Rock Band

[Lantien]

Yep, Fender Stratocaster is still busted. Instead of hand fixing it, I'm tempted to just putting up the money for the deposit and having EA ship in the replacement Fender.  If at least just to know if the problem is related to a version of the Fender Stratocasters or not.  Also, I'm concerned if the drum is starting to fall apart too.  So far it's holding up....

I can't verify our drum status firsthand; I'm asking how they're holding up from my roommate, because I'm horrible on the drums.  Like painfully inept. There's definitely a line between people who can pick up at medium, and who needs to start at easy to get things down.  Sadly, I'm in the latter category.

Our current Band World Tour setup is:

Roommate 1: Medium Drums, some Medium vocals, hard/medium guitar/bass
Roommate 2: Medium Vocals, Easy/Medium drums, Easy/Medium Guitar/Bass
Roommate 3: Hard/Medium Bass/Guitar, some Medium vocals, no drum Experience
Roommate 4: Expert/Hard Guitar Bass, some Medium Vocals, no drum Experience

It's not a horrible lineup, we can get through things at a decent crawl, averaging 4 stars.  5 stars on songs the vocalist can nail, 3 stars on songs foreign to the vocalist, with some downwards drag in there for songs with really hard baselines (Foreplay/Long Time), or complicated drums.

For songs we're really solid on, we time our Overdrive/Star Power off the drummer, since he has the least flexible ability to engage it. Usually the guitarist follows his lead, and the bassist follows the Guitarist's lead. If the drummer has no saved Overdrive, then we'll engage it off the vocalist. Doing that ensures you have runs of 6x Star power. Have a guitarist with 4x or a bassist with 6x already, and you will see your stars rapidly fill up.  Even if I know I'm not at 4x, I'll still follow up other people's Overdrive, since I generally can catch up, and other people might already be at max bonus, and the whole group will benefit.

For a shakier song, I'll save the overdrive for when someone is about to fail out.  While it's much more satisfying to save someone (Oh yeah, when someone fails, the band doesn't totally crash at that point.  Instead that player's track is muted, and someone will have to engage Overdrive to "bring them back".  You can only do this 3 times per player until they're out for good.  Failure to bring someone back means the Rock meter slowly goes down until you get to 0, at which time the entire band fails), it makes more sense to use it at the point that they're beginning to fail out.  Overdrive will then have them quickly move back up to the green zone.

Really, since the guitarist and bassist can kick in Overdrive whenever they please, they have the most responsibility to watch the rock meter, to see if people are failing, or to add their Overdrive to others.

So we're early on in BWT, just starting out on the first tour bus.  Then we had a roommate's girlfriend show up. We knew she was a solid bassist, who could play most basslines on medium.  What we didn't know is that she also has had formal voice training...

As soon as we had her sing Say it ain't so, and realized that she was phenominally good, we quickly scrambled to press her into service. Her only limiting factor was that her background of rock and roll was limited, so she had strong knowledge of about 7-8 songs.

Then we got to Learn to Fly, and the drummer wanted to try it.  So we swapped her to play drums.  The bassist and I swapped a concerned look.  We then swapped many looks when by sheer force of will, on a song she's never tried before, did a passable job on Medium, never even being in danger of failing out.  She's basically some sort of musical freak of nature.

After all that, we advanced greatly, moving up past the Roadie challenge. Just a fantastically fun night. I know we're not going to ever really compete for the top tiers of scoring, but who cares?  4 Whiskey Grid is coming to a town near you... and hey, we're in the top 200 of Roxanne!  We're up and comers!

[HAMMER FRENZY]

I played some of this at Schild's house this weekend and I am pretty unimpressed. I think that the idea is really neat but in execution it just wasn't much fun. I played all the instruments and did spend most of my time with vocals and I found it way too easy to sing and play expert vocals. It was my first time playing and any song I actually knew I could do expert vocals on. It was just kinda wacky. The guitar is wonky as hell. It really is just a god awful guitar, and the guitar note charts/tab is just crappy. I found myself just wondering, "what the fuck are these guys thinking?" It was not a difficulty thing either, they are just boring charts. The drums on the other hand were pretty neat, but I thought the set is kinda flimsy and way too light. I also think that it being a straight line set up kinda kills the effect for me. the set kept sliding around a lot too, so we had to set up big water jugs behind it. All in all, I would rather play Guitar Hero any day of the week. But I have to admit, after I had some booze in me, the game was much funner. It shouldn't take me being drunk to enjoy myself though.

