Customer Reviews

Rock Band 3 Wireless Fender Mustang PRO-Guitar Controller for Xbox 360

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have been a drummer for about 14 years. I have been around guitars most of my life, but never really felt like learning one, mainly cause hitting drums seemed easier to me. I got this controller about a week ago and I have already learned 5 songs on expert. If you are not very good with rockband/guitarhero guitars, but still love the game for singing or drums, this may be for you. I can't play a single song on the 5 button guitar controller on the expert difficulty setting. But in a week I can play 5 songs, easy songs, but full songs.

SIZE -- This this is slightly bigger than a 5 button guitar, but weight wise feels the same.
QUALITY -- I haven't had any problems with a button not responding and the strings are steel coated with nylon, which seem like cheap plastic from the sound they give off. But they are durable, they just sound like plastic. I don't mind this because they are infinitely quieter than uncoated strings. But make no mistake, this IS a plastic guitar controller.
NEW features -- With songs that have Pro guitar/bass charting you can practice the song like normal. But there is a new trainer unique to each song under the "learn to play song" section. Here the song is broken down to its basic components. For example the song "The Hardest button to Button" only had 3 components. You practice these components as you would a beat or fill in the drum trainer. Once you master the components you go to practice song and place them where they go and bahdabingbahdaboom you now know a song.

CONS -- None that I have noticed so far. But I am not too familiar with guitars so I may never notice. A friend of mine that came by to give it a shred said that with strings you can feel which string you are on easier cause on a "real" guitar the strings are different thicknesses. On this its just 17 frets of buttons, all the same size. (thickness, not width) But he loved this anyway, cause he learned to play a song he likes and has never tried to play before.

If anyone has a specific question about this, or even about the software (the game rockband) just ask here and i will answer asap. :)

First off let me just get this out of the way. I did not purchase this from Amazon, I purchased it from Gameshark.com and have had it for about 2 weeks now.

I was incredibly skeptical about this guitar when I first heard about it. "A plastic six string guitar? How's that supposed to work?" However, I heard nothing but good things about this guitar over at the Rock Band forums so I knew I had to actually try this for myself. So essentially this is a plastic guitar that has 102 buttons that is supposed to mimic a 6-stringed, 17 fretted guitar. The neck has numbers on each edge by the 3rd fret,the 5th fret, and so-on, similar to real guitar so you have a guide to where which numbered fret is where. As far as the rest of the buttons are concerned, you have the A, B, X, and Y buttons on the right side of the pick guard, and you have your start, back and guide buttons on the left side of the pick guard. If you are left handed like me, this layout is unfortunately terrible because instead of the buttons being located directly below the strings where they're easy to reach, they are instead located under your arm pit essentially. This isn't a big deal, but it's incredibly annoying if you're a south paw. One of my absolute favorite features of this guitar is how you can disassemble it into three pieces. You can easily pull the entire neck out of the body of the guitar, and you can also easily take the head stock off of the neck, unlike the RB3 Stratocaster where trying to remove the head stock is a chore.

Now down to playing the guitar. Like I said before it has six plastic strings that are all the same gauge or thickness, which is different from a real guitar of course, but I'm glad that they took this route so us leftys could try pro mode. This unfortunately is a bit of a problem, because on a real guitar you can tell what string you're playing by feeling how thick it is, but now since both the strings and the buttons are all the same gauge, it's harder to tell what you're playing without looking at the guitar. Another thing that's lost in translation with this guitar is the lack of vibration from the strings. Again, when playing a real guitar whenever you pluck a string it vibrates and you can tell if you're putting your finger on the right string on the fret board based on the vibration. Since this obviously can't happen with this plastic guitar, unavoidably there will be situations where you'll have your finger on the right button, but you'll be plucking the wrong string. This isn't a deal breaker, but it can cause some confusion. And now for my last little gripe about playing this guitar, the strumming. This may vary from person to person, but I find that trying to strum a string quickly can be quite difficult when done continuously. On a real guitar, yes I'm a broken record, when strumming a string quickly you usually only graze the string when you play it, but this technique won't work particularly well on the Mustang since it's wont pick up light strums most of the time.

