Rock Band makes finding other members easy

You remember the first band you started, way back in high school. You got your best friend’s mom to buy a drum-kit and you managed to get a hold of a cheap Stratocaster spin-off made in Mexico. Everything seemed perfect and you were ready to take the music world by storm…except you couldn’t find a bass player to save your life. Not even Gary would play bass for you, the kid who nobody liked because he smelled funny. And that was the end of your short lived musical career. Sigh.

Well, now you can recruit your band members from an online community of more than seven million players on Xbox Live, and if you can’t find someone to join your band out of a crowd that size then you might want to consider medication. Rock Band is set to hit stores this holiday season and you can bet your bottom dollar that there will be plenty of quartets vying for the top spots on the leaderboards, and plenty of eager bassists.

Rock Band was Microsoft’s next-highest card, just a little under Halo 3, and it made its appearance early on in Peter Moore’s press conference this year at E3 2007. Moore even joined in with the developers for a little jam session and he only accidentally paused the game twice. If we can trust in Moore and the rumors (and if they get it working right) the developers will be putting full online multiplayer functionality in the game, allowing you to rock yer’ friggin’ socks off with gamers all over the country and even in Europe.

Rock Band has also hopped in bed with the music industry in terms of playable songs. MTV, a division of Viacom, has announced that it will be making master track recordings of important rock albums available for use in the game as well as downloadable content. This means that there will be a lot fewer songs that are “covers” (no, Sting didn’t go to Harmonix Studios to record just for Guitar Hero) which means that more songs will sound exactly the way the do when you play them off of a CD. The Who’s Who’s Next was the big album announcement for E3, and the developers are also touting weekly updates on downloadable content after the game’s fall release later this year.

Here’s a list of the first sixteen official track for Rock Band:

1970s

• The Who “Won’t Get Fooled Again”
• Mountain “Mississippi Queen”*
• David Bowie “Suffragette City”
• Black Sabbath “Paranoid”*
• Blue Oyster Cult “Don’t Fear the Reaper”
• The Ramones “Rockaway Beach”

1980s

• Rush “Tom Sawyer”*
• Bon Jovi “Wanted Dead or Alive”

1990s

• Nirvana “In Bloom”
• Stone Temple Pilots “Vasoline”
• Weezer “Say It Ain’t So”
• Foo Fighters “Learn to Fly”
• Metallica “Enter Sandman”

2000s

• The Hives “Main Offender”
• The Strokes “Reptilia”
• Queens of the Stone Age “Go With the Flow”

* Indicates a cover song, all others songs are original master recordings

So start practicing and get those rock chops up to speed—auditions are coming up soon.

Read [The Syndicate] Also Read [Guitar World]