Agreed however I do like the new guitar so I am OK with my purchase.

Yeah, ignoring the the quality of the song, it seems like a poor choice for this game. I guess it will at least be more fun on bass/guitar.

I picked up the bundle, but I won't be putting much into DLC. I'll do the free ones and huge, must have songs, but that will be it. I am even picking up Dammit (and any other dupes) for Rock Band, as GH:WT just isn't as party friendly as I had hoped. Still fun, but nowhere near the experience I expected.

My yellow cymbal missed notes on a semi-regular basis. I played RB2 with it and tried menu navigation using the yellow cymbal and the blue pad back and forth and it missed hits just doing that too. This leads me to believe no patch will fix this problem. To top it off, my 4 year old was turning the cymbals sideways and then my 10 year old was turning it back but didn't pay attention to the direction the wire was taut and popped the wire out of the connector. I just got back from taking my set back to Blockbuster where I had pre-ordered it. Of course no local stores within a reasonable distance had the band set in stock for 360. I returned for credit and picked up game + guitar. I won't touch those drums again until they have a better build and sell them separately. I guess I should have trusted that impression from playing in store at the Best Buy kiosk. I was just blinded by the bounce and feel of the actual pads.

Don't like the interface too much... it feels clunky and amateurish when compared to the clean lines and efficiency of RB and RB2. The song selection is decent enough but it's not OMG SO OVERWHELMING that I'd choose it over RB and its incredible DLC content (which I already got a ton of). I'm not impressed by the tour modes either, there seems to be much more variety and theming in RB.

On the plus side, LOVE the open note on the bass play, which gives it an edge of RB. Vocals are a LOT pickier (my wife sings on Expert, and is top rated on RB, but she was having issues with GH:WT). I haven't played Drums yet (I play Hard regularly on RB) so we'll see how that goes with my existing set.

The character creation and customization is fine and dandy, but I'm not quite sold on the animations yet. I don't feel the same "personal" feel I get in RB.

Maybe I'm just too used to RB. It's kind of like your groin.

The hardware (both guitar and drums) plus the set list make this a great game IMO. The venues, character creation, animation stuff is just fluff anyways and doesn't really bother me one way or the other. Shit I played Frets on Fire for a long time and was pretty happy with that. For me it's all about the music and quality gear. I think Neversoft has done a good job on both accounts.

The song duplicates compared side by side

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_lis...0FEB9E31F972F4

Well Activision has admitted that there was a manufacturing issue:

So while you are waiting for that fix how about a new set of drumsticks to go with it?

http://www.redoctane.com/Guitar-Hero...umsticks-White

Zildjian Travis Barker Drumsticks (White)

That's pretty cool.

I really like the open note on bass. Overkill by Motorhead was killer on Expert bass. It took me half the song to realize that the solid white lines are for open note pulloffs.

I also think the held notes on guitar while other notes are being played adds a completely new dimension and makes some boring songs interesting. I have a terrible time keeping my fingers holding those notes down.

Here is a fix for most know drum issues.

http://community.guitarhero.com/foru..._topics/131655

I personally tried this using electrical tape and I must say my drums work like a charm now.

I think any lost hits are the fault of my not so perfect playing now.

Basically unscrew the back of the drums (do not unscrew the top most 3 screws as they secure the "control pod"
in place) and use masking tape to put some pressure on the piezo sensors. Now i can tap them as lightly as my rock band 1 drums and they register!!

Comparing the sensitivity to the RB1 drums isn't exactly a good thing

Interesting. I was wondering how long before someone did that. I only checked out 2 songs, Bon Jovi and Lacuna Coil (guitar, expert) and they were nearly identical other than the intro on the Lacuna Coil song.

Got to start my guitar career properly last night and played for about three hours. Some additional thoughts:

* I love the new guitar, and in theory the slide bar seems like a nice addition. But there's no way in hell you can get your hand down to it, hit the right notes, and then back up to the regular buttons and not miss anything. In the end, this gimmick will just end up being one of those things that people who play GH non-stop use to prove they're better than everyone else. "Oh you FCed (insert difficult song here)? Well I FCed it AND used the touch pad!"

* I know there was probably no way to avoid some of the same songs being in both Rock Band and GH4, but good lord, why are all the duplicates in the first gigs you play? I played 8-10 full gigs last night and all of them were mostly songs that I've already played to death in Rock Band. So boring.

If song selection between the two platforms becomes equal and we just have to judge each solely on gameplay then Rock Band will win handily.

* I noticed that coming out of an in-game pause the screen counts you down back into the song. Best feature ever.

So apparently as of a few hours ago, the patch for the 360 went live to fix the ION kits. Unfortunately it only acts as a 4 pad Rock Band kit, but that's good enough for me.

Definitely a feature that every music game needs.

I like that feature, too. You can even somewhat see what's coming up while it's paused, instead of trying to remember which notes you would soon be missing, like in RB.

While I admit it is a nice feature, I don't let anything interrupt me while playing.

If the phone rings, they'll leave a message if important.
If my wife says something, she can wait until the song's over.
If someone's at the door, I'll walk over to the door and open it while playing if I can.

Your score and percentage are still going to be lower than if you had played the song all the way through, so you'll end up playing it again anyways.

I love the pause feature as my wife and kids and life come before my fun times and psuedo-rocking. Also I don't play for score or stars, just for fun.

The only thing I can see that would improve it at all, and I thought I read it did this a while ago, is to actually back up the song and note charts a few seconds and maybe grey it out so that you can get back into the rhythm before it re-enables.

As it is, it is light years ahead of RB's pausing.

I hate the Quickplay song selection menu more than life itself.

Not true at all. Maybe in quickplay but what about World Tour? The game is so robust, I'm not going to go through an 8 song set to get the lone star that I missed because my toddler knocked over a drink all over the carpet during one of the songs that I had to tend to. My dog scratches the hell out of the back door if I don't get up to let her out, hence, pause. Some of us don't have the luxury of blocking "life" out once the 360 is turned on. That's why I hate that you lose fans if you quit during a song/set. Pausing is the only option, so a 3 second countdown is great to ease you back into it without totally screwing up your set. At least you can save/quit during the challenges in RB2. That is a plus which only makes the other mode look worse for not having that feature.

I wait until the wife and kids are asleep until I play. When I do play with the kiddies up and about they're almost always live score duel matches so if anything happens, I just take the loss since I can't pause anyway.

Add me to the list of resume countdown lovers. I've only had to use it once, but I had hit a break in the song so the remaining chart was hidden behind the graphics. It is the perfect combination of allowing for interruptions while not allowing constant pausing to map out the next notes.

Also great are Hot Blooded and Jesse's Girl. Both very low on difficulty and high on fun. I haven't bothered DLing the boss battle songs, but I think both artists did a bang up job with those.

By the way, I thought there was a music store in this, like Rock Band's. Where is it?

I heard that they added it in with the patch from this morning. I don't have the game, so I can't know for sure.

Oh, that's good. I haven't played today, but without the patch, you had to go through the marketplace outside of the game.