AC DC Live: Rock Band - Track Pack ISO XEX - ...
Players can download songs on a track-by-track basis, with many of the tracks also offered as part of a "song pack" or complete album, usually at a discounted rate. Tracks released for Rock Band 2 on the Wii platform are only available as singles while Rock Band 3 offers multi-song packs as well as singles. Since on-disc songs are not available for download, some albums are incomplete. For example, the album Blood Sugar Sex Magik is available for download; it contains the song "Give it Away" on Rock Band 2 and Blitz, so the downloadable album does not include "Give it Away".
AC DC Live: Rock Band - Track Pack ISO XEX - ...
The franchise is the Trope Namer for: Big Rock Ending: Charted as a Button Mashing part. The first game got a little carried away with these, placing them on every song that could even remotely qualify, and musically adding them into many of the covers that didn't (and even a few master tracks!). Also, the AC/DC pack has some ridiculously long "BRE"s.
Bladder of Steel: An optional achievement (in Rock Band 2) gives us what has to be the biggest modern example this side of MMOs. We're talking over six hours without failing or pausing. The songs go in ascending order of difficulty as well, so you're probably already tired out by the time you get to Visions, Panic Attack, Painkiller, etc., making failure even more likely.
D-G Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Sight-reading Megadeth's Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? album on Rock Band 2 on Guitar-Expert. You will end up conditioning yourself to use overdrive the second blue comes down the highway. Then you'll hit "Bad Omen"'s second solo and full-combo it. And then you'll hit "Bad Omen"'s Third Solo and fail because you wasted your overdrive on the laughably easy second solo.
This also screwed up a lot of Guitar Hero 2 players when "Hangar 18" came out for Rock Band; the RB chart is quite different from the GH2 version.
If you're left handed, but play guitar right handed due to your more dexterous left hand, you'll probably be playing keyboard with your left hand. There is no lefty flip option for keyboard. You're probably going to try to play green notes with your index finger and orange notes with your pinky, even though you will want to do the opposite.
Switch from guitar to keyboard causes this in any combination, really, mainly because you have to use five fingers rather than four.
Can also be inverted. The player can experience moments where he/she nails a difficult section perfectly and thinks "how did I just do that?" That's your muscle memory helping you out.
Defeat Means Friendship: A meta-example: some songs by An Endless Sporadic have been showing up on the Rock Band Network
Difficult, but Awesome: Using the bottom frets on a Fender Stratocaster controller during guitar solos. During a guitar solo, you can hit the notes using the buttons on the bottom of the guitar controller without needing to strum. However, because the game counts each time you hit a button on the bottom fretboard during a solo as a strum and penalizes you more for strumming when there isn't a note than for missing a note, you'll likely do worse using these buttons than you would using the top buttons and the strum bar, at least the first time you try it. HOWEVER, with practice, you can use these buttons to great effect during certain difficult solos. What makes this technique so effective is that you can use both of your hands to hit notes, whereas you would otherwise only be able to use your non-dominant hand to hit notes. One example of where this technique is useful is the solo in Disturbed's "Stricken", during the part where you must alternate between green notes and other notes. The notes go by so quickly it can be hard to hit them with just one hand. However, you can hold the green button on the top fretboard and use the bottom one to hit the other notes.
Joe Satriani's "Surfing With the Alien" features some of the fastest trills in the series, but since the vast majority of them alternate between orange and a different note, you can hold down the other note on the top fretboard and mash away on the orange button on the bottom fretboard (using two fingers is recommended) to hit those trills. An even MORE difficult technique is to hold ORANGE down on the shredboard and tap madly at the other note. It seems like it shouldn't work, but it does.
The infamous Solo 2 (also known as the Surf Solo) in "Satch Boogie" is another place where you can use this technique to great effect by holding down the green button on the upper fretboard using your other hand to hit the other notes on the bottom fretboard. You may need to cross your arms so you can use your regular fret hand (your more dextrous hand) on the bottom fretboard, where you will be hitting the majority of the notes, but the song has a long sustained note (as the final note of a Overdrive phrase no less) before Solo 2, giving you time to do just that and also start the section with a full overdrive gauge.
