With Rock Band 4 out now, I thought it was time to take a closer look at the new instruments. While my review focused primarily on the gameplay elements of Rock Band 4, this article will serve as a breakdown of the new instruments and how they compare to past Rock Band peripherals. Let’s break it down by instrument.
Guitar
The new guitar doesn’t have any new features, but instead offers some nice refinements. The buttons are quieter, the neck is more rigid and you no longer need a dongle as it works off Bluetooth technology. Aesthetically, the new guitar features a wood finish similar to the Rock Band 2 guitar and weights roughly the same. One nice little addition to guitar neck is the inclusion of fret numbering to make the guitar look more realistic.
The guitar is used to calibrate the game and it works remarkably well. The new guitar plays and feels really good. There were a handful of times where it would randomly disconnect from the game, but these instances were few and far between. The strum bar feels like an improvement, even if doesn’t have the clicky feel of the Guitar Hero peripherals.
The effects switch, which was present in past Rock Band guitars is finally put to good use as you can use different effects to spice up the sounds on your freestyle guitar solos. The same can be said of the solo buttons, which are used widely throughout the freestyle sections as well.
Drum Kit
The new Rock Band 4 drum kit feels fairly similar to the Rock Band 2/Beatles kits. The pads are reasonably quiet and the pedal is reinforced with s steel plate. The new drum kit allows you to use your old madcatz cymbals if you have them lying around. The drum kit, like the guitar doesn’t require a dongle and syncs up to the PS4 through Bluetooth. Syncing both instruments is quite easy and I never had any issues with the drum kit disconnecting during play. The only issue I experienced (and Madcatz now has a firmware update for it) is that during fast sections of songs, I would tend to drop a lot of notes I knew I played correctly. The drum kit also features an extra port if you want to hook up a second bass pedal.