Rock Band 3 Keyboard Peripheral Enables Piano

Although rhythm games don’t really make better business from the sales-point…..yet Harmonix, firmly committed to the genre- releases Rock Band 3. New peripherals, new features, and a goal to disrupt the music games business are its basic key lights. But the question is that after the Beatles, Rock Band and Guitar Hero 5 failed to live up to expectations- what is Rock Band 3’s future?

Last month in Los Angeles, Harmonix producers declared that this game will be a “disruptive title” in the music category. The jury is still out on that claim, but from the looks of things, it’s clear that Harmonix has put a lot of thought into the features for Rock Band 3. Lets find out what all is new.

Conceivably the most visible addition to the game is the keyboard peripheral, which is, apparently, used for songs that include piano or keyboard parts. While the keyboard peripheral isn’t specifically required for the game, yet you’ll be able to play the keyboard parts in a song with a guitar, if you like playing an actual keyboard on songs! While the keyboard is limited in size, just two octaves, to be exact it should be noted that the peripheral itself is a proper instrument which has some larger insinuation for the game.

Talking about the rest of the Rock Band instruments, playing keyboards is simple on the lower difficulty settings, provided you’ve got the right-hand position. After placing your right thumb on the equivalent of “middle C” on the keyboard, the note highway gems are joined to the five subsequent white keys, and as with the guitar parts, you’ll sometimes be pressing two or three notes together to form chords. Our limited facility with the keyboards kept us from trying any parts above medium difficulty with any sort of success, but it’s clear that some parts will be tricky from the get-go.

To demonstrate the keyboards in action, as well as the harmony vocals that have been brought into the game from The Beatles: Rock Band, a group of Harmonix producers took the stage to play Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Judging by its addition in the next Guitar Hero game, as well as in Power Gig: Rise of the SixString, this makes it the must-have song for 2010′s crop of music games. The on-stage group members gave it their best with Freddie Mercury’s multilayered vocals and composite activities, and the result was a strong, if not necessarily note-perfect, effort. Vocal harmonies will be all over Rock Band 3, and several of the songs that were playable in the demo version featured those harmonies, including “Sister Christian,” “Here I Go Again,” “Power of Love” by Huey Lewis & The News, and “Walkin’ on the Sun” by Smash Mouth, among others.

Those new songs will be a handful of the more than 80 tunes that will be included on the Rock Band 3 disc, and those 80 songs will add to Rock Band’s increasingly huge content library, which is well over 1,000 songs strong now (and quite a bit more if you count the work coming out of the Rock Band Network). That much content can make for an organizational nightmare (we’ve all scrolled and scrolled when searching through our RB catalogs, looking for the next song to play), which is a fact that Harmonix developers are taking into consideration with improved filters and set list tools that should make those songs easier to find. For example, you’ll be able use filters to show only new songs or only songs that are of a certain length (to prevent that annoying guy at your Rock Band party from selecting the epic “Green Grass and High Tides,” only to fail once the guitar solos begin). You’ll also be able to rate songs so that they appear more or less often when playing random set lists, as well as save and share set lists with your friends. Taking that idea one step further, you’ll be able to create custom battles in Rock Band 3 and share them with your friends.

Road challenges are a new feature in Rock Band 3–described by Harmonix’s Dan Teasdale as “Band World Tour” crossed with “Mario Party.” The core experience is still the same as Band World Tour heading on tour with your bandmates to play shows and earn as many fans as possible.

The game will also feature lots of goals surrounding a player’s skill on the instruments. The goals measure your skill on each of the instruments in the game, and you’ll have a consciousness of your relative skill on all the instruments as you go. Every goal you complete in the game will earn you fans, and those fans will earn you new items for your band…things like your van, which will further expand your touring ability.

But yes, Harmonix developers have something extraordinary in mind for the truly hardcore Rock Band fans this time around. You’ll have an entirely new level of skill to choose from, known as Pro mode which will be tied to the guitar, drum, and keyboard parts in the game. When playing Pro mode, you’ll have relative levels of skill as well, but the ultimate goal is to better translate the gameplay conceits of note highways and gems into real musical terms. The easiest explanation for Pro mode comes with the drums; if you have a Rock Band set that includes cymbals, you’ll see different-shaped gems coming down the highway that will indicate cymbal crashes. So I find this one to be interesting….what are your thoughts on this!

Tags: band 3, guitar hero, harmony vocals, keyboards, new peripherals, octaves