[questionmark]

It would be great to see those Elton John tracks! Even better if someone helps polish them up for full instruments release.

[ckovanda]

I have the keyboard and always intended to find the time to practice and get better, but when i play I always come back to guitar and drums.

 

Even so, I’m super excited to hear about Elton John tracks!!! perhaps I’ll dust of the keyboard and give it another try!

 

any clues on what the other 6 tracks are?

[Korewahondes]

I too play Pro Keys with Madcatz’s plastic thing. Never played piano before so I started with tutorials, then completed RB3 songs in Easy and Medium and the 2-chords went easier and easier to me. After that, I had to complete the practice sessions for each song in Hard before playing the whole song sightread ‘cos it became way harder. If I recall correctly, I completed the RB3 songs in Hard too and never really started Expert.

 

I’m just able to play Linkin Park – What I’ve done and Bon Jovi – It’s My Life in Expert. The rest of the time, I stay in Hard which is almost doable for me and fun enough to enjoy.

[espher]

Barely play — don’t have a stand or good surface to rest it on without it feeling awkward. Also, short fingers.

 

When I do, I play hard on 0-3 dot and medium on 4 dot to devil heads.

[TrojanNemo]

I too play Pro Keys with Madcatz’s plastic thing.

 

For someone who hasn’t played piano according to your post, you’re hitting on something that to me is one of the bigger failures of the keytar. The keys are just awful. Unweighted keys just kill the action in my opinion. I studied piano for a couple of years in high school and man, the difference between a real piano or an electronic keyboard with weighted keys versus the unweighted ones is huge. It’s one of the reasons I felt uncomfortable with it and never really gave it a chance. I thought of modding my keytar but gave up before I started

[raynebc]

I’d hate to think how expensive the RB3 keytar would have been if it had fully or even partially weighted keys.

[MaybeTowelie]

A couple of years ago, I started the process of learning pro keys. That lasted about 6 months. Before I stopped, I could play most songs on hard, (medium for the extra hard ones). It was fun…but then I started trying pro drums. I found with playing pro drums, the learning curve wasn’t as bad as pro keys, and I could actually see a vast improvement between plays. I haven’t really touched pro keys (or any keys) since. I found when having RB parties, the concentration it took to play pro keys took a lot of the fun out of it, so now I stick with Guitar/Bass/Drums.

[Ruck Bogers 22]

I’ve played piano for years, though not brilliantly, but enough to be able to enjoy Pro Keys on RB3. I play on Expert for about 95% of the songs, dropping down to Hard for some of the more ridiculous ones. My greatest achievement on Pro Keys was being #1 on the Wii leaderboards for In A Big Country ages ago… I moved to Xbox a long time ago though and was probably beaten ages ago!

 

I barely ever play 5-lane Keys as I don’t find it nearly as rewarding, but if I hadn’t played piano in the past, I don’t think I ever would’ve bothered with Pro Keys, so I can understand why people don’t like it too much ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif” />

 

As for the keytar itself, weighted keys of some sort would’ve been great but I think they’re pretty good value for money. I’ve never had any issues with mine and it’s lasted me over 4 years now (not to mention four house moves), so I’m pretty happy with it ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif” />

[H3ADShOt3]

I’d hate to think how expensive the RB3 keytar would have been if it had fully or even partially weighted keys.

 

I got the game and the keytar for 40 bucks for my 360. I thought that was a pretty good deal considering it also came with the game brand new.

[beastman]

Maybe it’s just mine, but I find the RB3 keyboard to be really hypersensitive and that makes it less fun with all the combo breaking I endure when I’m actually hitting the notes. I break combo plenty on my own, thank you very much.

 

It seems like a combo breaking key hit is registered if I bump the side of the adjoining key without pressing it down at all.

[FujiSkunk]

I play pro keys. While I’m not all that great of a piano player outside of the game, in the game I’ve been good enough to keep a spot in the top 20 of the XBox 360 pro keys leaderboard. I’m three stars away from five-starring everything on expert: one star on “Llama” and two stars on “Roundabout”. Maybe someday…

[funkydunkleman]

I pull out the keyboard maybe 4-5 times a year. It was fun at first, but I never really improved over time and it got frustrating. Now it’s just annoying that every custom has to have them tacked on.

[Nightmare Lyra]

I pull out the keyboard maybe 4-5 times a year. It was fun at first, but I never really improved over time and it got frustrating. Now it’s just annoying that every custom has to have them tacked on.

 

Great Keys on every single one of those AC/DC songs… ” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_wink.gif” />

[cybersharkexpert]

I started with drums, and god dammit drums are the only thing I can actually say I’m good at (other than Vocals I guess???) BUT I find playing Keys really fun, and having the 5th instrument in Rock Band really opens up the door to a lot of cool and interesting songs that wouldn’t otherwise be in Rock Band!!

 

Notice I said Keys there, though. I can’t play Pro Keys. These are drumming hands, and they do not understand anything more than five buttons at a time in a rhythm game, let alone 25.

[Necroblashyrkh]

I play pro keys pretty regularly, although I’d still say it’s less than drums, guitar or bass. Maybe it’s the effort of moving my synth in front of the tv, or the fact that there’s much less songs for synth and even fewer really good ones. With official DLC I used to do a few runs on 5-lane keys to get to a nice leaderboard position and to look at all the nice statistics on RB-central and Facebook (because boy do I love statistics in games), but with customs, my 5-lane playing has been reduced to special cases, like wanting to play a new Dream Theater album with friends, while suspecting that sight read expert pro keys would produce special 40% less synth versions of the songs.

 

I had played piano etc. for about 25 years before RB3 and I like to think I’m pretty good but it was still pretty hard to learn to play in game. I probably would have quit out of frustration if the leaderboards didn’t constantly tell me how my embarrassingly bad performances on moderately difficult songs were still in the top 1-5%. I made a decision to start on expert, since I thought there would have been no point to learning “reduced real versions” of songs and I still have never even seen a under expert chart. Unfortunately I never actually learn any of the songs in game, unless I take some extra time to pause and properly memorize the notes and chords but I would say that getting to try different songs more easily than learning them for real, has helped me to diversify my irl playing abilities. Being a pretty unfluent sheet music reader, I wish the game would have had actual notation as an option, since I’m now vastly better at reading Rock Band notes than real sheets.

 

Nowadays I’m good enough to 5-star something like 80% of songs on sight read but I definitely am not among the best players when it comes to the really really hard songs. I still have a lot of trouble with fast broken rhythm chords, hitting very fast passages with any consistency and weirdly enough anything to do with chromatic scales. At first I used the training and practice modes extensively but even before the official DLC ended I got to a point where I pretty much never touch the practice modes, unless it’s a song or synth part that I really like, such as Fisheye or Megitsune as recent examples.

[Author]

Posts