Oh and one other thing, though they’re somewhat self explanatory, but what DO the little mini-awards you get after songs mean? Most Gutsy is especially confusing, if I had to guess I’d say it has to do with the relative difficulty of the song and in general compared to the rest of the band.
Drum fills: Once you collect enough ‘star power’ by hitting white notes in sequence, you’ll activate fills. When that happens, every few measures of the song a ‘fill area’ will show up. It’s totally free-form what you do in there. Make up fills, keep a 4/4 beat, whatever. When you get near the end, you hit the ‘crash cymbal’ (the green pad) to activate star power, which doubles your score for a period of time. The fills themselves are not scored.
I think Most Gutsy means you played on a harder difficulty than everyone else, but I’m not certain of that.
Most Gutsy seems to mean that you hung in there and survived (i.e., you came back from the brink). Energy Hoarder is the person who had the most energy and didn’t burn it. Savior is the one who rescued others.
What amuses me is when my husband and I play, and earn the same score, yet one of us is marked Top Performer. Must be random.
Alright, then what is “Serious Skills”. Though it’s relatively self explanatory what’s the exact critera.
Also how do you unlock Rolling Stones Rock Immortals? I want my glowy drums.
Also… this is way too much fun, even compared to the original, maybe because I can actually play drums worth a damn now.
If I remember correctly, to unlock the Rolling Stones Rock Immortals setlist, you have to unlock Shanghai, then its 8 or so songs, increasing in difficulty. After beating that I think you get the golden instrument that you used to beat it.
If anybody is still interested, my gamertag is Emery88, but I’m usually only online during the day and evening. I can play expert on everything, but I mainly do guitar, and genuinely enjoy doing bass.
Le Sigh
I’m officially stuck in the “nether zone” between medium and hard on the drums. I can pretty much just screw around* and score in the mid-high 90%s on most songs, I don’t even have to concentrate on anything really on medium. Hard, on the other hand, EATS MY FACE. I’ve tried everything, heel up (which tires me out, I feel like I’m only using my ankle, but my thigh starts to tire… also, I’m starting to fear it’s gonna break the spring… when I use heel up it makes an ungodly squeaking noise after a while). I’ve tried heel down, which is what is more natural, but to get faster parts I’ve been starting in the down position rather than unpressed, it works to a point, but really fast parts don’t leave me enough time to raise and lower. I think my real problem is songs like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ default song, which has that weird off-beat kick, which seems to be what fazes me, I can play Dirty Little Secret (a DLC) on expert, for instance (barely, and I learned this by accident, but I can muddle through).
Any tips for switching up? Especially good “practice” songs, I’ve been trying the challenges from ground up a second time, but I’ve found the tiers hardly match up to difficulty, for example I found Pinball Wizard and The Trees ridiculously easy, while I find some of the lower ones harder.
And I swear to the 7 Heavenly Spheres, if I hear Rebel Girl one more time I’m gonna get stabby.
*By screwing around I mean: randomly crossing, crossing every other note on green+red repetitions (i.e. right is green, left is red then on the next set left is green, right is red and back again ad infinitum), seeing how crazy I can get with my strokes (on slower blues I’ll strike with a leftward momentum and come back right on the second), playing as much as I can one handed (especially with my off-hand), in other words pretty much everything short of playing in performance mode.
Hey O!
My dorm floor beat the endless set list. Pretty much one guy on drums, then 5 guys on the others till about 50 songs in, then 4 for the other 3 parts till the end. That was pretty dang fun, even though I’ve hardly played II at all.
Did you guys get the Bladder of Steel achievement/trophy? If not, chop chop, back to the grind!
(For those that don’t know, that achievement is playing the Endless Setlist WITHOUT PAUSING OR FAILING)
We’re not that crazy! 
We’d need to go down some levels for that - didn’t fail much, but a few times. And we’d need someone else to be competent on drums.
Maybe at some point in the future. And not starting at midnight.
