands-on demo of the game, and came away convinced that I am secretly a guitar god, even though rationally I know I can barely finger three chords in real life.

There are also more opportunities for customization than just picking frets. Holding down the strummer will bend those notes and samples slightly, while tilting the guitar produces feedback, as if you were holding a real electric guitar up to an amp. If you want to look really cool, you can let go of the strummer and start finger tapping out the solo by holding down a low fret. If you'd rather sound raw, hold down all five frets and strum away to generate some discordant noise.

While you can do whatever you want in these sections, Harmonix has included optional guides to the note track that suggest how to play. The game may ask you to hold a sustained note for a bar or two, for instance, or strum along at eighth or sixteenth note speed, or use the set of five high frets down near the bottom of the controller rather than the standard low frets you always use. You can ignore these suggestions and play whatever solo you want, but your score will suffer for it.

For those who love this type of freestyling, there's an entire solo mode where you can just jam along for the entire song. If you don't like it, you can still turn it off and go back to the standard 'authored' solos like in older Rock Band games.

New instruments, similar gameplay

At our demo event, Harmonix finally confirmed that old instruments will work on the new-generation consoles from the same manufacturer (though wireless Xbox 360 instruments will need a dongle to work on the Xbox One). Publisher MadCatz will be releasing a new line of plastic instruments as well, with slight improvements from what came before them. These weren't available at our demo event, but MadCatz's Alex Verrey talked up their supposed benefits while we were there.

The Rock Band 4 guitars get new frets with positive force actuation, which means both quieter play and that players 'get a great tactile feedback when you're clicking them,' according to Verrey. The strum bar is still a contactless switch, Verrey said—while some people may prefer Guitar Hero's microswtich-equipped strummer, that can be less reliable. 'They often tap out at about 100,000 presses,' Verrey said of the old Guitar Hero controllers, compared to millions of strums for the new Rock Band 4 controllers. The new guitars also take advantage of a digital accelerometer that should make tilting the guitar to activate score multipliers and such 'as close to faultless as it can be,' Verrey said.

The changes to other instruments are less dramatic. The new drums have reinforced pads, with cushioning that prevents the pitting and dimples that could appear when you hit older pads very hard, Verrey said. The new drum pedals are reinforced with a design that's harder to break, and the kit now allows for a dual drum-pedal setup out of the box.

As for the microphone, it's been given a different shape and a bit more heft, so it no longer feels like a plastic toy. That mic now samples voices at 16-bit, 48Khz rate (the highest that the consoles can handle via USB, Verrey said) and more importantly, it allows for much louder singing than older mics. You can yell as loud as you want into these new microphones without any of the clipping or distortion you'd see with older hardware, Verrery said, leading to more accurate vocal reproduction and scoring in the game.

That will be important for Rock Band 4's new vocal scoring feature, which allows you to earn points for singing in harmony with the song itself, matching notes in ear-pleasing fifths and sevenths to the backgrounds chords. These eligible notes are indicated with subtle lines on the on-screen vocal track. While I found I couldn't hit them reliably, I'd sometimes get lucky and snap my vocal performance to those positions by accident as I struggled to find the real note.

Drum play is pretty much identical to that in old Rock Band games, except when it comes to those improvised 'drum fills' that activate your score multiplier. Harmonix says players would often freeze up and not know what to do during those wide-open sections. So for Rock Band 4, these sections have been replaced with a randomized set of drum fills designed to keep the beat while being interesting. This adds a little bit of variation to each playthrough, but it felt like a step back for someone like me, who loved just pounding away during those sections.

Guitar Rock Band 4

Real Guitar Rock Band 4 Band In A Box

My favorite new feature, though, is the ability to pick songs using a band voting system during a set. Rather than being kicked back to a huge list of available tunes, players can now register a preference for things like 'a song from the 1980s' or 'a Who song' or 'a song that slows things down' during slow moments, right from the gameplay interface. The game then picks your next track based on the winning vote, without slowing down the rocking, a feature that will come in very handy at parties.

Rock Band 4 Real Guitar

For the most part, Rock Band 4 will just be more of the same old Rock Band, right down to your old downloaded songs and instruments. For those who want to live out their dreams of shredding a real guitar solo, though, it could be much more than that.