Now that Rock Band can use the GHIII guitars, this is a great way to get a second wireless controller to add to your ever growing collection of plastic instruments. Also, if you have Amazon Prime, you can get free 2nd day shipping.

But you have to be fast, as these will go fast.

Some of the new features to be added to the site include some that were announced with the first version of Rock Band, like the ability to create t-shirts and stickers of your band and band logos, but will also include neeto features such an extensive database of all Rock Band songs and much much more…

From the Rock Band Announcement Forums:

Hello, Rock Band fans! My name is Jeff Chausse (pronounced “SHOW-see”), and I joined Harmonix this year as Web Director, to oversee bringing RockBand.com to the next level of awesomeness. For many months now, the Harmonix web team has been working on a major overhaul of the site to launch in conjunction with Rock Band 2. We’re putting the finishing touches on it right now, and I wanted to give you a sneak peek into what we have in store for you.

Just to get one thing out of the way immediately: rest assured that the forums you’re reading right now aren’t going anywhere. The Forums are pretty much the lifeblood of the community, and we’d be crazy to mess with them. HMXSean and the gang will be sticking around here for a long time to come.

But outside of the Forums, we’ve rebuilt everything from the ground up to be more fun, more informative, and easier to use. Let’s run through a few highlights, shall we?

THE MUSIC

Rock Band is all about music, right? So, we’ve devoted an entire section of the site to information about every available Rock Band track – both on disc and DLC. We’ll have over 500 tracks total by the end of the year so that’s a lot of tracks. In addition to the basic info about each song (including difficulty rankings for each instrument), we’ll have background information on each song, written by our own ace rock writer Brett Milano, and most song pages will even feature gameplay tips from our own staff.

THE ‘ZINE

The ‘Zine is RockBand.com’s new blog, featuring a lot of the Rock Band happenings you’re used to seeing - like DLC announcements and band interviews, along with new content like a behind the scenes “Sketchbook”, contests, and a weekly series called “52 Weeks to Rock”, a useful and humorous instruction manual for becoming a real life rock band, written by people who’ve really been there – real life Harmonix musicians and superfans.

BATTLE OF THE BANDS

Rock Band 2 features “Battle of the Bands” – daily and weekly tournaments that allow you to test your skills in constantly refreshed challenges with a variety of ways to compete. RockBand.com will be the only place you can get a sneak preview of upcoming battles, invite your friends to participate against you, and even send yourself a reminder of when to start rocking. Battles you’ve competed in are stored in your profile, where you can check your ranking against your friends, and relive your experiences via your own personal Battle archive.

PHOTOCREATOR

The days of taking pictures of your TV to show off your band to the world are over. Photocreator is an online tool we’ve created that actually lets you pose and shoot photos of your Rock Band 2 characters and bands, which are then rendered in full game-quality 3D (by an army of servers we’ve affectionately dubbed “Rendertrons”). You can then assign your favorites to your band pages or just add them to your personal profile. Just link your Gamertag to your web profile to get started.

MERCH BOOTH

Oh yeah, there’s one more thing you can do with your photos as well – make stuff! Real stuff like T-shirts, stickers, and posters. Just pick the Rock Band 2 band or character photo of your choice and our Merch Booth tool will step you through customizing merchandise that’s shipped to your door in just a few days. I’ve seen a bunch of test runs of this stuff and, trust me, you will be impressed by the end result - the quality is amazing.

BANDMATE CREATOR

As if that weren’t enough, in addition to posters, shirts, and stickers, you can make customized 3D statues of your favorite Rock Band 2 characters, which we’ve dubbed “Bandmates”. These things are awesome. They’re about 6” tall, made using full-color 3D printing technology from Z Corporation. Just pick a character, an instrument, and a pose, and they’ll get shipped to your door for about 70 bucks. The Harmonix office is swarming with Bandmate prototypes. After we’d evaluated a test run, we’d give them away to employees, and there was always a mad scramble to grab them on giveaway day.

STREAMLINED UI AND NAVIGATION

Tying all this together, we’ll be introducing a greatly streamlined site interface and navigation system that will help you get where you want to go with minimal fuss, including a new homepage that should knock your socks off.

