Instead of featuring a song that would compliment this week’s DLC release, we thought it would be interesting to release a song that is a polar opposite. Nickelback is definitely a polarizing act, and I’m one of the few who do like the band (but even then, only the lighter songs, I don’t like the heavy songs they do), so I thought I would feature one of my favorite tracks by the band, Photograph.

Photograph is the 14th single released by the band, from their fifth studio album, All the Right Reasons. Despite being voted as the number five most annoying song of all time on Rolling Stone, it reached number one on Canada charts (unsurprising for a band originally from Canada), and topped out at number two in the US. It was released for Rock Band as DLC in June of 2010, as part of a 6-pack.

So onto the song itself. I’ll start with the “best” [Editor's note: quotes added for emphasis] part of the song, the vocals. We’ve all been in a situation where we look at an old photograph and the memories come flooding back:

Look at this photograph
Every time I do it makes me laugh
Every memory of looking out the back door
I had the photo album spread out on my bedroom floor
It’s time to say it goodbye.

Be sure you don’t trip up on the last chorus of the song, as it is charted differently than the other choruses. Next, you have some standard acoustic-style charted 1-tier guitar, with lots of three-note chords. 0-tier bass is basic but not repetitive, and 3-tier drums isn’t really prominent in the verses, aside from some cymbals and a bit of foot pedal, but is still simple but fun.

Here’s a full band playthrough:

Thanks for reading!

I would appreciate it if you would have a look at my growing fansite, The Tribute Pages which features tributes of video games (including Rock Band 3), TV shows and movies. Thank you!

The Rock Band Network is an invaluable source of new music but, perhaps because of the quantity of songs or the unfamiliar nature of the artists, it can be a little hard to find the type of music you want. As a tester and charter for the Rock Band Network, I get a lot of exposure to songs coming through the pipeline and there are definitely songs that deserve more recognition. This feature will help you discover new favourites, find a new challenge, and support the independent Rock Band scene. Each week I’ll highlight one new Xbox 360 song, one new PS3 song, and even a song released awhile back – all of them worthy of a listen!

Xbox 360: The Mercy House – Greed

Greed was initially lined up as downloadable content for Guitar Hero before, well, that series went on hiatus. What was Guitar Hero’s loss, however, is Rock Band’s gain as this song, from the upcoming album A Broken State of Bliss, is a powerful piece of rock awesomeness that signals an up-and-coming band with a lot of talent.

Guitar begins with a tricky riff before a chugging chord section continues for the majority of the track. The chord selection is perfect, with hammer-on and triple-note chords adding some difficulty to the sections. The bridge of the song acts as a perfect buildup to a solo that is fairly difficult and rewarding, filled with hammer-ons and trills. The whole song sounds very much like newer Alice in Chains songs which is by no means a bad thing – it’s especially evident in the grungy production and resonating chords. The bass chart is a hidden gem of the song and features a steady but difficult stream of hammer-ons during the verse and a simpler pattern during the chorus.

Drums are mid-tier in terms of difficulty but include quite a large amount of variation, from a tom heavy section during the bridge to fills and snare rolls. As the song nears the end the fills become ever more complicated, mixing snare rolls, kickpedal and quick tom/cymbal changes – there’s enough differentiation here that the track remains fun throughout.

The powerful vocals will have any singer straining to hit the high notes and harmonies add to the distinct Alice in Chains sound. It’s the lead, bringing to mind early-Axl Rose, that gives The Mercy House a sound of its own. If an Alice in Chains and Guns ‘N Roses crossover sounds like your type of music then this is well worth checking out.

With The Mercy House releasing their debut at the end of April we very might well see more of the band on the Rock Band Network. For now, Greed is a brilliant introduction to the band for Rock Band players and deserves support.

Sounds like: Chains ‘N Roses, Axl in Chains.
Perfect for: Full band

PS3: Amberian Dawn – Talisman

The Rock Band Network’s most prolific artist, Amberian Dawn, has over 40 songs available to download. Talisman, from their album End of Eden, brings more symphonic power metal to the game with excellent charts full of solos and fun-to-play patterns.

The stunning vocals deserve immediate attention – Heidi Parviainen’s operatic style will prove a challenge to even the most veteran of Rock Band singers. Add in three part-harmonies, all in the soaring operatic style, and it’s a great song to test out those vocal chords.