Another place where holding down on the green fret is more or less necessary is the intro to Thunderstruck on the AC/DC Track Pack - but if you imported the song to Rock Band 2 instead of playing it on the Track Pack disc itself, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that the note chart has been changed from all-tapping to only being able to tap the green notes, forcing you to keep strumming while you hold your thumb over the green fret.
Difficulty by Region: Due to the way that the game's overstrum protection interacts with the frame rate, fast strumming parts are easier to hit in the PAL version of the game than in the NTSC version. As a result, pretty much any song with 13+ notes per second strumming has never been Full Comboed by someone playing the NTSC version of the game. This was finally fixed with the retroactive tweaks to tremolo strumming and removal of overstrum protection in Rock Band 3, and taken further in Rock Band 4, where any long repetitive strum or trill is charted with a fill lane, even on songs made before the feature was introduced.
Does Not Like Shoes: The Duke of Gravity in Rock Band 3. Your own created characters can be this in any of the games if you choose.
Double Play: Some loading screens suggest playing an instrument and singing at the same time.
Downloadable Content: If each song is one pound, there's tons of it. With RBN, it became possible for music copyright owners to add and sell their own (though only 30% of the profit would go to the music- and chart-makers). * ahem* Enormous wall of every Rock Band song, ever. And it's incomplete, considering the songs that came out after this photo was taken.
Here we go again.
Drop-In-Drop-Out Multiplayer: In Rock Band 3 this is possible in menus, loading screens, and even during a song.
Dynamic Difficulty: In the Brutal Mode of Rock Band 4, having more health causes the gems to go invisible sooner. At full health, they only have time to blink into view before going invisible, especially if a strong hyperspeed modifier is running.
Easier Than Easy: Super Easy in Lego Rock Band. No fret-work on guitar, no worrying about what drum you're hitting on drums, and no pitch detection on vocals.
Earn Your Fun: Averted in Rock Band 3, which unlocks every song from the start (though there are still clothes and instruments to unlock). The Beatles, Green Day, and Lego games also have most songs unlocked from the beginning.
Played straight in the first two games, where the majority of songs are locked from the start, and can only be earned by playing the Tour mode, which can be tedious compared to Quickplay. The player can input a cheat code to unlock on-disc songs in the first two games, making it useful for Rock Band parties; however, this disables saving and achievements.
Early-Installment Weirdness: The original Rock Band compared to subsequent games: Songs were separated into nine tiers of difficulty; it was reduced to seven in later games.
Preset and custom characters were tied to a specific instrument; in all subsequent mainline games and Lego Rock Band, any character can play any instrument.
Band World Tour mode could not be played solo or online.
Easy-Mode Mockery: In the first game, Easy Mode prevents you from unlocking the last sets of songs on the Easy career tour. The multiplayer Band World Tour mode takes this further: after a certain point, the Easy difficulty is locked out, forcing everyone to play at least on Medium.
Rock Band 2 continues the tradition. If certain songs are in your setlist in tour mode, Easy difficulty is locked out. On some late single-song gigs, Easy and Medium difficulty gets locked out, forcing everyone that was on Medium to jump to Hard.
The Beatles: Rock Band has a subtle form of this. If you select Easy as your difficulty, or if you press the select the Back, Select, or - button No-Fail mode is on. Green Day stopped being subtle with that, and openly admitted that No Fail Mode was on if you picked Easy.
All of the games share one with a high threshold: no matter how many points you or your band earns, the gold star rank can't be obtained if even a single member is playing below Expert.
The End: After finishing the story mode of The Beatles: Rock Band, there's one more song to play. Three guesses what it's called.
Epic Rocking: RB3 lets you filter by duration, including the category "Neverending Epic Songs" (which clock in at over 9 minutes). Just giving some examples, we have "Foreplay/Long Time", "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Green Grass and High Tides" in the first game; "Panic Attack" in the second; "Jailbreak", "High Voltage" and "Let There Be Rock" in the AC/DC Live pack; "Homecoming" and "Jesus of Suburbia" in Green Day; and "Free Bird" and "Roundabout" in the third. Somewhat averted pre-Rock Band 3 - if you picked Green Grass and High Tides solo vocals, you get a version with shorter solos (but the same number of tambourine notes), and with Foreplay/Long Time, the game skips Foreplay.
