I have been a drummer for about 14 years. I have been around guitars most of my life, but never really felt like learning one, mainly cause hitting drums seemed easier to me. I got this controller about a week ago and I have already learned 5 songs on expert. If you are not very good with rockband/guitarhero guitars, but still love the game for singing or drums, this may be for you. I can't play a single song on the 5 button guitar controller on the expert difficulty setting. But in a week I can play 5 songs, easy songs, but full songs.
SIZE - This this is slightly bigger than a 5 button guitar, but weight wise feels the same.
QUALITY -I haven't had any problems with a button not responding and the strings are steel coated with nylon, which seem like cheap plastic from the sound they give off. But they are durable, they just sound like plastic. I don't mind this because they are infinitely quieter than uncoated strings. But make no mistake, this IS a plastic guitar controller.
NEW features -With songs that have Pro guitar/bass charting you can practice the song like normal. But there is a new trainer unique to each song under the "learn to play song" section. Here the song is broken down to its basic components. For example the song "The Hardest button to Button" only had 3 components. You practice these components as you would a beat or fill in the drum trainer. Once you master the components you go to practice song and place them where they go and bahdabingbahdaboom you now know a song.
CONS -None that I have noticed so far. But I am not too familiar with guitars so I may never notice. A friend of mine that came by to give it a shred said that with strings you can feel which string you are on easier cause on a "real" guitar the strings are different thicknesses. On this its just 17 frets of buttons, all the same size. (thickness, not width) But he loved this anyway, cause he learned to play a song he likes and has never tried to play before.
If anyone has a specific question about this, or even about the software (the game rockband) just ask here and i will answer asap. :)
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First off let me just get this out of the way. I did not purchase this from Amazon, I purchased it from Gameshark.com and have had it for about 2 weeks now.
I was incredibly skeptical about this guitar when I first heard about it. "A plastic six string guitar? How's that supposed to work?" However, I heard nothing but good things about this guitar over at the Rock Band forums so I knew I had to actually try this for myself. So essentially this is a plastic guitar that has 102 buttons that is supposed to mimic a 6-stringed, 17 fretted guitar. The neck has numbers on each edge by the 3rd fret,the 5th fret, and so-on, similar to real guitar so you have a guide to where which numbered fret is where. As far as the rest of the buttons are concerned, you have the A, B, X, and Y buttons on the right side of the pick guard, and you have your start, back and guide buttons on the left side of the pick guard. If you are left handed like me, this layout is unfortunately terrible because instead of the buttons being located directly below the strings where they're easy to reach, they are instead located under your arm pit essentially. This isn't a big deal, but it's incredibly annoying if you're a south paw. One of my absolute favorite features of this guitar is how you can disassemble it into three pieces. You can easily pull the entire neck out of the body of the guitar, and you can also easily take the head stock off of the neck, unlike the RB3 Stratocaster where trying to remove the head stock is a chore.
Now down to playing the guitar. Like I said before it has six plastic strings that are all the same gauge or thickness, which is different from a real guitar of course, but I'm glad that they took this route so us leftys could try pro mode. This unfortunately is a bit of a problem, because on a real guitar you can tell what string you're playing by feeling how thick it is, but now since both the strings and the buttons are all the same gauge, it's harder to tell what you're playing without looking at the guitar. Another thing that's lost in translation with this guitar is the lack of vibration from the strings. Again, when playing a real guitar whenever you pluck a string it vibrates and you can tell if you're putting your finger on the right string on the fret board based on the vibration. Since this obviously can't happen with this plastic guitar, unavoidably there will be situations where you'll have your finger on the right button, but you'll be plucking the wrong string. This isn't a deal breaker, but it can cause some confusion. And now for my last little gripe about playing this guitar, the strumming. This may vary from person to person, but I find that trying to strum a string quickly can be quite difficult when done continuously. On a real guitar, yes I'm a broken record, when strumming a string quickly you usually only graze the string when you play it, but this technique won't work particularly well on the Mustang since it's wont pick up light strums most of the time.
At the end of the day, the Mustang is a really fun peripheral to use. It's awfully similar to a real guitar, and it's incredibly fun to use. I really wish this guitar wasn't so darn expensive though. $150 seems awfully steep for a plastic guitar, but it does have over 100 buttons so I suppose it's pretty expensive to make. If you have any desire to learn guitar or bass, then this is easily one of the most entertaining ways to do so. I know Madcatz has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to their products, but this guitar is a quality item. I will definitely update this review if anything goes wrong with it however.