At the end of the day, the Mustang is a really fun peripheral to use. It's awfully similar to a real guitar, and it's incredibly fun to use. I really wish this guitar wasn't so darn expensive though. $150 seems awfully steep for a plastic guitar, but it does have over 100 buttons so I suppose it's pretty expensive to make. If you have any desire to learn guitar or bass, then this is easily one of the most entertaining ways to do so. I know Madcatz has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to their products, but this guitar is a quality item. I will definitely update this review if anything goes wrong with it however.

I was a bit worried when I heard that Madcatz was doing the hardware for this RB3 Pro Guitar. Although Madcatz has improved their hardware over the years, I knew this pro guitar needed to be solid and with this many buttons, it had to have good quality.

Well the quality is very good overall and the body, buttons, and strings have a solid feel. The one area where the design is a bit weak is in the knobs that hold the strap, especially the one you screw is directly in the seem of the body and can easily push apart the seem of the guitar and not lock tight. To fix this, I just used a helping of Duco Cement. Now this means that I can no flip the strap to the lefty side but I can live with that and I don't have to worry about this knob popping out.

I also had to screw in a few of the top screws of the body (this was why the knob did not fit right) because it seemed one of the body screws was not fully seated. But I suspect this manufacturing glitch may not be that common.

Other than that, the guitar feels very solid for a plastic game controller. Much more solid and polished feel than I would have expected. Sure its an expensive game controller but its fairly complex piece of hardware and they did a very good job with making the buttons, neck, etc all feel like a guitar. Lighter and not quite as big as a guitar, but the fret distances are pretty much spot on.

One thing to note is that this guitar can be used in standard guitar modes and thats a good way to get a feel for the different fret spacing but the main purpose of this guitar is using pro mode to learn guitar. If you just want to play Rock Band with the best standard controller, this is not it. This guitar is for pro-mode and pro-mode has a much steeper learning curve than the standard Rock Band game. And for that purpose, this guitar delivers!

Pro-mode is very well done with great pacing where you go from learning basic notes and slowly advance to learning cords etc. And although they do not use tab for the notation, they have come up with a notation that is similar to tab but work well with the highway display and fast scrolling that will come with playing songs. I still think it would have bee nice to include a full tab mode but my guess is they tried that and found the new notation to work best.

So, although you will not learn tab reading skills, you will learn the chord names and shapes needed to play all the RB3 pro mode songs and that is impressive. Honestly, the pro mode trainers are much more complete than I would have thought. They really spent some time putting this together. Also, when you miss a chord, it can automatically stop the song, show you the correct fingering, and let you get it before you continue. It works very well and if you don't like it, you can turn it off.

Back to the hardware... Right now, I give it 5 stars because it just works. Now, for those that play guitar, you will quickly find issues here because, and this needs to be clear, this is not a guitar. Its a guitar trainer. It has some very basic differences that make some things hard to transition from real guitar to this trainer. First and most obvious is the lack of strings on the neck. What is the effect here? Well, you don't have the same feel for the string/fret so its a bit of a different feel as far as the coordination of your hands on the strings and pairing that up to the fret that pairs up with that string. But, since a real guitar give you more feedback, it may be easier to transition TO A REAL GUITAR, then FROM A REAL GUITAR. Which is sort of the whole point of a guitar training. So, if already know how to play a real guitar and you don't want re-learn a trainer, you should probably wait for the Fender Squier ($250-$350) to come out. But if you are just learning guitar, this makes one impressive trainer.

The only remaining question is how well the hardware hold up after months of use. So far, it feels like it will hold up well. But that is nearly impossible to predict. So, come back here in a few months and see if the review change. But for right now, this thing is a great guitar trainer.

UPDATE: I have since upgraded to Rocksmith for learning real guitar. At the time I did this review, RB pro-mode was the best choice. But today, I have to say that getting an inexpensive guitar and getting Rocksmith is a much better option. It does not change my review or score but I will say that I will not go back to Rockband Pro mode because I feel that Rocksmith has nailed the real-guitar trainer.

