Squier® - Rock Band 3 Game Guitar - Black

If you ever wanted to play guitar, the Fender Squier and Rock Band 3 might be one of the easiest ways to get started. But that is not to say it is easy. This is a real guitar, not a game controller. You are going to have to treat it as such. Getting a guitar is much closer to getting a dog than getting a television. Don't expect that you can just pick up the box with the Squier in it and be ready to go. Some additional things you need to use the Rock Band Squier: The MIDI Pro Adapter for your game system so you can connect the guitar to the game console. Right now these are hard to find. Guitar picks. A tuner (but see the next item). A guitar amp if you want to hear what you are playing. Consider a modeling amp like the Fender Mustang I to get a wide range of sounds. This amp, and others, include a guitar tuner. A 1/4" instrument cable to connect either of the above. Some more things that are nice but not essential: A guitar stand or wall hook. A gig bag or guitar case. A 1 foot MIDI cable if you want to mount the MIDI Pro Adapter on the guitar. See the accompanying photo of the mounted adapter with the supplied 10 foot MIDI cable and an 8 inch MIDI cable I made. BTW, mounting on-guitar is almost essential for the XBox 360 because Microsoft doesn't allow the on-guitar game control buttons to be sent to the XBox. All guitars, including this one, should receive a "setup" to do the fine adjustments needed to get the guitar in good playing condition. You can do this yourself if you are reasonably mechanically handy. You may need to do some research on the special adjustments needed to get the best responsiveness for playing in Rock Band. All in all this is a really fun guitar for those who are prepared to put in the effort. But do yourself a favor, don't buy this if you think it is just an easy step up from the plastic toy controllers. The Mustang controller might be a better choice for that.

Bottom Line: Quality of craftsmanship as just an electric guitar: 7 out of 10 Responsiveness and accuracy of fret-board sensors: 10 out of 10 Rock Band 3’s Pro Guitar tutorial: 10 out of 10 RB3’s Pro Guitar songs - how well they progress through the difficulties: 10 out of 10 RB3’s Pro Guitar songs – how accurate each note/chord is to the song: 10 out of 10 TLDR/Bored at work part: First of all, I love this guitar. But let me back up a little bit. I have 4 guitars other than this one, including an $800 Schecter. I read all the reviews I could find on this Fender and as a result had very low expectations both in terms of quality and responsiveness of the fret-board sensors. But I really wanted to try it for myself because I’ve looked forward to this guitar since it was first announced. So I triple-checked Bestbuy’s return policy on this item and hesitantly purchased this guitar (I had already picked up a MIDI adapter for my PS3). Although it’s certainly not the quality of my Schecter - it’s really not bad – not bad at all. Maybe I’m just not as demanding or maybe not as pro as some of the other reviewers. I plugged it into my iPhone with iRig with headphones. It tuned up easy and sounds great to my ears, sustain is good – fretting higher up the neck is still relatively in tune. The setup on it was done properly. So that’s out of the way; this axe is of decent quality. But what was really most important to me was how well the game would be able to pick up my fingering and picking. On this huge aspect I would give it 10 out of 10 – very responsive and accurate. I can slide up and down the neck on different strings and can see the numbers going up and down on the screen without a perceivable delay on-screen. Haven’t had any problems with it showing my fingering inaccurately, on both fretting and picking. Another thing I was concerned about was the number of songs I already have that have pro guitar parts. I have the keyboard and was disappointed in songs I thought should have the keys and don’t so I was wondering if I’d run into the same thing with pro guitar. Turns out the vast majority of the songs that come with RB3 have pro guitar parts and lots of the downloads I’ve done have them too. I understand some downloads require an extra dollar. Considering I remember paying 4 or 5 bucks for sheet music (single songs) or much more for whole albums, etc. And this is an interactive, progressive way of not only teaching you the song, but forcing you to keep time with the other parts of the band. Let me stop there and talk about how important that part is. When you learn to play guitar with hours and hours of practice on your own you will never get that part of music of keeping up with the rest of the band. If you miss a note or don’t get to it in time when you’re by yourself you tend to just hit the note late and go from there. But when you’re playing with a band and miss a note you have to forget about that note and try to hit the next one. You could possibly get this effect by using a metronome or even playing along to