This Ain't Your Daddy's Guitar - New Rock Band Details Emerge

We've finally gotten some more new info on the upcoming Rock Band title from Harmonix, including the first four tracks for the game. Note that these will be master tracks, not cover songs:

Weezer – Say It Ain't So

Black Sabbath – Paranoid

The Who – Won't Get Fooled Again

Nirvana – In Bloom

The first tracks look pretty good, a nice blend of older and newer (90's) rock. It's good to see that they were still able to secure bands that were in previous Guitar Hero games. The songs aren't what I'm excited about today, they've finally let us in on the details of the instruments we'll be playing.

I'm a Guitar Hero myself, so I've been wondering how they'll challenge me with this new game, other than just more tracks. The answer is more frets. That's right, each guitar will have a whopping 10 fret buttons, twice the number of frets on the Guitar Hero game. They note that these will be used during their new "solo sections." The Guitars will also have a five way switch for guitar effects that can be purchased in-game. This leads me to wonder how the Guitar Hero controllers will work if used.

The drum set will have four pads and one pedal. You'll have your snare, with the other three pads used as toms and cymbals, depending on the song. Of course you'll get yourself a nice pair of Rock Band drumsticks too.

The mic is well, a mic. It has a built-in "phoneme detector" which basically prevents you from cheating your way through a song by just humming. For all of you singers out there that feel disappointed that you don't actually get to play an instrument, fear not! The mic can also double as a tambourine during some songs.

We still don't know how much they are going to charge for the game and instruments, either way, this game is going to rock!

New Rock Band details: instruments explained, first four songs announced [via opposablethumbs]