First and foremost, the guitar does appear to work as advertised, however I bought it about a week ago and will be sending back tomorrow. I am familar with playing the guitar (not tons of experience, but can play a hadful of tunes) so I figured this would be a good way to enjoy Rock Band 3 and get some practice in at the same time.

I didn't realize just how much the fact that the strings at the bottom and the fret buttons were all the same size would throw me off. All of the strings are the same thickness/size (probably so they'll stay strong and won't break since there doesn't appear to be a way to change them), and this makes playing while staring at the TV extrememly difficult. Every string and button feels exactly the same, so it's difficult to play by feel.

Also, the guitar seems a lot heavier in the neck, and this kind of threw the balance off whenever I would play. Make sense due to the amount of wiring / etc. that i am sure is in the neck, but still pretty annoying.

I'm not saying that someone who kept trying couldn't maybe get used to it, but at this price why risk it? I'll be buying the actual guitar when it comes out later this year since this didn't work out. I felt bad about giving it two stars since it works as it should, etc. but two stars means "I don't like it" and that's the best description I would give it really. While it is an interesting idea, I can't see any reason to recommend this over the actual guitar Fender will be putting out later this year, especially after having used this one.

I have to say it's more impressive than I thought it would be. It's accurately responsive to where your fingers need to be playin' Pro and kicks arse! It's about half the price of what the Squier will cost you as the Squier won't be released 'til March 2011. With that said, I just couldn't wait to play Pro guitar/bass and wanted to get my hands on the Mustang now since it's already available. Also, wanted to get a feel for how it responds to standard/basic guitar. It works alright! You just need to use any buttons on the first 5 frets to mimic the 5 colored arrangement of G/R/Y/B/O but despite having the ability to play expert on your other plastic guitars it will still take some getting used to because the frets are a bit spread out compared to what your finger spread has on say a Xplorer guitar controller, Les Paul guitar controller, or RB2 fender. Because this is an actual life-size fretboard minus real strings but instead includes buttons along the 17 frets with 6 buttons per fret. Definitely worth the money as long as you put the time to learn Pro. The Overdrive kicks in nicely also when tilting the guitar. It's also lighter in weight than what I was expecting. This will definitely hold me over 'til the Squier gets released. One advantage the Mustang has is its ability to play all guitar songs from Pro to Basic. The Squier won't be able to play Basic guitar, only Pro! So if you have a ton of DLC that doesn't support Pro like me than this is a good investment me thinks. The length of the Mustang is similar to an actual guitar size (so it's taller than your RB2 fender when standing them upright). So yeah, only the body of the guitar has actual strings located in the strum area. The six-strings seem very durable when plucking away or strumming and the neck of the guitar is actually a full-sized fingerboard and as you learn notes and play chords the buttons accurately work! So I'm assuming that whatever you practice to learn Pro-wise in RB3 you should be able to transition fine with any fully 6-string guitar. At least that's the objective and idear!

Other things I'd like to pointout about the Mustang is that there isn't a whammy bar. So if yer lookin' to add twang to yer sheddin' or stretch out those overdrive notes for a bigger boost of overdrive, it won't happen! Looks like the Squier doesn't have a whammy bar either. Like most wireless RB instruments, the Mustang uses 3 AA batteries. There is a connector on the guitar for adding an overdrive jack so that you can deploy overdrive and so I tried the RB2 kick pedal to see if that would add a different option and it did not work. The overdrive jack may only work after new & more gear is released compatible with the guitar or Harmonix will release some patch to add more options when deploying overdrive. A feature the keyboard apparently has also. Also, if you play locally or online with friends and you only want to pick Pro songs and your other amigos add non-Pro guitar songs to your list, then you are stuck sitting there playing nothing when non-Pro songs show up. Since the Mustang handles both Basic and Pro guitar songs I wish there was a way it could tell you're using a Mustang and then it would switch between Basic and Pro automatically while playing random setlists, would be useful and more entertaining, maybe some patch would fix this, hopefully! And lastly, when scrolling through the menus and your music library of songs in the RB3 game you have to use the control pad and function buttons on the Mustang guitar. What I'm trying to say is there are no shortcuts when navigating through your music library. You can not use the frets or strum the strings to navigate like you can with other guitar controllers or hold the orange note down to bring up the shortcut or when you use kick pedal to press down and hold while using drums that opens a window menu when navigating around your music library which makes things much quicker and easier. It's a bit inconvenient but really makes you use the back button so you can sort through filters in the game, at least there is that! Either you sort out songs by using the back button going through the filters or manually use the control pad on the Mustang to find the songs you want by going through each song listed in your library by sort. The Mustang Pro-guitar has its Pros and Cons but I think the Pros outweigh the Cons. Again, Hope all this info was helpful. Overall, I am enjoying the Mustang Pro-guitar and I definitely recommend one since it's available now!