the song, but there’s a different feeling when playing the game of RB3 – it feels more like playing with a band than playing along to a song on your own. Maybe it’s the sound the game makes when you hit a wrong note or that when you miss a note, you don’t hear the guitar part and really notice the missing sound. But I think most of all – it’s that you know you better get it together and get back on track or you’ll get booed of the stage or even that you just want to get a higher score than last time. Plus you would have a hard time doing what Harmonix has done with the difficulties on songs. You could sit down and take out every other note on a fast part of a song, and etc until you have an easier version that plays on top of the real song. But then you need to ramp it up through the 4 difficulties until you are playing every note on expert. Brilliant! It’s not new, they’ve been doing this on these music games for years, but now we’re actually learning to play the song in a whole new way. I remember the old way of learning to play a song. I’d play it slow, try to hit every note cleanly and when I could do that relatively well, I’d speed up the tempo a little bit until I was playing at full speed. But rather learning the song in the RB3 setting is more fun and more efficient – fun is so important here. The fun comes from pay off. Your pay-off is so slow in any case. Traditionally you improve so slowly that you don’t really notice. But being able to play songs at harder difficulties and scoring more points really makes your improvement more evident. But if you are considering buying with this in mind, you should go ahead and accept – progress is still slow. RB3 makes it more evident, but it still takes hundreds of hours to get even decent. It takes quite a few dozen hours just to get the calluses on your finger tips so your fingers don’t hurt anymore. Oh yea, since I mentioned finger tips. If this is going to be the only guitar teacher you’re going to use (which is totally possible now) – then you’ll want to do some research on technique. Do some internet searching and read about how particularly you should have your left hand positioned. Thumb perpendicular to the neck, not wrapped around the neck but the end of your on the back of the neck. And then you fret the strings with the tips of your fingers – your fingers should be standing up on the strings. So the calluses you develop will be on the tips of your left hand fingers – including the pinky – put that finger to work! But you can read all about technique, there are tons of great web sites out there about it. And you can get as deep into that as you want, even how to sit properly, etc. Also, you have to understand – it’s a work in progress. When people first start playing they don’t even have the right muscles in their hand for proper technique. But if you continually strive for proper technique it will come. When comparing this to paid lessons from a professional, the biggest con is that you have no one to show you proper form. There are lots of bad habits you can develop while playing the game that won’t sound great when playing for real. For example, you have to learn control of all the strings, even ones you aren’t currently playing on. You have to keep them from vibrating from things like just lifting you fingers from them or even sympathetic vibrations (the vibrations of one string making another string vibrate). Best thing to do is after a session of playing the game for a while, turn off the game and push in the dampener in and try to play what you learned in the game. Always keep the guitar in tune so it sounds good when you do this. <><><> Great guitar, I would recommend it to aspiring guitarist of any level short of true expert. For a very experienced guitarist it would be a great and fun way of learning new songs at the very least. So anyway, did you really read all this? Wow… :)

So let me start of by saying you can watch my review(s) on this playlist: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5D267FC6FFD08C05 This is my first guitar ever so I really have nothing to compare the sound or tone to but that said I can make speculations about it so onward. First off I would like to mention that you MUST setup this guitar before playing through an amp (tuning, checking neck relief, setting intonation, string height) as it it setup for best use through the game. So much to cover so I will start with the RB3 side of things: Once you make the string height adjustments and raise or lower the pickup you will have a lot beter expereince playing the guitar though an amp along with the game (w/ string mute down), just thought I would get that out now. So at first, when you just pull the guitar out of the box and use it, the string mute is going to cause a lot of extra tension on the strings, making them hard to press down. After a week or so the strings will form indentations in the mute and the tension will be less. For the most part the guitar has worked very well for me in