For the past few mornings I’ve been checking my feeds and seeing posts and re-posts of the same two Rock Band 3-related stories:

1. Upgrading your old DLC with new RB3 features like keyboards and harmonies will cost money; and

2. Rock Band 3 DLC is not compatible with Rock Band 1 or 2.

These stories have been popping up everywhere, including the more reputable sites (e.g., Joystiq). I wouldn’t have thought these things need addressing, but apparently they do. So let’s take them one at a time.

First, new features in old DLC. Yesterday’s Bon Jovi track pack included three songs we’ve seen on previous Rock Bands: “Wanted Dead or Alive,” “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and “You Give Love a Bad Name,” from Rock Band, Rock Band 2, and Lego Rock Band, respectively. These were offered as new “RB3 Versions,” meaning that even if you already owned the songs you’d have to pay $2 to get the new versions with keys and harmonies. (Though in what is to me a pretty startling development, you can skip keys and harmonies and just add Pro guitar/bass on to your existing DLC.)

This has apparently made some people very unhappy. Continue reading →

Ladies and gentlemen: Music games haven’t had a single damned thing in common with electronic memory game Simon — OK, except for colored buttons — since the PaRappa series, which actually was memory-based. (You’d be shown a sequence of button-taps, and your job was to repeat it.)

Modern music games, on the other hand, aren’t at all about memory, at least not that kind of rote-recitation memory.

So, to recap: When you compare music games to Simon, you sound like an idiot. Especially if you then archly refer to the genre as “sort-of-music-y games.”

Though I suppose if you’re trying to memorize entire songs and then repeat them back, that could explain why you’re missing the point so comically.

Anyway, I just wanted to share. Thank you for your attention.

I’ll admit it: I’m nervous.

It’s Monday morning as I write this, and I’m just tying up some loose ends in preparation for the official launch of Plastic Axe. Tomorrow. I’m compulsively proofreading posts, checking and re-checking my plugins, trying to fake out The Vault’s search function, hemming and hawing and going back and forth about exactly how many posts I want per page. (Seven, in case you wondered. For now, at least.) You know, pre-launch stuff.

Ninety-nine percent of you won’t read this until after launch, of course, which gives this post something of an odd status. It exists in a kind of closed-off time loop; it’s today where I am, but tomorrow — or later — where you are. It’s a unique opportunity to look around and take a breath and organize some thoughts before I initiate the Full Contact Media Blitz tomorrow morning. So let me tell you what I’m hoping to accomplish here. Continue reading →

If you’ve been playing a lot of music games, you may be getting to the point where you’ve started thinking to yourself, “Hey, maybe I could actually do this for real!”

Don’t laugh: Countless musicians (including yours truly) have gotten their start in a similar way, moving from tennis rackets to hand-me-down acoustic guitars, or chopsticks to drum sticks. I’m not saying everyone can do it — some people simply aren’t musical, not in that way — but here’s a secret a lot of musicians would rather you not know: It’s really not that hard. Continue reading →

A couple weeks ago, games industry website Gamasutra posted a fairly detailed story about a decline in retail sales for the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises. “U.S. Guitar Hero/Rock Band revenues are down 49% year on year,” Gamasutra wrote, “as discounted hardware and over 20 SKUs flood the market.”

And so, the news sites and the blogs dutifully reported the imminent demise of the music game, concluding that a glut of games had oversaturated the market. Reporters crowed about bubbles bursting and people “getting tired of rhythm games,”

Trouble is, that’s not remotely what the article said. Continue reading →

It happens every time. Someone will post something about Guitar Hero or Rock Band, some innocuous comment, often in an unrelated context, and somewhere in the comments or forum thread, someone else will chime in with something like: “Why don’t you learn to play a real instrument?” or “These games are ruining music” or “All that time wasted playing a game when you could just go buy a guitar for less money,” and so on, et cetera. You even occasionally hear similar gems from people who should know better…like, say, Jimmy Page and Jack White.

So, okay. Hyperbole aside, let’s talk about what effect these games actually are having on music, the music industry, and the appreciation of music.  Is it keeping kids from learning to play instruments for real? This guitar teacher doesn’t think so; he’s seen a jump in students of about 35 percent since music games became popular. This event organizer doesn’t seem to think so either.

And the folks who make instruments seem to have similar opinions; the president and CEO of industry association NAMM specifically cites music games’ popularity as encouraging people to take up music in real life.

Well, what about the music industry itself? Continue reading →