One of the three greatest inventions in the history of human kind....that greatly contributed to insomnia. Here they are..

1. Thomas Alva Edison invented the light bulb.
2. Microsoft (or who ever who sold it to them) invented the Kinect and Harmonix made Dance Central game for it.
3. Harmonix (once again) invented Pro Guitar for rockband 3.

Mustang Pro guitar is good. I mean really good. I mean really really good.

To start this review with.. I'm a beginning guitar player. I'm was studying the 4th stage of a 6 stage lesson DVD set (Metal Method by Doug Marks: he is great BTW) when I got the Mustang Pro guitar. Anyway long story short; I'm not a good guitar player at all.

*Can it teach you to play real guitar? Hex yeah!!
**Does the Mustang pro guitar simulate a real guitar? IMHO better!!

*First I did the first two of the training sessions with Mustang Pro. And then I picked up a real guitar while my wife tried the same training sessions with the Mustang Pro. On the real guitar I was able to easily play the same in the electric guitar with the practice I got from the mustang Pro. AND it sounds awesome sound coming out through the guitar amp when it blends with the sound track of the game. 'Hey, that sounds v-e-r-y good' were my wife's exact words.
**I have read comments about people talking about the guitar feeling light to; strings are same thickness to; buttons being the same thickness to; there is no correlation between buttons and the strings you strum. In my experience - none of this is the case. I cannot feel the thickness of the strings with the pick anyway (duh.) What I am learning from this is the skill to approximate the distance between the strings without looking. With practice able to do this better and better. Same goes for the buttons. My finger beginning to remember where they need to move to press for each note. This is a skill I can take directly to the real guitar. The buttons work very well, interestingly even for slides.

So why did I say in someway the pro guitar is better than a real guitar... There is something more satisfying about picking these strings with the pick than picking real metal strings. I threw out the picks that came with it and got Dunlop standard thickness Nylon picks. When picking the strings with those picks the strings almost feel like these strings are rubber not plastic. It's a good feeling .. u'll know what I mean once you get one yourself [UPDATE A DAY LATER: I had only played single notes and power chords when I wrote this. Later I played major chords and the strings get pretty loud when doing that. No big deal though.] As far as the construction of the guitar goes it's sturdy enough and you forget about the guitar once you get immersed in the game. Maybe wish the body was bigger like a real guitar so I could rest the elbow of the strumming arm on it when sitting down.

The reason learning with this is better than learning with an actual guitar is... you ALAWAYS have a backing track and a cool note highway showing where to play.

I can write this review into pages but I would cut it short.. because I myself dislike reading long reviews.
-If you want to learn guitar - buy this.
-If you want to teach your kids guitar - buy them this.
-If you don't have the time, patience or interest to learn - don't buy this

I did notice one thing...in most of the trainings it tells you where which finger to put on which fret. On two trainings it did not tell me where how to move down the frets . For example it was wanting me to play 5th, 7th and 8th frets and to play the 5th string with my index finger. Suddenly it wants me to play the 9th fret but does not tell me which finger to use. So I'm confused whether to move my hand all the way down and play with the index or stretch my pinky to play the 9th fret (this was a base line by the way. ) I wish there was an option where I could watch a video of a hand playing that piece if I wanted to . That's about all I can nit pick about. I would figure this out or ask somebody who knows... so no big deal.

TEN stars. Harmonix, come here so I can give you a kiss.

If you know a few basic chords but your guitar skill sucks, this is for you. This review will provide useful information if you are looking for this primarily as a way to learn real guitar.

