Rock Band guitar shown in latest GameStop newsletter

whatever happened to the distortion pedals for guitar hero II/360? :[
well rock band seems like it will be a notch above guitar hero.

Booo - it's a Fender design. Lame.

to me it looks like the GH# guitars will work. i think (this is only thoery from seeing the guitars and i might be completely wrong and sound ridiculous) it might just be the same notes but on a higher octive. < dont think "octive" is spelled right but u get the idea.

At first I thought this guitar was going to be a great edition to the game, but after playing the game for a few days now I hate the new guitar. The buttons are awkwardly positioned, and you can accidentally bump them with the slightest movement sending you back to the main menu. Also the xbox button, start, directional pad, etc are placed in a bad position below the whammy bar. I've found myself accidentally hitting the buttons too many times pausing my game mid-song. Strumming on really fast sequences is almost impossible because you have to hit it a lot harder to make it work. The guitar that came with the special edition died on us after 1 day of play, so we had to return it. Thankfully walmart was willing to switch out guitars without us having to pack up the entire kit for the return.

We ran out and purchased the old school guitar hero style guitar last night, and we've enjoyed playing so much more with it. We aren't constantly accidentally pausing or backing out of our game and having to start over again anymore, plus the size is just much more manageable for me.

As for the soloing, you still solo no matter which guitar you are using, but the Fender Stratocaster has a switch to allow you to make different sounds during soloing. Honestly we've hardly used the switch as it doesn't seem to give it that much of a different effect.