Guitar Hero IV Adds Drums, Vocals, Create A Song

Next Week On Rock Band: Classic Cred

Next week's batch of fine Rock Band downloadables brings some classic credibility to the table, with a trio of individual songs that you won't be able to buy in some sort of value added, cred-building bundle. Each new download will set you back the standard $1.99 USD (160 Microsoft Points) when they hit next week. Damn, that "Train In Vain" is quite the toe-tapper. I'm so into it, my overbite is showing.

• "Hanging on the Telephone" by Blondie
• "Train in Vain" by The Clash
• "Kool Thing" by Sonic Youth

DLC Week of May 13th [Rock Band Forums]

Cheap Rock Band Tracks Are For PS3 Owners As Well

Rock Band Tracks Go Cheap Til June

You'll have at least two more options for getting your hands on free tracks for Rock Band, as a pair of new promotions from Best Buy and Comedy Central promise to boost your song collection for "free." As Shacknews points out, Disturbed fans can get access to a pair of the band's downloadables by pre-ordering their latest opus via Best Buy, songs that the public won't get until June. It looks like this particular promotion is limited to Xbox 360 owners and fans of intolerable music.

Later this year, folks who buy the South Park season 11 DVD set will be treated to a trio of unspecified Rock Band tracks alongside top shelf poop and dick jokes. Details? Scant! All this cross selling makes us wonder: Could Rock Band be the greatest cross promotion tool ever to grace the video game medium?

Best Buy Promoting Exclusive Rock Band X360 DLC; Tracks Will Be Publicly Available in June [Shacknews]
South Park - Interesting Bonus Item, Early Box Art forThe Complete 11th Season: Uncensored [TV Shows On DVD]

PlayStation 2 Rock Band owners have to be sick of playing the same songs over and over again by now, and with Wii owners eagerly awaiting the June 22nd release of the game, the question of delivering downloadable content to the online-handicapped systems is finally being addressed - offline.

MTV Games, Harmonix, and EA will be releasing the Rock Band Track Pack Volume 1 for the PS2 and the Wii on July 15th. $29.99 at your local game purveyor nets you an additional 20 songs for the game, chosen from the DLC already available on the PS3 and 360. It's an okay mix I suppose, with some of my favorites - NIN's "March of the Pigs", Faith No More's "We Care A Lot", and Weezer's "Buddy Holly", but I much prefer being able to pick and choose my songs rather than be handed a chunk all at once.

I am going to assume these packs are standalone, going by the size of the files and both systems lacking a hard disk. Still, more Rock Band fun is more Rock Band fun, right? Hit the jump for the full track listing, and see where you fall between delighted and disappointed.

Rock Band Sells 3 Million Games, 10 Million Songs

Next Week's Rock Band DLC Makes The Scene

Next week's batch of Rock Band downloadable tracks arrive just in time for the new, officially licensed Rock Band Lip Ring controller, adding extra authenticity to what Harmonix is calling the Scene Pack. Individual hipster tracks will hit you in the wallet for $1.99 (160 Microsoft Points) each or $5.49 (440 Microsoft Points) as a bundle. They're all master tracks, fortunately, and should show up on the service of your choice starting next Tuesday.

• "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race" by Fallout Boy
• "Date With The Night" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• "It Hurts" by Angels & Airwaves

DLC Week of May 6th [Rock Band Forums]

Rock Band Drives Viacom Profits Skyward

Harmonix Dudes Make Proper Time 100 List

Aerosmith Exclusive to Guitar Hero

Newsweek this morning is reporting that Aerosmith and their music will be a Guitar Hero exclusive for an "unspecified period of time." Activision CEO Bobby Kotick first hinted that the band would be "proprietary to our format" at last month's Morgan Stanley Technology Conference.

"It's an exclusive deal for this game," Aerosmith publicist Marcee Rondon told Harris. We confirmed this with Tim Riley, Activision's vice president of music affairs, who told us through Activision PR that "I can say that we do have the band exclusively, and their catalogue should be exclusive to us beyond the one or two tracks they had licensed out to Rock Band before we made our deal." (According to MTV's Rhythm Game Track Finder, it's one song: "Train Kept a Rollin'.")

Hit the link for N'gai's take on the info he uncovered and why it was both inevitable and, likely, will not be the last time this happens in the increasingly broad genre of rhythm games.