I have had an acoustic guitar that I've fiddled around with for a year or so, but I haven't really been able to actually play any songs. Sure I could fake a few strumming patterns and change between the half dozen or so chords I knew, but that is not really playing guitar.

This peripheral is close enough to a real guitar to really help me target a lot of the issues I had with learning guitar, namely my rhythm,clean finger placement, and familiarity with distances between frets. I had a lot of trouble with keeping tempo while changing chords, especially from barre chords like from a Bm to C, or F to A. These things are really basic but it's difficult to know if I've got them right when playing with a real guitar. In addition, I'm happy that my hand flops up and down the neck of this peripheral the same way it clumsily finds its way up and down a real guitar, and the instant feedback I get onscreen is REALLY helpful in learning to curb that. Also, since the game tells you when it's important for an up or down strum (or if it doesn't matter) then it REALLY helps me with timing.

With my (craptastic) background, I was still able to start right at medium difficulty (power chords) and was able to get to the hard difficulty (1st position "real" chords) within an hour or two. Learning the RB3 notation was intuitive (you'll need to listen carefully to the tutorial) and I find that I use it more often than I use the common chord notation on the side. The strings are metal coated with plastic, which is great because it mutes the metal sound. I want to develop callouses so I strum only with fingers and not a pick, and it doesn't bother me. Some people might find the noise from the plastic strings annoying if they use a pick.

Now that I'm learning real songs, I have found this to be better than if I had a human instructor. I can choose to have the trainer stop immediately when I make a mistake, or I can choose to have it ignore it if I'm trying to just get the hang of it. I can speed up and slow it down to my needs. The trainer also breaks the song into manageable chunks. Combined with the instant feedback of where your hand is pressing the fret at all times so I don't have to look down so much, this is the ultimate tool.

Perhaps its my previous experience with an acoustic guitar, but I find that I press down on the buttons very hard. The peripheral is really sturdy and holds up when I apply copious amounts of grip force. I don't know if it's because I'm pressing hard, but I find that my fingers are callousing the same way as they would if they were strings. Some people say that this peripheral isn't so great because you can't feel the difference between the strings as you could if it were an acoustic, but honestly I can't tell the difference in thickness between a G string and a B string anyway. Of course I can feel the drastic difference between a high E and a low E, but how's that supposed to help you? In short, I don't feel it's a big miss.

Until the real squier comes out, if you're looking for a teaching tool that is effective and don't mind shelling out the money for this peripheral, it is worth every penny.

Let me start by mentioning I've been playing guitar for nearly 30 years, and I'm lucky to have an absolutely gorgeous Les Paul. Needless to say I was hesitant to try this controller (it's plastic and has buttons instead of strings, after all. But I was also extremely curious and intrigued (I love games and I love music, so melding the two seemed like a pretty cool idea).

Well, I'm please to say this little controller completely blew my mind (obviously exceeding my low expectations).

The neck and body are slightly smaller than a normal full-sized electric, and the buttons are light to the touch, making this a really easy-playing instrument. Moving up and down the neck was slick and easy-feeling. Frankly, I've played real electric guitars that had a worse feel than this little creation.

The fact that it's light and small actually works nice and feels pretty natural, sitting on the couch in front of the TV.

The other thing that I was impressed with was the technology. I've had no issues with frustrating false-triggers. Whatever you play, the game picks up. No problems.

I would HIGHLY recommend this controller for anyone wanting to take their Rock Band experience to the next level (way more fun playing the songs for real).

The real kicker is the game. Rock Band 3 is a blast and pro-mode really takes things to the next level. It's loaded with guitar tutorials, which is why I also HIGHLY RECOMMEND this for anyone who's interested in learning to play the guitar. In the Pro-Mode, Rock Band gives beginner (and advanced) players an impressive list of tutorials that will take you from playing single notes, arpeggios, scales, chords, bar-chords, hammer-ons ... all the way to teaching you some of the most tongue-twisting licks that Rock has to offer.

Great fun, great controller, great learning tool.

What are you waiting for! Stop playing a game and start playing music.

Enjoy.

