Rock Band 3 - Introduction

Figure 1: Old 5 button guitar

Rock Band 3, for those of you not familiar with it, is one of many games in the music games genre.  In this genre of game the player needs to perform movements or press buttons in time with on screen sequences that correlate to the beat or rhythm of the music being played.  Another distinguishing feature of most of these games is the use of a non-standard input such as a dance mat, guitar, keyboard, etc.

In most music games these non-standard controllers are just a substitute for the standard controller and each movement you make must correlate to a specific button on the standard controller.  As you can imagine this is a little limiting for simulating real musical instruments which have more variation in movement.

So, for example the guitar controllers used in these games (until now) have had five buttons on the neck of the guitar and a single switch/button in place of the strings used for strumming/picking (figure 1).  As you can also imagine, learning anything other than rhythm from these controllers is pretty much a lost cause.

Figure 2: Pro instruments

That's where Rock Band 3's "Pro Mode" is different. In this mode you can break through the six button barrier and use controllers/instruments that have more buttons than the standard controller (figure 2)  You can even use REAL instruments assuming they have MIDI output.  Consequently Rock Band 3 can actually be used as a teaching instrument for learning how to play a real musical instrument and has modes of game play that are designed specifically for this purpose.

Which leads us to the meat of this "project".  Over the coming months I'll be using this blog as a journal to document my progress learning to play guitar using Rock Band 3 and the Wireless Fender Mustang  Pro Guitar by Mad Catz.  In the next entry I'll describe the guitar/controller in more detail and explain how it's used in game play.