The guitar chart, packed with complicated solos, is worth every penny/Microsoft Point. The chart features fast alt-strumming, numerous solos and more than enough difficulty to guarantee replayability. It helps that the song has exceptional production values – fans of bands like Nightwish (and I know there are many, thanks to the Rock Band Dashboard) should really consider this band’s output on the RBN!

Drums feature enough kickpedal to keep those shins burning and there a varied selection of fills that make use of toms in different combinations. Check out the preview video below to see what’s on offer. There’s also a brief respite for drummers during the solo/breakdown, promptly followed by a complicated cymbal part to dissolve any chance of a rest.

Bass features a lot of alt-strumming and, while not the most interesting part of the song, is enough of a challenge to keep your attention throughout. You’ll still need quick fingers and good rhythm to achieve gold stars and a decent notestreak.

Keyboards feature prominently within the song so it’s no surprise the keys track (especially pro keys) is difficult but worth a try. Some of the note patterns will have your fingers getting in a bit of a tangle but there are also chords, simple glissandos and more to keep things varied.

Amberian Dawn are a band with songs that are always fun to play and which can sometimes serve as a good introduction to more difficult metal songs on Rock Band. For anyone looking for metal that involves more than screaming vocals and drudging breakdowns, check out the wide range of Amberian Dawn song available.

Sounds like: Nightwish
Perfect for: Vocalists, guitarists, drummers, keys

Throwback: OK GO – White Knuckles – The Big Robot Remix

OK Go’s White Knuckles appears on the Rock Band Network twice – once in the original album version and again in this incarnation, an exceptionally awesome remix by The Big Robot. The story behind the remix is an interesting one; The Authority (the charting company behind the song) held a competition wherein entrants had to remix White Knuckles. The Big Robot’s remix was determined the winner and rightly so. It’s great to see OK GO so at ease with user generated content and public interaction – there’s essentially two degrees of separation between the RBN track and the band, what with the remix and charting in between. The track is fun, unique and a great entry to the RBN!

As an electro-pop remix, the instrumentation is varied and potentially tricky given the fact the song has been chopped up and spliced back together again. The pounding beat has elements of dubstep and electronica meaning it is constantly varied and not a monotonous load of repetition. The mix is really vibrant, with the drums crisp and clear. There are just enough small fills and flourishes to make the chart a standout track.

Guitar can initially seem a little sparse – the odd riff every so often, with the rest of the chart fairly understated. As a remix it’s understandable that some of the guitar has been moved away from the limelight… that is, until you hit the solo! A constant zigzag of hammer-ons, reminiscent of Less Talk More Rokk, it is timed just on the right side of challenging. Notestreaks will fall and curse words turn the air blue, but its a fantastic solo out of nowhere that really fits with the rest of the song.

Bass, thanks to a little bit of electronic tweaking, is distinct and truly fundamental to the way the song sounds. The chart features hammer-ons and makes use of the full fretboard and, while not the most difficult bass chart, is still a blast.

Vocals are the least changed from the original version – if you’re able to sing that then you’ll have no problem. Again, because the song is a remix the order of the phrases might have changed a little! Some phrases are also pretty short meaning you’ll have to be bang on the right note to get an awesome rating.

This is a brilliant example of the eclectic ingenuity that you’ll find on the RBN. It’s fresh, different and one of the few places you’ll be able to hear this version. Kudos to everyone involved with the song – take a listen to the song and you’ll be itching to play it!

Sounds like: OK GO (understandably) infused with Daft Punk/Justice
Perfect for: Guitarists, drummers

PAX East was this past weekend, and before the event started, we were invited to Harmonix to get some hands on time with Rock Band Blitz before it was unleashed to the gaming masses on the floors of PAX East. At the Harmonix booth at PAX East, there were six Rock Band Blitz kiosks set up for passionate fans and apprehensive skeptics to try playing a song in a beta build of the game. In our preview, we’ll talk about the gameplay, and give our first up close and personal impression with the game.

