Roadies, breathe a sigh of relief. Rock Band 3 is getting patched up to fix the dreaded Roadie Amp Loading Screen of Death that would sometimes arise when loading into a particularly complex venue. And that’s not all, says HMXHenry. Here are other items being addressed:

Save Data Affected By Especially Long Band Names – Custom / Random Setlists specific to artists with especially long names (most notably Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, Honest Bob and the Factory to Dealer Incentives, The Presidents of the United States of America, etc) that were not completed before playing through to the next auto save could result in corrupted save data.

Iron Man Eyebrow Freeze in Character Creator – The Character Creator would sometimes seize up when reselecting the default eyebrow for the Iron Man pre set face. All eyebrows are now safe.

Pause Scoring Exploit – To prevent abuse of repeated pausing mid-song to pad a score, we now disable score reporting on any song in which a player repeatedly pauses. Your crowd meter should go grey and you will not be able to complete any goals or achievements tied to score during that play through.

This patch goes live on PS3 today, and should hit 360 soon as well. Hit the Read link for even more details.

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Tommy over at RockBandAide has uncovered codes to unlock the guitars that were offered as pre-order bonuses at various retail outlets. So I’m curious: If you did pre-order, did the “exclusive” guitars play a role in where you ordered from? And are you pissed now that they’re open to all?

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The new NPD numbers are out, detailing videogame sales in the U.S. for the month of October, and Rock Band 3 failed to break the top 10, according to Gamasutra. That may sound like an unfortunate placement, but there are a few key points to note here:

First, Rock Band 3 was only out for five days in October, so let’s apply the same logic as we did to Warriors of Rock’s first sales reports.

Second, seven out of the ten top titles had at least a week’s head start on RB3, with six of those having two weeks or more. The three that released on the same day were Fable III, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, and WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2011. It’s not much of a surprise that those all sold better.

And third, we know Rock Band 3 came in at 15th because NPD analyst Anita Frazier specifically called it out, saying “Based on solid reviews, this game has the potential to perform well over the holidays.”

Furthermore, according to VGChartz, The game moved a respectable 280k units in the U.S. in its first two weeks. (Warriors of Rock, in case you’re wondering, appears to have sold about 360k in the U.S. so far.) Contrast that with Halo: Reach, number 6 on October’s list, which sold 315k in the entire month of October, according to Microsoft.

We’re definitely not back in Guitar Hero III territory, but things are looking reasonably healthy for the music-game genre nevertheless.

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Yes, Rock Band 3 is only just out of the gate, but that means it’s time to start looking to the future. And the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog has done just that, via an e-mail chat with Greg LoPiccolo, Senior Vice President of Product Development at Harmonix.

The interview focuses mainly on the significance of Rock Band 3′s Pro mode, but it also includes this interesting exchange:

Speakeasy: Do you think Rock Band can encourage players to compose music and find a personal style?

Greg LoPiccolo: In the future, we’d love to try to tackle composition and improvisation as gameplay experiences, but those are very difficult problems to solve.

How close is Rock Band 3 to meeting the company’s ambition of what a music game can accomplish? Where can you go from here?

Rock Band 3 is a significant step for us, but we ultimately hope to erase the boundary between “gamer” and “musician.” We have a long way to go in pursuit of that goal.

Obviously most of this is pretty pie-in-the-sky stuff. But now that we have peripherals that can do full keyboards and full guitar, it can’t be long until someone figures out a way to incorporate true creativity into a game. If nothing else, to give guitar and keys tracks “fill” sections (like drums currently have) that can be rated on whether you’re in key with the song…

It’s funny, so many of the Rock Band 3 reviews talk about not knowing where the genre can go from here. This is certainly one option.

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