Pros:
1. It's kind of like playing real guitar with rock band 3
2. It seems sturdy, I've been wailing on it for a month now and It's still working.
3. It's wireless with batteries included
4. No restringing or tuning frustrations like with real guitar.

Cons:
1. Strings don't extend up the fretboard, so there's no physical correlation between what you're picking and what fret you are pressing.
2. All buttons are the same height, no physical difference between the top "string" and the bottom "string".
3. Only 17 frets, the neck is 2 inches shorter than my gibson.
4. Strings are plastic, and make an awful scratching noise when you pick them.
5. I don't want to think about what will happen if one of the 100s of buttons stops working or if one of the strings breaks.
6. No string bending, pinch harmonics, or pick scratching are detected by the game.

I've had a lot of fun with this game over the past few weeks. I've been playing it several hours a day using only this controller. Using the controller and the game I've learned a lot of songs that I otherwise would not have bothered with, such as Rock Lobster, Whip It, and Stayin' Alive. Skills learned playing Rock band 3 translate over to playing real guitar, but I think you do need a real guitar to get the most out of this. Many times I can't figure out what I'm trying to play in Rock Band without banging it out with the real guitar first. It's just too frustrating trying to figure out what you're pressing and what you're picking, especially when playing arpeggios or guitar solos. In a way, the mustang is kind of like playing two different instruments with each hand. I plan to buy the Fender Squier that is coming out in March, but I had to get my hands on this game. I do not regret buying it and I will continue to play it, but when the Squier comes out I'm not going to use it anymore.

I'm new to learning guitar. I own a Fender Stratocastor and a amp and though I've tried many times to learn how to use it, there seems to be other things taking my attention away from learning how to play. Enter the Rockband 3's Fender Mustang Pro Guitar and suddenly learning becomes extremely intuitive. Side note: The tutorials in the game are not preachy and don't feel like you are in a dry music class. They are high quality and abundant!

I've owned this Mustang guitar for 2 months now, have played it nearly everyday and I'm glad to say the buttons are not getting stuck or worn like Guitar Hero guitars (I'm looking at you Guitar Hero World Tour which I had to return 4 times and eventually giving up).

Pros
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1. Quality is excellent: Strings offer good tension and don't lose tension with time. Buttons depress easily and offer no more resistance than actually pressing down on a string. In fact I find barre chords easier on this guitar than on a real guitar.
2. Neck disassembles for easy storage
3. Wireless
4. You can strum the strings aggressively and it doesn't damage the guitar.
5. Rockband 3 picks up the signal surprisingly well and with no apparent lag.

Cons
----
1. Rockband 3 doesn't recognize bent notes and so far I haven't figured out how to do a slide on a sustained note that Rockband could understand. Perhaps it's doable, but I can't attest to it.

For what it is: a learning tool: this peripheral works exactly as advertised.

Shortcomings versus a real guitar:
---------------------------------
1. With buttons, sliding along the fret board to do a C5 followed by an F5 back to a C5 power chord sometimes leads me to slide to another "string". Thankfully this may be the biggest issue, which is not so bad an issue. Probably my being a noob accounts for 85% of this issue which maybe will improve with time. But I do slide better on my real Strat.
2. Each string is the same size and feel so I find myself plucking the wrong string a bit more easily than on a real guitar: once again I mostly blame my inexperience for this.
3. The strings don't make sound other than a plucking sound so you have to trust that what you are playing produces the real song sound played by Rockband.
4. This guitar is slightly smaller than a real guitar but it doesn't bother me. I switch from Mustang to real guitar and back without feeling like there's a discrepancy.
5.Sometimes I feel that Rockband accepts little mistakes like strumming a string I shouldn't be strumming, but usually the game is right on the money.

I am simply pointing how it differes from a real guitar and this is not meant to detract from this excellent product. My goal is to help you decide if you want this Fender Mustang or buy the Fender Squier "real" guitar.

I really think this guitar is a labor of love and worth every penny.

I give this a 9/10, where 10/10 is a real guitar. I had a very experienced guitarist over and he mastered this instrument in seconds and learned a new song with disturbing ease. He liked the guitar very much and was very impressed.