Best Deals for Rock Band 3 Wireless Fender Mustang PRO-Guitar Controller for Xbox
First and foremost, the guitar does appear to work as advertised, however I bought it about a week ago and will be sending back tomorrow. I am familar with playing the guitar (not tons of experience, but can play a hadful of tunes) so I figured this would be a good way to enjoy Rock Band 3 and get some practice in at the same time.
I didn't realize just how much the fact that the strings at the bottom and the fret buttons were all the same size would throw me off. All of the strings are the same thickness/size (probably so they'll stay strong and won't break since there doesn't appear to be a way to change them), and this makes playing while staring at the TV extrememly difficult. Every string and button feels exactly the same, so it's difficult to play by feel.
Also, the guitar seems a lot heavier in the neck, and this kind of threw the balance off whenever I would play. Make sense due to the amount of wiring / etc. that i am sure is in the neck, but still pretty annoying.
I'm not saying that someone who kept trying couldn't maybe get used to it, but at this price why risk it? I'll be buying the actual guitar when it comes out later this year since this didn't work out. I felt bad about giving it two stars since it works as it should, etc. but two stars means "I don't like it" and that's the best description I would give it really. While it is an interesting idea, I can't see any reason to recommend this over the actual guitar Fender will be putting out later this year, especially after having used this one.
Honest reviews on Rock Band 3 Wireless Fender Mustang PRO-Guitar Controller for Xbox
I was a bit worried when I heard that Madcatz was doing the hardware for this RB3 Pro Guitar. Although Madcatz has improved their hardware over the years, I knew this pro guitar needed to be solid and with this many buttons, it had to have good quality.
Well the quality is very good overall and the body, buttons, and strings have a solid feel. The one area where the design is a bit weak is in the knobs that hold the strap, especially the one you screw is directly in the seem of the body and can easily push apart the seem of the guitar and not lock tight. To fix this, I just used a helping of Duco Cement. Now this means that I can no flip the strap to the lefty side but I can live with that and I don't have to worry about this knob popping out.
I also had to screw in a few of the top screws of the body (this was why the knob did not fit right) because it seemed one of the body screws was not fully seated. But I suspect this manufacturing glitch may not be that common.
Other than that, the guitar feels very solid for a plastic game controller. Much more solid and polished feel than I would have expected. Sure its an expensive game controller but its fairly complex piece of hardware and they did a very good job with making the buttons, neck, etc all feel like a guitar. Lighter and not quite as big as a guitar, but the fret distances are pretty much spot on.
One thing to note is that this guitar can be used in standard guitar modes and thats a good way to get a feel for the different fret spacing but the main purpose of this guitar is using pro mode to learn guitar. If you just want to play Rock Band with the best standard controller, this is not it. This guitar is for pro-mode and pro-mode has a much steeper learning curve than the standard Rock Band game. And for that purpose, this guitar delivers!
Pro-mode is very well done with great pacing where you go from learning basic notes and slowly advance to learning cords etc. And although they do not use tab for the notation, they have come up with a notation that is similar to tab but work well with the highway display and fast scrolling that will come with playing songs. I still think it would have bee nice to include a full tab mode but my guess is they tried that and found the new notation to work best.
So, although you will not learn tab reading skills, you will learn the chord names and shapes needed to play all the RB3 pro mode songs and that is impressive. Honestly, the pro mode trainers are much more complete than I would have thought. They really spent some time putting this together. Also, when you miss a chord, it can automatically stop the song, show you the correct fingering, and let you get it before you continue. It works very well and if you don't like it, you can turn it off.
Back to the hardware... Right now, I give it 5 stars because it just works. Now, for those that play guitar, you will quickly find issues here because, and this needs to be clear, this is not a guitar. Its a guitar trainer. It has some very basic differences that make some things hard to transition from real guitar to this trainer. First and most obvious is the lack of strings on the neck. What is the effect here? Well, you don't have the same feel for the string/fret so its a bit of a different feel as far as the coordination of your hands on the strings and pairing that up to the fret that pairs up with that string. But, since a real guitar give you more feedback, it may be easier to transition TO A REAL GUITAR, then FROM A REAL GUITAR. Which is sort of the whole point of a guitar training. So, if already know how to play a real guitar and you don't want re-learn a trainer, you should probably wait for the Fender Squier ($250-$350) to come out. But if you are just learning guitar, this makes one impressive trainer.
