BandFuse: Rock Legends preview – Hands-on playing real notes on a real guitar

Jamming out on small, plastic, toy guitars with silly color-coded buttons is a thing of the past. Now, it's about pretending to be a rock star and actually learning how to play real instruments. BandFuse: Rock Legends is an instructional guitar title that promises to cater to all skill levels – from beginner to expert. We had a chance to grab a Fender, pluck a few strings to “Sweet Home Alabama,” record our own future hit and ended up coming out of the demo impressed.

Players have the option to walk through short video tutorials of guitar basics and play through the list of songs on five levels of difficulty. So, even wannabe guitarists who have never touched an instrument can learn. When playing a song, color-coded tabulature scrolls horizontally across the screen, while pitch and timing scores are tallied at the bottom. The lowest settings will have players picking one note at a time in rhythm and the hardest difficulties display the same notes and cords played by the original musicians.  

For those with more experience on the fret board, there is also the Free Jam option to create, record, and share your own music once they have mastered the song set. We saw one of the developers (also an excellent guitarist) layer multiple guitar rhythm and lead parts in the mixer to create an impressive tune in just a few minutes. Guitars, basses, microphones, and electric drum sets can be plugged in, recorded and mixed using the in-game mixer, and then shared to Twitter and Facebook.

BandFuse puts a 6-string guitar in your hands and teaches you to play songs like “Alive” by Pearl Jam and Maroon 5’s “Harder to Breathe” using the proper cords and notes. Before this, many of the instructional guitar games had a significant delay from when a note was struck to when that note was heard through the TV. It seems like the developers put in an enormous amount of effort into correcting that issue, and it has really paid off. When a chord is played on the guitar it feels as though our guitar was plugged directly into an amp, with no noticeable lag. And as a neat little bonus, the game lets you play during loading screens and menus like you have a guitar and amp set up to jam on.

We didn’t get to see them ourselves, but Bandfuse will also feature a full campaign mode, a full set of pedal effects, three player multiplayer support, and the ability to slow down the animated tabs so you can get every single note right. 

Bandfuse: Rock Legends will be available this winter on Xbox 360.