Boston-based journalist Garrett Martin recently had a chance to visit the offices of Harmonix, creators of the Rock Band franchise and the new dance game Dance Central. He got a chance to check out both games and talk with the people behind the games, and today he's sharing those experiences exclusively on Joystick Division.

Congratulations, you've finally mastered the five-button guitar.  You can streak through the Outlaws and Judas Priest's "Painkiller" without missing a note.  You're the hometown Gary Hoey of plastic shredding, and you're ready for a new challenge.  Or maybe you're a saner, stabler, more sensible Rock Band fan, plunking out the songs you like with your friends or family.  Either way, Harmonix, the developer of Rock Band, thinks it might be time for you to try out a real guitar with Rock Band 3.  And also maybe a keyboard.  Oh, and they want you to put the instruments down every now and again and dance like you're in a music video.  Harmonix is a demanding company.     

 

This fall, Harmonix releases two games within nine days of each other.  Rock Band 3 expands the franchise with a keyboard, harmonies, and the realistic Pro Mode for guitar, bass, and keyboards.  Dance Central, exclusively for the Microsoft Kinect motion sensor, turns your living room into a club as you dance along to pop and dance hits.  They're different games built upon the same philosophy that has defined Harmonix from the very beginning.  Both are so fun that you might not even realize they're making you a better dancer or teaching you the basic concepts of playing music.

 

With Rock Band 3's Pro Initiative, fake rocking has never been harder.  The Pro Initiative aims to break down the wall between Rock Band and actual musical performance by making the controllers as realistic as possible.  This has been Harmonix's goal from the beginning, according to project leader Daniel Sussman.  "In a lot of ways the genesis of Pro mode was the drum game from the first Rock Band.  It takes a game and roots it in music fundamentals," he says.  "It's not that abstract and it's fun and accessible but it also teaches you something that's relevant outside the console experience.  Rock Band drums did that.  There were people who got good at that game and were able to play real drum sets.  With Pro mode we wanted to apply that experience to the bass, guitar, and keyboard."

The Rock Band 3 keyboard controller is a fully compatible MIDI keyboard that looks like a miniature keytar.  Don't be daunted by the twenty-five keys; this is the most intuitive Rock Band controller yet.  All you do is push buttons at the appropriate time.  It's so simple that you play the regular mode with one hand.  The keyboard features two octaves, with two different color-coding systems to make both regular and Pro modes easy to understand.  Regular mode focuses on five white keys, with the standard green-red-blue-yellow-orange Rock Band color scheme.  For Pro mode the keyboard marks each octave into two sections, one running from the C to the E and the other from the F to the B.  Instead of colored gems white and black notes scroll down the screen during Pro mode, and you have to hit the corresponding keys at the right moment.  Pro mode has multiple difficulty settings, and the higher the difficulty the more closely you're playing the actual song. 

 

The Pro Guitar mode is supported by two unique controllers.  There's a Fender Mustang recreation divided into seventeen frets with six buttons apiece, for a total of 102 inputs.  There's also a Fender Squier Stratocaster that's a real functional MIDI electric guitar.  You can plug the Squier into an amp and annoy your neighbors, or use the MIDI output to hook it up to your computer.  The Mustang's a far cheaper option, but feels like an uneasy compromise between price and intent.  It's more distracting than the standard five-button guitar controller and only marginally more realistic.  The Stratocaster isn't cheap for a video game controller or for a Squier, which is Fender's low-budget introductory line of instruments.  Still, it feels much better than the Mustang, and has the added benefit of being a real working guitar. 

 

The hardest thing about the Pro Initiative for keyboard or guitar is understanding the on-screen instructions.  It takes a little while to internalize the Pro mode notation and consistently translate what you see on screen to what you're doing with your hands.  It's especially confusing with the guitar and its dozens of potential inputs.  The Rock Band 3 disc is loaded with tutorials, though, and once you're past that hurdle you're basically playing music. 

 

Pro mode challenges the players, but it was a bigger challenge for Harmonix to design.  "It was arguably the hardest thing we've ever done," Sussman claims.  "The amount of information we're trying to build a game around is so varied and deep.  There's a lot of buttons for a reason.  You see great drummers playing on a three piece kit, but you don't see a lot of guitarists playing on a one string or five fret guitar.  You don't need a lot of inputs for a compelling drum experience, and we hit that balance well.  The ukelele experience is far less compelling than a guitar, so dealing with the amount of information coming in and formatting it in a user interface that is recognizable or accessible took up the most effort on our part.  It's also something that we're incredibly well suited to do as a company.  We've been working on abstract information represented in user interfaces going back to our very first games.

 

"The ambition with the guitar game was straight-forward," Sussman continues.  "You should be able to play it on an actual six-string guitar and it should reflect everything or most things you need to know to be a serviceable guitar player.  With the keyboard, because we didn't have an audience who played any kind of a keyboard game before, we had to support both ends of the spectrum.  It was difficult in the early stages where we had to conceptualize what kind of a game it would be."