There’s more, of course, but you’ll just have to wait and see for yourself when the new site goes live next week. We at Harmonix are all very excited to be launching the site we’ve always wanted to have – built and run entirely by Harmonix designers, developers, and writers. We can’t wait to put these features and tools into your hands. As always, we look to you, the community, to help us find problems and make this site as good as it can be. We hope you’re ready for the new RockBand.com experience!

Rock on,
Jeff

I can’t wait to make my own shirts!

I may not be the biggest country music fan, but I’m all about divisification and I’m sure that there are a lot of Rock Band fans and future Rock Band players that would be very excited to see the inclusion of some country music in the game.

What do you think? Should Harmonix include country songs in Rock Band?

Colbert’s obviously a big fan of the game as not only shown by the release of the song, but also with the recent tapings on the Colbert Report of Rush and Nas playing the game as well. Be sure to check out the video of the song below:

Oh yeah, there were some other issues addressed in this patch as well, like any of that matters. Well, except if you want to download songs from the Rock Band store in the future, then it might, might, matter to you. If that’s the case, be sure to hit the jump for the complete patch details.

Hi Everyone:

PS3 ROCK BAND DISC EXPORT TITLE UPDATE
First and foremost, we’re happy to announce that PS3 users will soon be able to export RB1 songs to their system in advance of the launch of RB2! A PS3 patch will be coming out this Thursday, September 11th, which will allow RB1 song export, in addition to updating DLC to our RB2 standards (so you can continue to rock the newer content in RB1 if you so choose!) This title update will also patch for the use of the Guitar Hero III Les Paul PS3 Controller with RB1 on the PS3. We’re excited to release this, as controller compatibility is something we’ve been working towards for a long time.

This Rock Band 1 title update is set to come out next Thursday. As with the Xbox 360 Title Update, you will have to update Rock Band in order to play any DLC that is released after Thursday.

PAX PACK
This leads us to the PAX pack which was released yesterday on the PlayStation Store. Due to technical issues with the submission of “Livin on the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe” by MC Frontalot, users who downloaded that track or the entire pack found that they were not able to play this content in the game. Furthermore, downloading the pack meant that all 3 songs in the pack failed to load.

We’re aware of this issue and are taking multiple steps to fix it. We are resubmitting the tracks to Sony today and hope to have fixed content up on the PlayStation store as soon as possible. Users will then be able to replace the broken tracks by re-downloading this content for no additional charge. If you don’t feel like re-downloading this content and can wait a week, the title update that is launching on 9/11 will fix it automatically. We appreciate your patience.

Again, we’re dedicated to bringing you the best in weekly content for any music game out there. We’re transitioning from single title Rock Band DLC to a cross-title DLC system which will allow you to play your DLC in both Rock Band 1 and Rock Band 2 DLC (an industry first!), so we hope you can be patient as we figure out the little hiccups here and there.

ROCK,
HMX Community, PR, and Audio

Things are starting to settle down now, so I’m now able to roll out some changes that have been in the planning stages for quite some time now, and just in time for the release of Rock Band 2!

In the meantime, I plan on getting caught up on the various Rock Band updates that have occurred in the last week or two, so keep coming back for those as well as to see what’s coming down the pipeline.

If the shipping charges from buying direct from Ion have turned you off from ordering this set, then Amazon’s cheap shipping should help quite abit, especially if you’re a Prime member as you get free 2nd day shipping.

The article has alot of information that’s been well known for some time now, but there are also new tidbits of information that can be picked up throughout the article, such as how much space the transferred songs from RB1 will take up on your hard drive (Hint: it might be time to start looking for a larger hard drive).

Speaking of Rock Band songs to be transferred, one item in their article that I almost didn’t pick up on right away has to do with what songs can’t be transferred and the reason why - “While not every song from RB1 will transfer over (some due to licensing issues, others because free downloadable master tracks will become available)”. So be on the lookout for some free downloads of songs from RB1 that were covers on the disc, but will now be masters.

Be sure to check out the article at Gameworld Network.

The last time that Target ran this ad, I picked up 4 cards, which was like a “BTGO” (Buy Three Get One), which I’ll probably do again.

Hopefully I can get a video uploaded soon as it was a pretty good segment just about the game.