Rock Band 3: +1 to Keyboard

Seen at the end of Xbox Live’s recent Green Day: Rock Band demo is the image of the five rock band icons in addition to a “3″ in the Rock Band typeface, promoting the upcoming game. Wait a minute, five? Yep, it looks as though there is a new addition to the rainbow button, plastic, toy instrument family, the keyboard.

The 5th icon is proof enough that, at least for now, the keyboard is in.

The keyboard seems to be a logical extension of the platform for two main reasons. The first one and most obvious being that it is fairly common among rock bands to feature the keyboard, particularly in the 70s and 80s. In addition electronic, or digital keyboards are already commonplace and inexpensive, so adapting them to run on the modern consoles can be done fairly easily. This was the case with electronic drum kits when Rock Band broke waves with the drum instrument.

It will be interesting to see the design of the instrument, whether it is more piano, keyboard, or accordion. Hell, it might even come out as a keytar which would be pretty rad indeed. There is also the off chance it will be some hybrid device, a keyboard but with a detachable stand as well as a strap, so you could play it either way. That’s how I would design it at least.

There are also a few immediate problems that I can think of and it will be interesting to see how they are handled. First, not all songs feature keyboard tracks. While the bass can readily pick up a guitar track in lieu of a bass track, what would the keyboard play if guitar, bass, drums, and vocals were already covered and there were no additional parts? Perhaps it will just double on the rhythmic sections of drums or bass. Unfortunately it may be the case that like vocals, some songs will simply not support the keyboard.

Following up on the first point, none of the existing songs feature a keyboard component. Will all existing songs simply omit the keyboard when played on Rock Band 3? Or perhaps, less likely, the keyboard will just duplicate the drum track.

An interesting, although highly unlikely solution might be to allow the keyboardist to play free style for any song it does not have a scripted role, but I would not count on that.

Harmonized vocals return.

I’m not sure where the keyboard will fit in.

Another issue arises from the (already sparse) free screen real estate. With three instruments along the bottom and vocals along the top, there is not much space left for another instrument. My guess would be that the keyboard section might end up along the bottom edge, with the string and percussion boards landing in the center of the screen. Alternatively they might squeeze everything in and have four instrument tracks along the bottom in a row. Regardless, playing on a smaller screen just became that much more difficult, especially when hammered.

Regardless, I have confidence in their ability to work out the details and take the series to 11. It’s nice to see they were not deterred by their failure with Sousaphone Hero.