Earlier this week at the E3 convention, Activision made some big announcements concerning the next-gen (or I guess current-gen at this point) iteration of Rock Band. They confirmed the game will be released on October 6th and they have revealed that you will be able to "freestyle" your own unique solo within certain parts of the game. Here is a trailer, which doesn't do much in the way of explaining how it works but still looks fancy:
[youtube]https://youtu.be/Dtvh7B_U-Hw[/youtube]
Shortly after, they released this second clip explaining the guitar solo feature a bit more:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB03AFfnSHE[/youtube]
A review on Wired does a good job of explaining how things work:
Similar to the improvisational drum-fill sections that have been around since the first game, guitar solos have been redesigned to a more freeform system that hopes to capture the feeling of wailing out a guitar solo like a true rock star.
In these sections, the on-screen button prompts are replaced by colored patterns that indicate a particular action to take. Different patterns mean different things you do with your fingers—one dictates holding a note and strumming in rhythm, another means you should hold a fret down with one hand and finger-tap the keys next to it with the other. Different colors determine whether these actions should be performed on the standard fret buttons up top, or the secondary solo keys near the guitar base.
The system is weird, at first. Tapping out a difficult guitar solo is one of my favorite accomplishments inRock Band, and I’ll admit I was fairly dismayed to find that experience totally supplanted by the new system. (I learned later that you can disable it and just go with normal beat-matching for solos, if you want.)
It sounds interesting enough to where I'd be curious to play it, but they're going to need to throw in some more metal songs the way Guitar Hero has.