As we have said many times since the game was announced here, on social media, and elsewhere, Rock Band Blitz is not meant to be a sequel to Rock Band. It is a spinoff title in the same manner as Rock Band: Unplugged. And it is not indicative of where the franchise is heading. As several people initially thought, this game is more of a spiritual successor to Harmonix-developed Rock Band predecessors Amplitude and Frequency. But while these thoughts are not far off, there are enough significant changes from these two titles to both simultaneously excite and challenge old school beatmatch players and Rock Band players alike.

Some of you may be thinking “OK, but why not a direct sequel to those games?” First of all, those games were exclusive to the Playstation2, and are Sony owned IPs, so if a sequel to those games is coming, it’s Sony’s call. Harmonix doesn’t have much of a say on that. “OK, then why is it a Rock Band title?” If the title was outside of the Rock Band franchise, licensing restrictions wouldn’t have allowed for use of the entire Rock Band catalog in the game, so instead of create a brand new IP, they leveraged an existing one for a spin-off title to maximize in game content.

While the version we played is not final, and gameplay aspects are subject to change prior to release, but the game has actually been in development for quite some time. Originally in development prior to Harmonix separation from Viacom, the project was mothballed for a short time before being resurrected last year and significantly overhauled by several folks. The PAX East panel “Evolution of Beatmatch Gameplay” talked about the long road of development for the title, which had several iterations.

As for the game itself, the current beta build of Rock Band Blitz gameplay first asks you to choose a song from the 25 in-game songs or from your previously purchased Rock Band DLC library. Once selected, the player is prompted to pick one of 16 unlockable power-ups, which help the player maximize his score. While only a few of these power-ups are available at the start of the game, players can permanently unlock power-ups by earning “Cred” through song playthroughs, and purchase single song usage of the unlocked power-ups by spending “Coins,” which are also earned through successful completion of song playthroughs.

Before the song starts, you’ll notice a familiar note highway across the screen laid out in a green, red, yellow, blue, orange pattern. In Rock Band Blitz, each colored note highway corresponds to one of the five standard instruments available in Rock Band (green is drums, red is bass, yellow is guitar, blue is vocals, and orange is keys). If the song you are playing does not have a corresponding instrument, the particular highway will be empty. Using the standard instrument Rock Band charts, two lane note charts are generated for each instrument using an algorithm developed specifically for this game. Unlike similar predecessors, two lane note charts were decided upon based on the complexity of additional gameplay features we will explain below, as well as several other factors including surprisingly ergonomic strain on current generation input devices.

The game has only one difficulty, and is based on expert difficulty. Video was shown of how the algorithm would populate the Rock Band Blitz charts using the other difficulties, and because of the two gem lanes for each instrument, the game’s pace was too slow, the difficulty was too easy, and it just looked “odd.” If you’re not the world’s best player, or like to torture yourself with ridiculously difficult songs, it’s good to know that there is no way to “fail out” of a song in Rock Band Blitz.

At its core, Rock Band Blitz is a beatmatch title where you have to hit as many notes as possible, but this is a massive understatement. Unlike Rock Band: Unplugged, where you can complete all the charts thrown at you (if you don’t miss anything), Rock Band Blitz throws every note chart at you that has an instrument playing in the song. Part of the strategy is for you to figure out which note track to play to maximize your score. This is why you may have seen me describe this title as an exercise in efficient and effective “plate spinning.” The exception to this is when an instrument solo is initiated, which is unique to each song, where only the instrument with the solo is playable. If there are two instrument solos at once, the current algorithm will select one of the charts for you to play.

Then we add in multipliers. Just like Rock Band, multipliers increase based upon successful gameplay, but in this title, breaking a streak won’t reset them, and each instrument has their own multiplier. This comes in to play as the multiplier window, or the difference between the instrument with the highest current multiplier and the lowest current multiplier, is only THREE. For example, no matter how hard you work increasing your drums, bass, vocals, and keys multipliers, if your guitar chart has been untouched (assuming it has a note chart), those instruments won’t go above 4x. Again, there’s a lot of “plate spinning” in this game.

Once you pass one of several checkpoints, your multiplier level cap is increased to three spots above where your lowest instrument multiplier is currently resting. For example, your drums, bass, vocals, and keys multipliers are all at 4x, but your guitar is only at 2x. Once you pass the checkpoint, your level cap is increased by one, as your lowest multiplier is now 2x (instead of 1x), and you can raise your other four instrument charts to 5x.