game, my g string has a hard time being picked up though sometimes since it is right in the middle of the pickup (which I have slanted upward toward the higher strings). Once I raised the bottom half of the pickup the higher strings register 100% of the time with the mute on without needing much force. You will need a bit more with the mute off though for them to be detected. When you play it through an amp while the MIDI hardware is on you will get a clicking noise from the MIDI signal going to the game. The fret sensors can be really sensitive at times where if you place your finger too close to the next fret up it will register that fret instead of the one you are trying to hit. Big note to 360 users: you will not be able to use the guitar buttons for menu navigation on the Xbox GUI or in-game due to restrictions that Microsoft forced onto the guitar. These buttons do work for navigation in and out of game on the PS3 and also on the Wii (I assume). Guitar/MIDI Side: As a guitar it functions pretty well for a beginner guitar.. It does not have very long sustains and sliding the higher strings is almost impossible because of this (same wit HOPO's for those strings). The output to my amp is good and clean. The ton, as far as I can tell, is pretty consistent and the hardware seems to be good quality. Your tuning machines are a bit of a Russian roulette though, most of them on my are good but the high e and a string tuners can be hard to turn sometimes. The fretboard is actually a hard coated plastic glued on top of the neck. The frets, I think, also appear to be a hard coated plastic as well as they do not feel like metal. You can plug this guitar into your computer and connect it to a DAW and use it with a synthesizer. I will have some more videos coming to that play list covering this aspect of the guitar. So far Multi Track Studio and Reaper are the only DAW's that I could get my MIDI-to-USB cable to work with (its an off brand I bought on amazon). Over all the guitar is a real, full featured guitar and works pretty well given its low price. Similar guitars with these functions minus the RB3 functionality cost well over $1000.

I picked up the newly released controller at BB today and played around with it for some hour and a half. Here are my initial thoughts: - you need to buy the MIDI adapter ($40), it doesn't work by itself. I had to come back to the store to get it. - the build has a much more serious feel than any other RockBand controller - it's got a nice 'real' weight to it and it's assembly is fitted tightly together. Yet it still looks cheaper than the real guitars - the neck is made of wood but the body and the fretboard bedding is plastic. - the rockband control buttons don't work (it's mentioned in the manual) - you'll have to use the MIDI adapter for browsing menus etc. What's more annoying is that it's got no 'overdrive' - you'll have to step on a MIDI adapter button to deploy overdrive - it's pretty much a vanilla guitar - the only other feature beyond basic guitar plus the additional fretboard sensors used by rockband is the string height adjustability Gameplay: - when I tried out the basic trainer, I failed the very first course which was plucking an empty E string (!). Turns out you need to tune the guitar (DESPITE OF WHAT IS WRITTEN IN THE MANUAL!) otherwise it's not going to work at all. There is no in-game tuner :-( - once I got the tuning fixed up everything worked fine. - the fretboard sensors are awesome! I didn't need to look at my hands at all - my actual finger positions were on the game screen. I a problem once though (during 90 mins of playing) - my on-screen finger position got stuck on the 13th fret on E string even though my fingers were on another side of the fretboard on other strings - I failed a couple of notes because of that - but it got 'released' once I slid my fingers up and down through the E string. Hope this doesn't happen too often! - the strings are very real - your fingertips will suffer within an hour of playing if you are not used to that. That's not a bad thing. Conditioning your fingers is vital if you want to play the real guitar. - the trainer is awesome. Contains a ton of techniques in a sensible progression and it plays a nice background riffs to your actual play (so it's not boring to listen to the beginner lessons) - playing songs even on Easy right of the bat is quite hard. The game will have you play single notes all over the fretboard. Not in a quick succession, but still fast enough that you don't have time to look at your fretboard. The virtual fretboard on the screen helps a lot but still - if you've never played guitar before, you'll need to spend a lot of time in the trainer to even play on Easy (perhaps you could do the zero star songs though). - I haven't tried plugging it to an amp as a real guitar yet All in all it seems like the product I wanted to get so far. It seems like I can really work on my guitar skills now and I can recommend this to all music enthusiasts.