[Lantien]

Hmm, I have to admit I came away with a totally different experience. With respect to vocalists, even when it was songs that people knew really well, people could still easily fail out of them; maybe it's a pitch thing?

The guitar will be one of those holy war things that people are going to back and forth on. I played about 1/3 of the solo guitar tour with the stratocaster, and after a bit of a training period, I can totally see why people can make a case for the stratocaster. There's not the reassuring clicking noise as verification of note played like with the Red Octane guitars. However with a functioning (the important part) stratocaster it takes less effort to strum, making some of the trickier alt-strum areas easier to do. In addition, you can rack up huge points with the solo buttons at the Big Rock Ending sections. I'll admit though, there's a bit of re-learning that has to occur before the Stratocaster makes sense.  Plus it uh, needs to actually work.

As for the charts, I got mixed feelings.  I'm almost glad the charts are less strenuous because I'm following everyone elses's abilities/Overdrive meter because I have the most flexibility to bail people out. Because of that, I've noticed I'm missing a lot of notes that playing by myself, I probably would not have missed. Plus when you're playing over the din of vocals and the sounds of drum hitting pads, I find myself slightly off on the rhythm of the song.

And yeah, people have uniformly complained about the drums sliding all over the place. The usual suggestion is to get carpet samples.

[caladein]

Hammer's experience on Vocals seems pretty universal, the songs that people know are getting slammed on Expert. Familiar song + (any) vocal training shouldn't be difficult on Expert just because you don't have that abstraction jump like you do from Real Guitar to GH/RB. The rap parts are tougher just because it falls back to phoneme detection versus pitch and that's where one might have trouble keeping up.

Overall, it seems like Vocals "work" but I can't help but get into a schild-like difficulty rant. Humming = CAL SMASH, but that gets the job done a lot of the time simply because RB doesn't really do phoneme and pitch detection at the same time. That said, while you can't fix "boring charts", I can tell my friend to grow some balls and start singing when I'm on bass or some such.

[WayAbvPar]

I am enjoying the game, at least when I can play it. The drum kick pedal gave out the first day. Saturday, the disc stopped loading (all my other 360 games work fine still). Best Buy doesn't have any replacements. I tried to set up an express RMA through EA, but I never got confirmation that my credit card transaction went through. I started a support ticket at 7:04 PM on Friday for the kick pedal. As of now (10:23 AM, Monday), there has been no reply. Nice fucking customer service, EA. God they suck so much cock.

[Lantien]

I am enjoying the game, at least when I can play it. The drum kick pedal gave out the first day. Saturday, the disc stopped loading (all my other 360 games work fine still). Best Buy doesn't have any replacements. I tried to set up an express RMA through EA, but I never got confirmation that my credit card transaction went through. I started a support ticket at 7:04 PM on Friday for the kick pedal. As of now (10:23 AM, Monday), there has been no reply. Nice fucking customer service, EA. God they suck so much cock.

Yeah, I finally sucked it up and sent in the express RMA for my Stratocaster.  Might as well give it a good faith shot.  If they still have failure problems, I'll go ahead and start opening the Strat up.

BTW, I didn't bother calling.  I went instead straight to http://support.ea.com/cgi-bin/ea.cfg/php/enduser/rockband.php You're going to have to register a EA account, so if you're deathly opposed to that... yeah, call it in. I also have not checked to see the shipping progress yet, so yeah, I'm not going to go out on a limb and say this is the way to go just yet.