While breaking a note streak won’t reset your multiplier like in standard Rock Band games, it’s still important. If you don’t break your streak on whichever charts you are flying around on, you fill up the BLITZ meter at the top, which helps to maximize your score.

Power-ups are selected prior to each song. The build I tried had two different flavors, but it looks like there may be a total of three in the final version. One class appear on purple gems across the note charts during the song and are deployed when they are properly hit. The other style of power-ups are accumulated using the familiar white overdrive notes and deployed at the player’s discretion. On the beta we played, we selected Pinball, which fires a ball bouncing further down the note highway and racking up points as it knocks out gems, as well as Bottle Rocket, which lets us fire a rocket further down the note highway, destroying gems and earning you points, as well.

Harmonix has not designed the game with a real-time multiplayer aspect, they will be including comprehensive leaderboards that will show you your friends scores, and will give you in-game messages on how your friends are doing, what songs they’ve beat you at, and more.

Is your head spinning yet? As much as you never really wanted to take your eyes off the note charts in Rock Band, there’s a lot more going on in this game, and basically you’re going to say goodbye to blinking. It’s a lot to take in while reading a preview of the title, but it becomes more intuitive as you play it. The interesting thing I noticed relatively quickly about the gameplay is that strategies developed for one song may not work well for another.

Even if you think you’ve got the hang of it already (and just because you’ve played Amplitude and Frequency, don’t assume this is the case), you’re going to want to try out the tutorial, which features a pretty epic original Harmonix track (assuming they keep it in through to the final build).

Here’s a previously posted full song gameplay preview which may help tie together everything explained above:

If you’ve stuck around to the end of this preview, and have seen some of the videos that have made their way into the wild, there is no doubt that this is a much different game than Rock Band 3. Unlike direct sequels to the core titles in the franchise, I definitely don’t expect everyone to love this game. However, it appears that Harmonix is aware of that, and has designed Rock Band Blitz to instantly export, free of charge, all new-t0-the-franchise 25 anticipated on-disc songs directly into Rock Band 3.

To the skeptics: give the game a shot. If you don’t like it, even if the game maxes out the XBLA pricing of $19.99, you’ve still got an incredible value at a giant 25-song track pack. If you’re anything like several of the people I talked to that were initially hesitant about the title at PAX East, you may be presently surprised and actually embrace this game pretty quickly once you’ve played it for a few minutes!

Here is this week’s Pro-Guitar/Bass chart for the Slayer DLC from the always awesome thenewnoelisoncruz. Definitely check out and subscribe to his YouTube channel!

Slayer – Raining Blood

Arriving in the Rock Band library today are three songs from thrash metal godfathers Slayer. Included below are playthrough videos of the DLC from the always awesome thenewnoelisoncruz. Definitely check out and subscribe to his YouTube channel!

Links to purchase DLC songs online at Xbox.com are included below for each track. All tracks are 160 MSP ($1.99). The Slayer Pack 01 is $5.49 (440 MSP). Pro Guitar/Bass charts are noted below where applicable, and can be purchased for an additional $.99. Playthrough charts for Pro Guitar/Bass will be posted tomorrow.

Directly below is a playlist of all the DLC videos, followed by individual videos of each DLC track after the jump.

Playlist of all new DLC:

Read the rest of this entry »

Contrary to what was initially believed to last until into the summer, the Nintendo Wii Rock Band DLC outage is already over, apparently before it even began. Harmonix originally communicated out that due to ownership of the Rock Band IP transferring from Viacom to independent developers Harmonix, new publishing agreements were required, and it appeared that Nintendo and Sony (EU only) were taking longer than anticipated to clear things up.

However, @HMXHenry gave us an update last Thursday morning on RockBand.com, and it now appears that Nintendo came through at the last second to continue with the release of new weekly Rock Band DLC unabated. Last week’s Evanescence DLC wasn’t expected on the Wii, but it shocked many when it showed up, and now it looks like all those hardcore Wii players / Slayer fans will still be able to get their fix tomorrow!

Unfortunately, that leaves European PS3 players STILL in the dark with new DLC releases. Still no change from the “summer?” timeframe estimated as to when the Sony (EU) outage may end.

Thanks to RBA readers theluigi1022 and WiiDrummer for the heads up!

[RockBand.com]