But completely played straight on the Wii version. Instead of shorter versions, you play the full song. This actually allows Wii players to get higher scores on Foreplay/Long Time (the tambourine notes during Foreplay are absent on the other versions).
On December 31, 2011, we got "2112" from Rush. The whole twenty-minute version.
Rock Band 4 has Dream Theater's "Metropolis, Pt. 1", clocking in at 9 and a half minutes.
On July 11, 2017, they announced In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly as downloadable content for RB4. Not the radio edit, but the full 17-minute version.
Excuse Plot: You're a musician. You play in a band. Now rock the world. Kind of subverted with the announcement of Devin Townsend bringing his album Ziltoid the Omniscient to the Rock Band Network, complete with a new plot of the titular alien overlord lambasting the player(s) for playing Rock Band in the first place and not playing a real instrument. Should you get the album, you have to prove to Ziltoid that Rock Band isn't a complete waste of time. You have 43 minutes, make it perfect. And bring him his damned coffee, while you're at it.
Expy: Several of the prefabs/session artists from Rock Band 1 and 2 are dead ringers for classic Guitar Hero characters like Clive Winston and Judy Nails.
Fake Band: Much in the tradition of using songs from Homestar Runner in the Guitar Hero games, the first Rock Band has the eponymous song by Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld. Vocalists beware.
You can also download the song "Still Alive" by GLaDOS and Jonathan Coulton.
And "Charlene (I'm Right Behind You)" by Stephen and the Colberts.
And as of March 31st 2009, three songs by SpongeBob SquarePants, with three more on November 10th (to tie in with the 10th anniversary episode "Truth or Square").
Counting the one in Lego Rock Band, there are 15 songs from Spinal Tap.
Also on Rock Band Network? The Midnight Riders.
And, courtesy RBN, another two: Drive Shaft and Geronimo Jackson.
Fake Difficulty: The drummers are usually the ones directly affected, but vocalists also have it bad sometimes. In Rock Band 1 and 2, when a song includes a harmony, with two vocal tracks sung at different pitches, Harmonix charts one of them for the vocals and penalizes you if you sing the other one, since you are technically singing the wrong pitch. This is fine in most cases, but sometimes they chart the quieter, less audible pitch as the pitch at which you need to sing, rather than the one everyone knows and will try to sing. "B.Y.O.B.", "New", and "Painkiller" are particularly egregious examples of this. But really, drummers do have it worse... They can only activate overdrive at predetermined points in the song, which reduces the number of notes they can hit. Yes, this means two people can "Full-Combo" a song with different numbers of notes hit. There are no such points during a Drum Solo in Rock Band 2. Subverted here since all the (marked) drum solos are actually noticeably easy except for the opening one in Painkiller, where outside of battle of the bands, you will not have overdrive there to begin with. This particular kind of Fake Difficulty is played straight, however, with The Jimi Hendrix Experience's "If 6 Were 9," a DLC song which has an exceedingly difficult drum solo whose challenging part doesn't start until a good way into the solo, long after your overdrive would have run out if you activated it before the solo started.
There is only one bass pedal. double-bass doesn't work well on any Rock Band kit (ESPECIALLY the ION Rockers). Attempts to full-combo some of the bass-heavy songs (such as "Conquer All", which might as well have been played by a four-legged drummer) are doomed to failure. ION Rocker owners finally have a means for double-bass. Sure, it's $60, but it actually WORKS compared to other methods such as headphone-splitters and so forth, which only work for the standard drums and only if one bass pedal is being pressed down at a time [due to how RB drums handle bass kick input].
For some time, an official splitter was available for the standard drum kit. This kit also included an extra pedal but required a AAA battery to operate. As of Rock Band 3, a second bass pedal can be plugged into the heretofore-unused unmarked plug on the back of the drum kit to act as a second bass pedal. (It can also be set to work as a hi-hat pedal while freestyling, but a hi-hat pedal has no gameplay function.)