Let me start out by saying I have no prior guitar experience. Despite that, I've been having a blast with this thing. The trainers in the game are very helpful and I was surprised how quickly I was able to get the hang of playing. The Squier is an actual guitar and if you have the string mute down, it's tuned correctly, and you are hitting the notes correctly then it does sound like you are actually playing the song. For those who fancy themselves masters of the plastic guitar, don't expect to be able to jump right into expert. With no previous guitar experience it may take you around a week of practicing before you start 3 staring some of the harder songs. If you play guitar already then you may pick things up quicker. The only problem I've had with this product is the high E string doesn't always register in game. I've read this can be fixed by raising the pickup. I haven't tested this,however, since my high E works most of the time and only seems to act up if I move from sitting to standing or vice versa. Another problem was that the guitar was out of tune when I got it. If you have a friend that plays (like I do) then s/he should be able to easily fix it for you so this isn't a serious issue. I have yet to use the guitar with an actual amp, however, so I cannot personally say how it sounds in that department. From videos I have seen though, it sounds pretty good but that will likely change depending on the quality of your amp. One last thing, the MIDI Pro Adapter ($40) is REQUIRED to play this in the game. It DOES NOT come with the guitar (as far as i know, maybe theres a bundle?) and I had to get mine online since I could not find Xbox adapters in the store. A MIDI cable is also required. The guitar comes with one but many people have complained it is of poor quality and breaks easily. I had a cable on hand already so I have yet to try the one that came with the guitar. Overall: Pros- Good tool for beginners, easy to understand tutorials and lessons, VERY satisfying once you get the hang of it! Cons- MIDI cable that comes with will probably break, MIDI adapter NOT included, needs tuning, pickup may need adjustment.

OK, so I'm going to write a really long, drawn-out and educated review in hopes of helping other people and selling more of these things I've been playing guitar for over 15 years, and I've given guitar lessons, worked in a guitar shop for years, and play rock band a lot. Mostly I play the drums and sing because those are the closest things to the real instruments. I've always hated the lame 5 colored button setup that guitar hero made famous so I never play it, even though it was my first and main instrument, so when I heard this was coming I was very pleased. I read a lot of mixed reviews of this guitar, but I felt that it would be really great for me to good to get back into guitar playing on rockband, since I have no real time to play guitar with other people. I finally got my hands on one!! I got it home and took a few minutes to properly set it up (the working in the music store and setting up lots of cheap guitars to good playing condition which is needed for any new guitar really helped). This didn't take much time, just a little adjustment on the truss rod (which anyone who doesn't really know what they're doing should have a professional do because if you do it too much either way, you can damage the instrument) and adjust the pickup height. After 15 minutes, I was happy with where it was. First - Quality of the instrument - I've setup lots and lots of guitars for selling retail. This one is very similar to any squier strat I've ever touched. The fretboard is fine. Some people say that the plastic fingerboard feels weird... I don't know what the heck they are talking about and they're too picky. It's FINE! The action (how easy it is to press down the strings with your left hand) after adjustment of the truss rod is great. The scale of the neck is great and familiar. The pickup through a guitar amp sounds fine... not extra great but just freaking fine. It overall feels good and plays like any other inexpensive (hate to say 'cheap'...) guitar and I'm pleased with it. Second - Playing as an instrument through an amp - Great! No complaints here whatsoever considering what I paid for it. Plays really well after some minor adjustments, without any awful pickup noise or neck/fret buzzing. Just fine. Third - Game play - This is where it really shines. I've seen other people say something to the effect of 'if you want a close-to-life instrument, stick with the drums or singing'. This is simply not true. Some of the songs I've known how to play on a real guitar for years, and replicating them in game play might take a bit of practice but not much. I've had it for 3 days now, and one failry complex song I got ranked #21 on the XBOXLIVE leader board on expert mode. I'm no ultra pro guitar player, but that made me feel pretty good. Bottom line is that it works really great. I'm even