You should *always start from the down position. You play the pedal like this: The front of your foot pushes the pedal down. Heel up works best for most people. The pedal stays down until a beat comes along. To hit the beat, you lift your foot and put it down again on the beat, and leave it down until the next one.
When you’re tapping your foot to a song, you don’t leave your leg in the air between beats, do you?
On the really fast beats, on a real drum, you’d press down, then let the impact of the rebound of the beater on the drum push the pedal back up again, then press down again for the next beat. The spring does the job of that on the Rock Band drums, but it’s not as good. In any event, there are no songs on hard that I can think of that have a bass drum beat so fast that proper foot down/heel up technique doesn’t work fine.
This is everyone’s problem on drums. Leaning to separate your foot rhythm from your hands is difficult, because there’s not much else we do that gives us practice doing that. All I can say is, keep it up and you’ll get it. When I first started playing the drums, I was hopeless. I simply could not maintain a different beat with my foot and hands. They’d want to sync up all the time. But eventually it just ‘clicked’, and now it’s not really a problem at all. I went from failing out regularly on songs on medium and hard to being able to play everything but a few of the hardest songs on expert. You’ll get there.
I think the difficulty level is really based on expert. Depending on the song, the transition from one skill level to the other is bigger. Also, with drums moreso than with other instruments, what makes a song hard for you is whether or not it features rhythms that fall into your strengths or weaknesses.
I’d recommend finding songs that feature a lot of separated foot and hand rhythms, since that seems to be your problem. Find songs with slow passages like this so you can practice them. You might also try working through the beat trainer in RB2, there are plenty of beats in there that have complex rhythms, and you can keep practicing over and over until they ‘click’. That’s probably your fastest route to improvement.
You’d be better off to stick to learning how to do it correctly. For example, make sure you are holding your sticks properly, with a light grip so they rebound naturally. Learn the proper ‘stickings’ for various rhythms. I really screwed up at first by doing fast single-note rhythms with one hand - That’s easy to do on medium and even hard, and it’s easier to learn than constantly moving both hands all over the place. It’s also mostly wrong, and when you get into the tougher songs you’ll have a bad habit to unlearn.
If you don’t learn the right stickwork, it gets a lot harder to play fast songs. By ‘right stickwork’ I mean, for instane, that if you have to hit three notes on a drum, you want to start with the outside hand (for example, if you’re hitting the far left pad, you want to start with your left hand, so that you end with your left hand. This frees up your right hand to move to the next drum on the same beat that your left hand is hitting the third note). With a four-note sequence, you start with your right hand and end on your left. If you don’t do this, you’ll find yourself constantly tripping up because your arms will get in the way of each other.
Here is an excellent tutorial for this on the Scorehero forum: Stickings and You - Making Parts Flow.
Oh, no, I’m aware of this part. I actually forced myself to learn grouping and such, I also hold the stick with the correct grip naturally (I thought I was holding it wrong for a while until I looked it up). I’m not a drummer, but I’ve been in band long enough to know the terminology and vague basics, I do rolls with both hands (I used to with only one, but I forced myself to learn the right way the other day cause I knew it’s be a problem otherwise) and let the rebound do most of the work, which saves me on the faster parts.
My screwing around isn’t that extreme, I wouldn’t do the stuff if I was actually trying, I’m not really getting any habits in my head. What I was mostly trying to do is “exercises” to separate <hand> from <pad> because I noticed some parts on hard where there would be, say, a continuous yellow and a change between blue and red, and (you can correct me if I’m wrong) it seemed like it’d be easier to continue yellow with the right hand and do the switch and cross with the left. I’m not trying to play fancy just do drills because I was getting it too far in my head that a certain hand is always a certain pad (and unfortunately, before I started that it was left for red, yellow for everything else so every instance of, say, blue + green ate me) and it’s simply to help me separate them for when I’m playing normally. I’m not doing it to excess.
Thanks for the reply though, that helps a lot.
I’m in the same boat as you Jragon, I’m a solid Medium player with high 90’s scores on about every song, but Hard kicks my ass. Gotta find time to practice, but too much else to do.
