Best Rock Band Guitar

hi guys my name is Matt I play in the
band Rose of Jericho and today what I
want to do is give review the new rock
band 3 Squire Pro guitar controller this
review is actually going to be broken
into two parts the first part is going
to be how the guitar plays in rock band
3 itself and then the second part of the
review is going to be how the Squire
plays as a guitar we’ll compare it to a
couple other guitars and just give an
impression of how it stacks up so let’s
get started
so this is the guitar as you can see
it’s a squier stratocaster this is a
real guitar it plays
the only differences between this and a
regular Squire is that this has button
controllers on it for controlling the
rock band 3 game itself of course if you
have an Xbox 360 these buttons won’t do
anything that’s a little gift from
Microsoft to us the fret board itself
has sensors built into it such that when
you’re playing in game it can sense
where you put your fingers and thus know
whether you’re playing the right chord
or not so first I want to take a look at
gameplay of using the rock band 3
controller ok so for this example the
song I picked was damaged by blink-182
and the main reason why I picked it was
I know the song so it didn’t take me
that long to learn how to play it well
at least a decent run at it anyways so
when we’re looking at the screen here
you can see arm at the bottom of the
screen or in the center here there’s
basically what what looks like the
fretboard of the guitar and there are
six strings and on the left is the
bottom lowest string and then on the
right is the highest or the the highest
pitch string and basically the way that
you read this is there’s going to be
numbers that are going to appear on each
of these strings and that basically
tells you what fret you put your finger
on and then you pluck the string at that
fret so we’ll let the video roll here
and you’re going to see numbers
coming towards the bottom of the screen
there and as they reach the bottom of
the screen you’re going to see me play
that string and fret at that number and
it’ll register in the game and I’ll get
a score so in retrospect I probably
could have picked a slower song since
these numbers are kind of flying by you
at hyperspeed but this is just kind of
giving you an idea of yeah you’re you’re
playing real guitar basically in the
part that I’m playing here is actually
the song just some thoughts about
playing on the guitar the first thing
that I have to say is it is a lot easier
well sigh a lot easier but it is easier
to 100% the song in real life say you’re
recording in a studio to get a good take
in a studio it’s easier to do that than
it is on this rock band 3 Pro guitar
this Broga tar is pretty picky your
technique needs to be pretty flawless in
general to get a really good score on
this run that you’re seeing here I
probably practice the song about four or
five times and this is a song that I
know fairly well I mean I can just sit
down and play this song and I could
probably record it in the studio and be
fairly happy with the take and a couple
tries but in this one I couldn’t even
100% it in five tries so it is pretty
tough if you’re a rock van serious rock
band player I would have to say that the
squire pro guitar is going to be a real
challenge it’s not like the old plastic
guitars or you got a 5 buttons and you
can see the speed that this this track
is rolling that you would need to
practice a lot to be able to sight read
this I mean there’s there’s six strings
22 frets and to be able to read this
thing as fast as it’s going by that
would be pretty tough
I mean even I’ve been playing guitar for
quite a while and
and I when their solos even if they’re
slow solos on this thing I can’t read it
I just get totally lost
so the next thing that I want to try was
um playing a song that I have never
played before to kind of see what the
process would be like on learning how to
play a song and pro guitar and the first
thing that I recommend you do is turn on
what they call chord numbering in the
previous video when we were when you saw
chords coming by basically it would just
show you the number of the bass note of
the chord and then your other fingers
the way they would indicate what you’re
supposed to play is this little kind of
blue bar basically in the height of the
bar is supposed to tell you how many
frets up your other fingers are supposed
to go to kind of give you the idea of
what the shape of the chord would look
like while it’s kind of a cool idea and
it works pretty well when you know the
song is just kind of as a visual
reminder when you’re learning a song
it’s not a lot of help
especially when if your finger has to go
more in about three frets away that the
bar never gets any higher so this chord
numbering basically what it does is it
it puts the numbers on all of the
strings that you’re supposed to be
playing so and the way you do that is
you go into options and modifiers to
turn that on
okay so definitely the next question
that I had was how does pro guitar
playing it in game compared to playing
real guitar well obviously it’s very
accurate in the sense that when you’re
playing pro guitar you’re playing the
actual notes of the song the other thing
that I really liked about a pro guitar
is the fretboard and how sensitive and
how accurate is when you can sit and
play a D chord and just like I’m used to
playing on a real guitar and it comes
out and sometimes your fingering isn’t
always exactly perfect I mean you you
move fingers sometimes away from the
frets and this guitar just I think does
a really spectacular job of still
capturing a good performance even when
you aren’t completely exact but it would
still come out correctly if you’re
playing through an amp so I was really
impressed by that overall the pro guitar
experience is just really outstanding um
I would highly recommend this to anyone
whether you’re a guitar player or not
because I don’t know it’s this is
probably the most fun I’ve had on a
music game since they release drums for
rock band so playing guitar playing real
guitar and rock band is just it’s
outstanding in the job they’ve done
implementing it here is is really
awesome
you
so playing pro guitar I did find some
oddities I guess and how the game works
um just instances where I don’t know if
it’s a bug or if it was intentional to
make things easier but um the first
example that I have is is in the Tom
Petty song I need to know you can see
the screenshot here is showing that C
chord basically so if you’re reading the
the finger numbering from left to right
it should be 3 5 5 3 3 except when I
played it and this is just kind of by
accident um I just played it where it
was 3 5 5 and the top two strings I left
open and it counted them as correct I
didn’t break my streak so I was curious
as to whether well maybe they did this
to make it easier but you don’t get as
high of a score so I did a little
experiment where basically I only played
those two chords the first time I played
it
the way I had been playing it which was
leaving the top two strings open and
then the second time I played it where I
barred the whole thing and I played the
top two strings on three like I was
supposed to and what I found was you get
the same exact score how you play either
way so this is kind of interesting from
the point of view that the way I was
playing it is actually easier than the
way it’s charted and so for those of you
that are going for the highest score
possible this kind of implies there may
be little tricks and things you can do
to make the song easier but still get a
high score and I guess really the only
way to find these things is going to
kind of be by accident
so the other somewhat minor issue that I
came across was strumming on the guitar
I was having problems with strumming
registering specifically up strums and
this was only in the case of big chords
so full six string chords like open
chords like G and E and C things like
that
the way that I got those to register was
I found if you move the position where
you strum the strings so that you’re
basically right on top of the pickup
then I found that the strumming seemed
to work pretty well the closer you move
to the fretboard the or the closely
moved to that string mute the worse that
your up strumming seemed to register I
haven’t tried adjusting the sensitivity
and I know there’s been some discussion
about the top strings don’t register at
all for some people I haven’t had that
problem with my guitar though I haven’t
played anything really fast so I’ve been
able to pick the strings like I would
normally which I play on well if I play
harder than average but I haven’t had
any problems with it detecting on the
stoppers top strings