The only remaining question is how well the hardware hold up after months of use. So far, it feels like it will hold up well. But that is nearly impossible to predict. So, come back here in a few months and see if the review change. But for right now, this thing is a great guitar trainer.
UPDATE: I have since upgraded to Rocksmith for learning real guitar. At the time I did this review, RB pro-mode was the best choice. But today, I have to say that getting an inexpensive guitar and getting Rocksmith is a much better option. It does not change my review or score but I will say that I will not go back to Rockband Pro mode because I feel that Rocksmith has nailed the real-guitar trainer.
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One of the three greatest inventions in the history of human kind....that greatly contributed to insomnia. Here they are..
1. Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb.
2. Microsoft (or who ever who sold it to them) invented the Kinect and Harmonix made Dance Central game for it.
3. Harmonix (once again) invented Pro Guitar for rockband 3.
Mustang Pro guitar is good. I mean really good. I mean really really good.
To start this review with.. I'm a beginning guitar player. I'm was studying the 4th stage of a 6 stage lesson DVD set (Metal Method by Doug Marks: he is great BTW) when I got the Mustang Pro guitar. Anyway long story short; I'm not a good guitar player at all.
*Can it teach you to play real guitar? Hex yeah!!
**Does the Mustang pro guitar simulate a real guitar? IMHO better!!
*First I did the first two of the training sessions with Mustang Pro. And then I picked up a real guitar while my wife tried the same training sessions with the Mustang Pro. On the real guitar I was able to easily play the same in the electric guitar with the practice I got from the mustang Pro. AND it sounds awesome sound coming out through the guitar amp when it blends with the sound track of the game. 'Hey, that sounds v-e-r-y good' were my wife's exact words.
**I have read comments about people talking about the guitar feeling light to; strings are same thickness to; buttons being the same thickness to; there is no correlation between buttons and the strings you strum. In my experience none of this is the case. I cannot feel the thickness of the strings with the pick anyway (duh.) What I am learning from this is the skill to approximate the distance between the strings without looking. With practice able to do this better and better. Same goes for the buttons. My finger beginning to remember where they need to move to press for each note. This is a skill I can take directly to the real guitar. The buttons work very well, interestingly even for slides.
So why did I say in someway the pro guitar is better than a real guitar... There is something more satisfying about picking these strings with the pick than picking real metal strings. I threw out the picks that came with it and got Dunlop standard thickness Nylon picks. When picking the strings with those picks the strings almost feel like these strings are rubber not plastic. It's a good feeling .. u'll know what I mean once you get one yourself [UPDATE A DAY LATER: I had only played single notes and power chords when I wrote this. Later I played major chords and the strings get pretty loud when doing that. No big deal though.] As far as the construction of the guitar goes it's sturdy enough and you forget about the guitar once you get immersed in the game. Maybe wish the body was bigger like a real guitar so I could rest the elbow of the strumming arm on it when sitting down.
The reason learning with this is better than learning with an actual guitar is... you ALAWAYS have a backing track and a cool note highway showing where to play.
I can write this review into pages but I would cut it short.. because I myself dislike reading long reviews.
-If you want to learn guitar buy this.
-If you want to teach your kids guitar buy them this.
-If you don't have the time, patience or interest to learn don't buy this
I did notice one thing...in most of the trainings it tells you where which finger to put on which fret. On two trainings it did not tell me where how to move down the frets . For example it was wanting me to play 5th, 7th and 8th frets and to play the 5th string with my index finger. Suddenly it wants me to play the 9th fret but does not tell me which finger to use. So I'm confused whether to move my hand all the way down and play with the index or stretch my pinky to play the 9th fret (this was a base line by the way. ) I wish there was an option where I could watch a video of a hand playing that piece if I wanted to . That's about all I can nit pick about. I would figure this out or ask somebody who knows... so no big deal.
TEN stars. Harmonix, come here so I can give you a kiss.