Played a bit more with my friends.  We're getting the hang of things a bit better, we're starting to pick safer songs and averaging 4 stars on a half medium/half hard setup.  I noticed with today's vocalist, she tends to stray from the established vocal patterns, which hurts her score.  For all you wannabe singers, just remember this isn't American Idol; re-interpreting a song on the fly won't get you anywhere. Unfortunately the guy in our band who knows the songs the best has enough on his plate playing bass. I really want my bandmates to learn "Time we had" though.  That's a very enjoyable (although really easy) song.

[OcellotJenkins]

Some guy on the official tech forums:

Please keep us informed on the status of your replacement guitar, as well as its functionality. As we speak, a class action law suit is being drafted over this case and will be filed on January 20th, the day after launch day warranties expire. Hopefully the papers will be scrapped in the event a redesign takes place; however, should replacement guitars have the same problem our case will be infallible.

lol

[caladein]

Are the warrenties on the replacement guitars refreshing? or is it always off date-of-purchase?

Also, lawl at a class-action. Unless the guitars all explode on the date on expiry or they start killing people I just don't see where it could go.

[MrHat]

I want this game but have already spent to much on other people for the holidays.

Edit to add an attempt at a bit of content:

Carrie Brownstein comments on Rock Band vs. Real Band  Nice enough read. Although, I'd prefer less writey, more music plz.

[Jerrith]

My replacement guitar arrived yesterday, and I played a bunch with it last night.  Hooked it up, and tried it:  Immediately FC'ed (100%, no streak break) a 3rd or 4th tier song on expert that I hadn't before.  Had great time with it for the rest of the night.  I wish this was the guitar that had been in the box at release.  If you're having trouble with your guitar, I highly recommend getting it replaced. 

[schild]

Is the new guitar gummy on the downstring. And does it click?

If not, it's not fixed.

[Tairnyn]

In other news, I had a friend's 360 for the night and the wife wanted to try out Rock Band for herself. She's now in love with playing the guitar and wants me to buy a 360 and the game. <3

[Phildo]

I got to play this in front of about 30 people on a stage at my school yesterday.  It was fun because both of the groups before mine failed on easy songs, while we rocked Weezer hard.  I got a free T-Shirt for my troubles.

God, I am so ashamed!

[schild]

Goddamn your school is full of dorks.

[cmlancas]

More like full of  . And maybe some  . Who would go to a rock band concert anyway?

Just kidding, I'm sure it was loads of fun! 

[Phildo]

They have a truck that tey drive around to different college campuses to set up demos.  They happened to be here on a lunch break, so there were a lot of people just milling around who decided to check out where the awful singing was coming from.

[WayAbvPar]

So- nearly 8 days after starting an RMA ticket with the geniuses at EA, I finally got a response. As I suspected, my RMA claim had not gone through. Glad I had to wait over a fucking week to find this out. Even better- when I click the link to update my ticket, I get this-

Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Are you fucking kidding me? I think I am going to take this piece of shit back and wait for a reengineered model or something. Giving EA any money ever again makes me want to punch myself in the balls.

Rare photo of EA customer service agent at work-

[Margalis]

I've heard about so many reliability problems there is no way I'm getting this. I don't play console games so I can struggle with faulty hardware and constantly return shit.

[Lantien]

RMAed on Tuesday, online.  Got guitar Friday night.  Guitar so far is still working, knocking so so much on wood.

The Fender is just a totally different animal from the Guitar Hero guitars. Here's how I compare the two

Guitar Hero guitar:
- Clacky Microswitches tell you when you've sucessfully strummed.
- Raised buttons give you a better idea of exactly where your fingers are.
- Wireless++
- Somewhat less anal Star Power/Overdrive initiation.
- The most effective way to downstrum on the Les Paul is to put my thumb on the center of the strumbar. A side effect is that my inner forearm sometimes scrapes against the top of the guitar.

Fender Advantage:
- The key to the strum bar is figuring out how much pressure you need to exert for a successful strum. It's less than the Guitar Hero guitars. This leads to somewhat quicker double strumming if you play your cards right. Part of me also is guessing that the Fender needs to be calibrated more than the Guitar Hero guitars.
- The recessed buttons make it easier to move your fingers over for fast sections that may require it.
- The solo buttons at the bottom really can spike up your Big Rock Ending score.
- The most effective way for me to downstrum on the Fender is to put my thumb on the tail end of the Fender strumbar. A side effect is that my inner forearm sometimes scrapes against the top of the guitar.