Do any **accomplished ** guitarists play Rock Band or Guitar Hero?
Q
Slash has said that he’s been late going on stage on occasion because he gets engrossed playing Guitar Hero in his dressing room.
A couple of the bands that have songs in Rock Band have said that they lobbied for their songs to get into the game because they loved playing it.
Rock Band and Guitar Hero are games. There’s nothing about playing an instrument that makes you not want to play Rock Band. In a similar vein, it might not surprise you to learn that a lot of Flight Sim fanatics also fly real airplanes.
I’m making the medium->hard transition myself now and I can beat about half or maybe 2/3rds of the hard songs.
Start with RB2 medium songs, then move onto difficult RB1 medium songs (rb1 medium is way harder than rb2 medium), then start the very easy rb2 songs on hard.
The main problem I had getting down was the offbeat kick. I can’t exactly explain how I got it down… I have a mental image and sound of what a real drummer would sound like doing it and I try to go with that. If you’re having trouble with that, start with songs that are slow and have a nice even offbeat kick in their main rhythm like Alive by Pearl Jam or Our Truth by Lacuna Coil. It’s easy enough to get the idea down with that stuff. Don’t hop into stuff with funky off beat rhythms.
I’ve been playing on hard since nearly the beginning with RB1, but I definitely have a limitation. I struggle pretty badly with “Everlong” on hard. I took a glimpse of it on Expert, and I couldn’t even keep up with it at 60% speed on practice. What a joke!
There are a limited number of songs (in the easiest tiers) that I can do on Expert with scores in the mid- to upper-90s. I wish I could do better because my wife can cruise singing on Expert, but I can’t keep up with her, and our band craves more fans!
Here’s my thought re: ramping up on the drums.
I am not a drummer, and I was a disaster in the beginning. One of the big problems I had was that, in anything but Expert, what I wanted to do didn’t match the game, because I was trying to play things that weren’t there - i.e., I knew the real song had a double tap in there, but the game wants to “make it easy” and only wanted one tap. This made it very difficult for me.
So, I switched to Expert exclusively, and started with songs I knew very well. It took months of practice, but now I’d say I’m okay. I can get 99% on a song like Buddy Holly, but if I were to try a Rush song, I’d make it about 20 seconds in and fail miserably.
And, it is true, practice, practice, practice. There have been times when I knew something was coming I couldn’t get, and when it got there, I just played it. Drums, more so than anything else, just requires you to go with flow. It is so hard for me to relax when I play challenging songs - one night, playing Go Your Own Way, I tuned into the tricky beat finally. But I was banging the drums so hard, my hubby was worried I would break them.
But damnit, when I was done with that song, I stood in triumph!
I’m totally in the same place on Guitar Hero World Tour. (I’m still waiting on Rock Band 2 for the Wii to come out, and praying the GHWT drums are compatible.)
I’m growing very frustrated with this “no man’s land”. I absolutely rule in Medium. I’ve got 5 stars on every song, and have even gotten several 100% performances. I can play a handful of songs on Hard, but not nearly enough. And it feels like an insurmountable hurdle. There are obvious fundamental skills I’m missing which are keeping me from getting to the next level.
More than anything, it really makes playing online difficult. I try to play one-on-one challenges with other drummers. It seems like most people I run into are playing Expert. Since I can drum almost every song in the game at least 95% on medium, I easily win all the time. I try in good faith to switch up to Hard so I’m not totally dominating, and then I look like a complete moron because I’m missing more notes than I’m hitting. So invariably, my opponent quits because I’m playing at a level that’s too easy for me and they can’t win, or they quit because I pick difficult songs that I can still enjoy at the Medium level but are way too hard for them. And if I step up to Hard for online play, I end up quitting because I can’t enjoy playing above my own skill level.
sigh indeed
Anyway, I just wanted to say that I feel your pain. If you unlock a secret that works for you, please share. Meanwhile, I’m going to keep trying to teach my right foot to have a mind of its own.