Some songs are very awkwardly charted (see Painkiller again, especially when comparing it to the Guitar Hero Van Halen chart which shows that 3 out of every 4 kicks were charted in RB2), and others reverse Red and Yellow's normal assignments as closed Hi-Hat and Snare, to the dismay of many people playing with the ION rockers. Songs with reversed red and yellow are actually charted like that to AVERT Fake Difficulty. A real kit has the hi-hat to the left (if you're right handed) of the snare, and doing a pattern like Run to the Hills or Everlong with a constant roll on the hi-hat means that both hands are usually to the left of the snare, with one going to the right to hit the snare. If the red and yellow weren't reversed, you'd have to lead with your weak hand, making any song with that kind of pattern stupidly difficult and awkward.
And yet this makes it much more evident on songs that place similar hi-hat runs on the yellow pad. Additionally, anyone with an ION Rocker more likely than not has the yellow cymbal positioned to the left or above the red snare pad so that they can do such patterns on a whim. Rock Band 3's Pro Mode ignores the so-called "Disco Flip" if a yellow cymbal is present, keeping the hi-hat (and hi tom) on yellow instead of allowing it to be on red.
You are penalized more for missing a Kick Bass note or a snare note than any other note (including when the hi-hat and snare are flipped like Run to the Hills and Everlong). "Miss" includes actually missing the note in addition to playing a non-existent note. (incidentally enough, knowledge of this actually makes Visions a lot easier to manage.) Additionally, if you accidentally hit one note out of order in a pair of quick non-simultaneous notes on different surfaces, you get penalized for missing the first of the two. This does get carried over to Guitar Hero when they implement drums, too.
On this tangent, Solo Tapping on Guitar also has this bit of fake difficulty. It's probably easier to illustrate the point than to explain it, so let's assume you have a yellow note in a solo. If you tap blue or orange on the shredboard (or have a shredboard fret held down when you press blue or orange on the lower frets), it counts as a miss and combo break. Fair enough. If you tap Green or Red, which are BELOW Yellow, it ALSO counts as a miss and combo break, even if there is a smaller (HOPO) green or red note immediately after the yellow note. Upside? you don't HAVE to release higher frets for single-fret notes during solos when tapping them. Oh, and neither the game nor the manual ever tells you any of this, making some songs much harder than they should be (Especially those with fast multi-fret solos - Constant Motion and Satch Boogie stand out in this respect, as neither one's fast solo runs can be Overdrive-bluffed)
Hammer Smashed Face features many sections with double bass. During most of those sections, Harmonix did their usual thing where they only map every other kick-pedal hit since players are only using one pedal, rather than two. During some of the choruses, the double bass in the actual song halves in frequency, meaning there should theoretically be half as many kick-pedal notes to hit in those sections. However, Harmonix mapped those kick-peddle hits identically to the way they mapped them in the verses, regardless of the reduced frequency. As such, during those sections, you need to use one bass pedal when Cannibal Corpse's drummer used two pedals. Another Way To Die also has double bass charted, although it's justified there, as Mike Wengren (Disturbed's drummer) rarely uses both feet on kick bass in the studio, only in live performances. So that "double-bass run" in the chorus (which happens to be the fastest continuous steady run of kicks in standard Rock Band 2 DLC)? One foot.
Bornholm's "Where The Light Was Born (Thule Ultima A Sole Nomen Habens)" features two sections where every kick-pedal hit is charted in a part where the drummer clearly used double-bass. That said, if you aren't good enough to get through those parts with one kick pedal, you probably don't have the stamina needed to survive the middle of the song.
And lastly, Harmonix rarely charts closed hi-hat and open hi-hat notes on the same lane, typically using yellow for closed and blue for open. One of the FEW times the two are charted accurately is on the cover version of Run To The Hills on Rock Band 1. Since there's no hi-hat pedal, they instead set up the simulated drum kit to have one perpetually closed hi-hat and one perpetually open one. Not really something a drummer would do, but that's the reasoning. There is an adapter for actual e-drum kits that lets you chart closed and open hi-hats differently, so you can actually do it properly, and there were talks about a