Yeah, it's a real dissapointment that Rock Band has shoddy components out of the gate. For a game this expensive, you really needed to have everything working out of the gate. I was lucky, I got to play more than a few times on demos that weren't totally broken. The game pretty much can sell itself if it didn't have so many freaking broken components.

Played a bit more last night, got to the PR firm in Band World Tour. At this point, all we need to do now is pick up stars to get to the Hall of Fame. At this point, we're realizing if we want to maximize stars, we go with:

Vocals: Medium/Hard
Bass: Medium, Hard on an easy song
Drums: Medium
Guitar: Hard, Expert on an easy song

Right now the limiting factor on moving up to a higher difficulty (we've already capped the fans) is the drummer. He's trying to get up to speed as fast as possible, but the upper difficulty drum songs on medium he can't finish yet (like Green Grass and High Tides). I've tried drumming once or twice in practice, but I get too frustrated and give up.  I just need to just tear through the solo tours.

We had two friends pop on over to check out Rock Band.  One guy sang, doing a hilarious version of Timmy! Overall they seemed really impressed with Rock Band, although the sticker shock surprised them.

As for Phildo's experience, lemme clarify and explain how they did things around the University of Washington.  They basically rolled in a huge trailer into the lawn of the student union.  The trailer basically expanded into a mini stage, with a main section with a big screen to play on, with sound on speakers so everyone around could here it.  There were also 3 smaller units to the side where there was a smaller screen that people played on, and sound was limited to headphones. Basically your crowd is made up of gawkers and fanboys. In addition, one of the booth girls did a way too accomplished spin around one of the bracing poles while she was killing time, making me raise an eyebrow. UW apparently wasn't prepared for the noise, so they limited performances on the main screen/speakers only during the time in between classes.

[Morfiend]

Just spent the later part of the evening playing guitar hero with my girlfriend, and she is now in love and wants me to buy Rock Band. I was all set to go out and get it tomorrow but now reading about all the problems, I'm scared.

Is there any thing I can do to make sure the Guitar works right from purchase?

[Lantien]

Just spent the later part of the evening playing guitar hero with my girlfriend, and she is now in love and wants me to buy Rock Band. I was all set to go out and get it tomorrow but now reading about all the problems, I'm scared.

Is there any thing I can do to make sure the Guitar works right from purchase?

You really need to ask yourself two questions:

1) Do you own a PS3 only?  If so, you can buy yourself some time because as it stands right now for the PS3 units (to the best of my knowledge), GH3 guitars don't work with Rock Band.  This means if your girlfriend wanted to play guitar/bass, you're out of luck until either Rock Band patches in the right compatibility, or Rock Band sells individual guitars.  Of course, if the plan is to have the other person drum instead or something, back to square one.

2) People have pretty much cited that you want to be on the lookout for a specific build date; that's the build date with the most defective units.  Unfortunately, doing a quick scan of various forums, I can't really find the specific date. As I recall, the newest newest build date works just great, but I don't remember what that date is, sorry.

[Morfiend]

So I went to Best Buy to have a look at it. They didnt have any in stock, nether did Toys R Us or Gamestop. Ok, now I have to have it, cause I cant. Managed to pick up the last one at my local Target. Played it all day today and had a blast.

The guitar feels a lot more chinky than the GH3 one, the strum bar is sort of lose, and there is a screw or some thing inside the guitar rattling around. But, I really like the feel of it better, and I like the recessed buttons.

Drums are hard.

[Tairnyn]

I really enjoy watching someone new to drums give it a shot. The first time through is always a disaster but after a few Starter songs on Easy anyone with a sense of rhythm starts to find their groove and enjoy it. The biggest challenge for most is learning to use the kick drum foot independently of the hand movements.

I've finally reached a point at which I can play Normal drums on any song and Hard on some of the really easy ones. I can't even begin to imagine the zen-like state one would need to play on Hard/Expert. I still get a rush when I get through Enter Sandman on Normal with all the crazy offbeat snares at the end. My inability to play Hard drums is our band's limiting factor at this point, although you can complete the game on Normal so it's more a matter of mastery than anything else at this point.