learning how to play songs that I didn't know how to play before... how cool is that?! OK, now I'll get to some 'cons'. It takes just a bit of getting used to. Some songs I had learned on my own, and the game tells me to play them differently (ie on a different string on different frets.... hope that makes sense). But run through the trainer's 'learn a song' mode and soon enough that is fixed. I've had some quick picking parts that didn't quite register every note, but come on. It's probably me. You aren't recommended to play the guitar without the string mute applied so it won't affect your score.... well... what happens is if you are playing through a guitar amp and the game at the same time, the strings tend to think they are constantly being picked for some reason. This breaks your streak and reduces your score. This does not affect your note %, though so for those of us who don't really play for points, its no big deal. My note %'s were very similar in both setups, though my score with the strings unmuted was significantly lower... but I don't REALLY care about that too much. My bottom line is - this thing kicks butt! I haven't had sore fingers from playing too much in years! And after playing a song 4 times that I kinda new how to play before, I was ranked pretty high on the leaderboards. I treat it like I'm playing the song and it responds very well. I see other reviews that are really critical, but I think they may have been expecting something perfect. It's not perfect, but if you are a little forgiving, it's really darn close. Total newbies or mostly newbies might have a hard time at first, and might need to spend a little more time learning the ins and outs of play, but overall it's everything I hoped it would be. Whew! That was long! Anyway, support the people that develop this kind of technology if you're interested in it and BUY THE DARN THING! You may need a little effort to get everything out of it, but it's totally worth it. An if you're a very experienced guitar player who's not going to pick apart every tiny little thing that isn't perfect, you'll love it. IT ROCKS!!!! Hope this has been informative for someone out there.......

First off I think that some people that are complaining about some things need to realize "this is a real guitar"...apparently you bought it for that reason, but dont exactly understand what that means. for instance...tuning...why would you buy a real guitar and not have a tuner...regardless of the fact that it says "tuning is not necessary"...anyone that buys a guitar tunes it. this is a guitar first and a controller second. also...being that its a real guitar, you're going to have to make some adjustments on it....in case you didnt notice it comes with two allen wrenches and there are all kinds of screws on the thing. if you're having to pluck the strings too hard...adjust your bridge...make the strings lower and closer to the pickup. after tuning, that was the next thing i did. just go throught basic notes training...if you find that you have to pluck too hard...lower the string and try again. you'll find the right spot. i barely have to pluck mine and it registers every time. know how to use the instrument before you starting whining that its not working.

I recieved the guitar on Tuesday. After tuning it and hooking it up to the Fender Mustang I amp, I found that it has a nice clean and solid sound.. The strings are a little tighter then I am used to but that will just take some time for my fingers to adjust. I hooked up the midi to a M-Audio Midisport Uno and connected it to the computer to record on my Guitar Pro software. The connection worked seamless and was able to register the fingerings without an issue. There are different settings on the guitar that allows you to switch between just fingering the notes or strumming/picking the strings. Most MIDI guitars are $1000 or more, so great value for the capabilities. As of today, I recieved the MIDI adapter for the PS3. I connected up the guitar, and after a few minimal adjustments on the volume I was off and playing Rock Band 3 with the guitar. It does a great job of recongizing where I am fretting the notes, There were a few errors due to my fingers not being close enough to the fret which caused it to read as a fret lower, but once I properly placed my fingers it worked great. I have noticed that you have to pick the string kind of hard, but that should be able to be solved by adjusting the action (string height) on the guitar to be closer to the sensor. You do hear a slight pinging sound when you pluck the strings due to the distance between the mute and the bridge, but it really isnt noticable while playing. You can control some of the menu selection from the guitars buttons, but it is easier to do on the MIDI adapter. There is really no easy way of attaching the MIDI adapter to the guitar, but the MIDI cable that came with the guitar is long enough that you could set the adapter on the ground.