The Guitar Heroes at Red Octane Lock Up Aerosmith With An Exclusive Arrangement, Leaving Harmonix and Rock Band to Dream On [Newsweek]

PS2 to PS3 Guitar Hero Adapter Rescues Otherwise Non-Functional Guitars

Here's some great news...that possibly comes a few months too late. TAC has released an adapter that will make your PS2 Guitar Hero controllers compatible with PS3 versions of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Running $19.99, the company promises the adapter makes guitars "100% compatible" for use, supporting: regular PS2 controllers, Red Octane's and Activision's SG Controller, the Kramer Wireless, Nyko's PS2 Frontman guitar, the DreamGear Shredster, all React PS2 guitar controllers and all Psyclone PS2 guitar controllers. While the $20 sticker price is a bit steep to make this purchase a no-brainer, many of us have been sitting on otherwise useless PS2 guitars. So we'll just label this a good thing and call it a day. You can buy one here, hit the jump for the full details.

Rock Band Gets More Smashing Pumpkins, Mother Hips Next Week

Next week's downloadable content additions to Harmonix's Rock Band have been announced on the official forums. They'll go for the standard $1.99 USD or 160 Microsoft Points, depending on your platform of choice, and will give you one more chance to see if you can vocally outperform Billy Corgan. It almost seems unfair to actually grade players on the singing portions of Smashing Pumpkins songs, doesn't it? Anyway, the line-up is...

• Smashing Pumpkins - "Zero"
• The Mother Hips - "Red Tandy"
• The Mother Hips - "Time Sick Son of a Grizzly Bear"

DLC, week of April 29th - three singles [Rock Band Forums]

Lars Ulrich Ponders Guitar Hero Signing Coolness

Rolling Stone magazine caught up with Metallica last week at their Record Store Day signing event in California, where they interviewed drummer Lars Ulrich, demonstrating the sort of hard-hitting interview questions that have made Rolling Stone a shining example of everything good about pop culture journalism.

You signed a lot of Guitar Hero controllers. Is that cool?

It's fucking way cool.

Our kids love playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band. It's awesome. There's something really positive coming out of video games. It's so cool to sit there and have your kids talk to you about Deep Purple and Black Sabbath and Soundgarden.

Rock Band Stand Reviewed, Declared Decent

In most households, Rock Band has destroyed any semblance of a classy living room. But this stand by Dude Thing Creations hopes to organize your life and justify your tax bracket with their Rock Band stand (for everything but drums). Running $55 and constructed of wood, Gizmodo had a hands-on and declared, "It works! propping up your guitars against this thing is much classier than leaning them against walls, cabinets, chairs, dogs or ottomans. There's even two sets of hooks on either side so you can wrap your cables around them for even more neatness."

Anticipating the comments, I'm going to point out that, yes, you could make such a contraption at home for less money. But given what we've already spent on Rock Band, what's another fitty?

Lightning Review: Rock Band Stand Keeps Your Guitars, Controllers and Mics in Check [Gizmodo]

Alright ... there's "Bark at the Moon" on expert, and then there's "The Swan" by the Berliner Philharmoniker's number one asskicking cellist, whomever that is. Considering that success in this genre involves at least knowing the major riffs before you play it, I'm thinking that this flash game is more difficult by half than anything Guitar Hero or Rock Band has ever cooked up.

The game helpfully advises us that there are "one million possibilities to get tones from a cello." I am definitely expert on the first: a sphincter-clenching, fingernails-against-the-chalkboard grind.

Post your high scores in the comments. I can get to about 455 points before I start writing apologies to everyone who has ever handled this graceful instrument.

Cello Challenge [Berliner Philharmoniker, via Reddit]

Today, Harmonix has officially announced the first album that will hit the Rock Band store: Judas Priest's Screaming For Vengeance. Arriving April 22/24 on Xbox 360/PS3, this10-track album will cost $14.99 with individual tracks being offered for $1.99 apiece. Then in May, The Cars' self-titled record will become the second full-album release from Rock Band. The Pixies' Doolittle will follow in June.

While this is precisely the news that all Rock Band fans have been waiting to hear, it raises a ton of new questions. Is $14.99 the new standard album price? And how often can we expect new albums? Luckily, we had the chance to discuss the announcement with Harmonix's CEO Alex Rigopulos, who was more than happy to answer all of our fanboy questions. We posted an abridged, cleaned (sans-Mark's-question-stuttering-and-boring-parts) Q&A after the jump.

Rock Band Wii Bonus Tracks Aren't Much Of A Bonus

So the Wii gets five "bonus" tracks on its version of Rock Band, does it? Five exclusive tracks, perhaps, to ease the pain over the fact the system won't support DLC? Course not. The five tracks are simply a quick, cheap workaround to that DLC problem, as they're all currently available as DLC for both the 360 and PS3. The "bonus" tracks are:

Oasis - Don't Look Back In Anger
The All-American Rejects - Dirty Little Secret
The B-52s - Roam
The Police - Roxanne
The Ramones - Rockaway Beach

Eh. Remember, though, if you're feeling a little let down by this (and indeed the whole DLC/Wii mess in general), don't blame Harmonix, they're on your side. Blame Nintendo.
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