I have gained an immense respect for drummers now and can't help but listen to the drum line on every song I hear and marvel at the coordination required.

[Bokonon]

The guitar feels a lot more chinky than the GH3 one, the strum bar is sort of lose, and there is a screw or some thing inside the guitar rattling around. But, I really like the feel of it better, and I like the recessed buttons.

Drums are hard.

The strum bar requires less pressure to trigger, and doesn't have a click, which can make it a bit more challenging to find its feel. The rattling sound is supposedly (from folks opening things up) part of the star power overdrive trigger mechanism.

My replacement feels much more sensitive in the strumbar. I need to get more use in. I don't have the rattle, but the star power is a little harder to engage than my broken guitar.

[Ookii]

Our Drum Pedal broke last night, it looks like this (not my pic)



I got that picture from a thread where it happened to some other random guy and he fixed it by screwing in four pieces of metal:



Something I will not be doing for it is not my Rock Band, but I would highly suggest something of the sort for anyone who doesn't want their Drum Pedal to snap in half.

http://rockband.scorehero.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1579

[Ragnoros]

Well it will be two weeks on Tuesday and they STILL have not shipped me a replacement guitar. I think I will go to Sears and try and take this MOFO back. Cause this shit is retarded.

[Lantien]

Got my replacement last Friday night.  Guitar seems to be working just fine. I got lucky in the process (so far) I guess.

Morfiend: if you're playing Band World Tour, I'd strongly suggest that you take your created character and play through the solo tour up until the songs really start to overwhelm you. Band World Tour on mystery setlists is set up so that it only uses songs that your band leader has unlocked. If you don't play through the solo tour, it only uses songs from the first tier of difficulty. On the flip side, if you unlock too many songs, you could very easily have on a randomly selected setlist a song that's fairly difficult, like Highway Star.  I unlocked the entire setlist, and our drummer visibly shudders when Green Grass and High Tides pops up.

Penny-Arcade's Tycho has an interesting viewpoint on the different guitars:

A good example of this playing out is in the guitars for Guitar Hero and Rock Band. When the Rock Band guitar is working, I vastly prefer it: its size and shape are much closer to electric guitars I have played, and the strum bar is thick at the outer edge to be gripped like a pick. Its operation is largely silent, without the characteristic click of a microswitch, designed (I am sure) explicitly to be quiet. Some people love that click, though - it means precision - and for the player who craves that fifth star, there is no higher virtue. Stars in single player are, for me, irrelevant. I'm sure this makes me a scoundrel. I only care about stars in co-operative multiplayer, where I see them as an index of our indomitable band spirit. I want a measurement of our unity. I'm playing the same game for an entirely different purpose. I wouldn't notice if it did click. When the song begins, I enter a trance.

That's a pretty serious distinction - people who play games in order to excel at them, and those who play games as a conduit to fantasy - and its only one axis of the diagram.

[Margalis]

Highway Star is an awesome song. That whole album (Machine Head) is awesome.

Too bad Rock Band doesn't come with a keyboard because Pictures of Home would be great fun.

[Azazel]

Agreed. Between that and Smoke on the Water, it's Deep Purple's finest moment. They should DLC the whole album. For both GH3 and RB.

[Lantien]

I was trying to think of a list of songs I'd love to see from the original GH1, GH2, and Rocks the 80s list (all songlists from when Harmonix was still working with Red Octane, so they would presumably have an idea of the song charts). It's not quite as far fetched as you think, because Rock Band has upcoming DLC using a song from GH2 (War Pigs), and they have DLC already based off one of the Rocks the 80s tracks (Synchronicity II).

The realistic constraints would be that there couldn't be any pure instrumental songs (so no YYZ, no Spanish Castle Magic), and no songs done by groups that have tie ins with Featured GH3 artists (No Poison, no Brett Michaels band (haha), no GnR, no Rage against the Machine).

After trying to construct a song list of songs I would want, I basically realized it would be easier to list songs I wouldn't want. I could especially see a huge market for the lower tiered songs, as just fun for everyone.

I'm looking really forward to the next set of announced DLC.  I haven't picked up any of the Bowie songs yet, and I'm not sure I really want to grab any of the Sabbath songs.  On the other hand, we're probably going to get the entire punk pack, and invariably all the songs from the 18th release set (I'm a sucker for the Pretenders). 

[Azazel]

I'd definately get the Sabbath pack, if it were performed by, you know, Sabbath. As it is, maybe at best. I don't know that there would by necessarily be anything preventing GNR or RATM songs being included in RB DLC, even with Slash and Morello's involvement in GH3. Last time I looked, RATM was defunct, and I'm not even sure that Slash has much say in anything to do with GNR song licencing anymore since Axl seems to own the band.

I'm not real impressed with any of the DLC for any of these games at this point...

[Lantien]

Sabbath's main problem is that they have no master tracks left. Apparently studios back in the day didn't care so much about master tracks, and the master tracks were disposed of. As such, they had to be remade with cover artists to get it into Rock Band/Guitar Hero, or they have the artist go back and re-record the song, like Guitar Hero 3 had happen with In Living Color's "Cult of Personality" and The Sex Pistol's "Anarchy in the UK".

As for GnR and RaTM:

In fact, it was barely an issue at all. According to Brosius, there were only one or two instances where “Rock Band” couldn’t get a song due to “Guitar Hero III.” “There were cases where if one company did a special deal where an artist was a spokesperson for their game, it would be inappropriate for them to be in the other game,” he said, without naming specifics. “There was a case early on [involving] a deal with a record label where a song was exclusive to one game or the other. But of all the songs, there were only like two cases, and it’s a resolved thing. It doesn’t really happen any more, and that’s how we want it. We don’t want to close things off and try to take control of something. As long as the bands are cool with having their song on both games, we’re cool with it too.”

As for the DLC, at my place the Police pack was well received, Roxanne and Can't Stand Losing You especially.  My Sharona also is fairly popular (although the guitar solo at the end is somewhat tricky).

Edit: decided to clean up the URL.

[Bokonon]

Sabbath's main problem is that they have no master tracks left. Apparently studios back in the day didn't care so much about master tracks, and the master tracks were disposed of. As such, they had to be remade with cover artists to get it into Rock Band/Guitar Hero, or they have the artist go back and re-record the song, like Guitar Hero 3 had happen with In Living Color's "Cult of Personality" and The Sex Pistol's "Anarchy in the UK".

As for GnR and RaTM:

http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2007/11/05/rock-band-audio-director-on-master-tapes-bumping-into-guitar-hero-iii-and-dlc-part-2-of-2/#more-1520

In fact, it was barely an issue at all. According to Brosius, there were only one or two instances where “Rock Band” couldn’t get a song due to “Guitar Hero III.” “There were cases where if one company did a special deal where an artist was a spokesperson for their game, it would be inappropriate for them to be in the other game,” he said, without naming specifics. “There was a case early on [involving] a deal with a record label where a song was exclusive to one game or the other. But of all the songs, there were only like two cases, and it’s a resolved thing. It doesn’t really happen any more, and that’s how we want it. We don’t want to close things off and try to take control of something. As long as the bands are cool with having their song on both games, we’re cool with it too.”

As for the DLC, at my place the Police pack was well received, Roxanne and Can't Stand Losing You especially.  My Sharona also is fairly popular (although the guitar solo at the end is somewhat tricky).

In Living Color: Wayans Brothers sketch comedy on Fox in the late 80s, early 90s.
Living Colour: Band that wrote and played Cult of Personality

You know, having never really understood/listened to My Sharona's lyrics, I never knew how dirty that song was.

[Morfiend]

Maybe I'm just blind, but after a brief check, I couldnt find anywhere that it listed DLC for Rock Band. Little help?

[OcellotJenkins]

Maybe I'm just blind, but after a brief check, I couldnt find anywhere that it listed DLC for Rock Band. Little help?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=rock+band+dlc&btnG=Google+Search