It’s been no great secret that the Guitar Hero series would be ‘diversifying’. Or, if you prefer, it’s no great secret that it would be ‘ripping off’ Rock Band. No two ways about it: Guitar Hero can now be played with two guitars, a drum kit and a USB microphone. It has a screen layout that’s almost identical to Harmonix’s game, a character creation tool, and can be played online.

It’s tempting to excoriate the various parties involved simply out of principle. To do so would be wrong because, even though the concept always belonged to Harmonix, GHIV is genuinely surprising in the depth it brings to the party. Alongside the fact that Rock Band wasn’t quite perfect (alongside its insulting European price tag) you might wonder whether this competition can only be a good thing.

The drumkit’s the major interface difference, with a lower row of three pads and two perched above, a foot pedal and (most importantly) rubber heads. The plasticky tapping of Rock Band’s drum kit was hardly a deal-breaker, but it’s pleasing to see little irritants removed. This kit also has some capacity for recognizing the strength of your blows, which is allegedly reflected in the sound coming out of the speakers as well as in triggering star power. The guitars will also be subject to a little fine tuning, with Neversoft particularly keen to make it easier to slide fingers down the neck as well as allow some new tricks such as muffling to make their first appearance.

Let’s get the rest out of the way quickly, because the reason for getting excited about Guitar Hero IV lies with one very specific section. With regard to tracks, collective joy for the presence of The Eagles and Van Halen, a collective groan for Linkin Park, and collective mystification for Sublime. Character customization options are extensive way beyond Rock Band’s and have several layering tools which, combined with the basic structures, make pretty much any human (and Elvis) a possibility. And you can customize your instrument.

So, on to the headlining feature of Guitar Hero IV, and one which will inevitably lead to the tired old ‘YouTube for X’ shouts. The game features a music studio that, in several different ways allows you to create your own music which can then be played through or uploaded to the GHTunes website, where other people can download and rate it. In its basic mode, you choose a backing track, the game will set you up with the right chords in the right scale, and you can bash away. A neat representation of the notes you’re playing gives a basic idea of the kind of challenge the song you’re producing will present. It’s a neat entry point to what proves a very complex tool indeed.

In a ‘live’ recording, you choose your scale and root note from a menu (these can be set individually for all instruments or made standard across the band), and there is the ability to further customize particular button presses for the exact scale you want. We witnessed an approximation of Smells Like Teen Spirit being created that was recognizable if not wonderful, but it did make clear that this option is essentially a four-track recorder (with, of course, the ability to instantly play anything you make as a GH note-track).

It’s the ‘Advanced’ recording studio that is the really exciting aspect of GHIV, however. It’s essentially a sequencer, but a fully functional one operated by five buttons and a fret. So you can lay down your note tracks, set your BPM and then tweak anything that you’ve recorded in the ‘live’ environment. GHIV also has a function which dictates the length of time between notes that can be applied to almost every aspect of the tool. It’s a piece of design that makes recording very easy, allowing you to set up complex patterns that may be beyond your own abilities to play in realtime.

It’s very likely that this feature is going to generate some insane fan creations. And as well as providing separate tracks for each instrument (though sadly there’s no vocal support) there’s a full suite of audio effects that can be applied to them, so your guitar could be ‘acoustic’, ‘boutique’, ‘electronic’, ‘indie rock’ or ‘hip hop’. And on top of all that, the cherry on the cake is surely the ability to set a marker for a particular part of a song – perhaps your magnificent, hair-flinging, finger-shredding solo near the end – and have the stage effects synched to it when it’s played.

It’s clear what a step forward this could be for the genre. The publishing of the songs works as simply and as richly as you might expect – they are uploaded to GHTunes and then, after setting the name, genre, etc, they can be downloaded by anyone. You can even create cover art for the song should you feel artistically inclined.

Guitar Hero III and Guitar Hero Aerosmith gave the impression of nothing so much as a franchise that was being slowly milked and would swiftly see diminishing returns. It would be interesting to know whether Guitar Hero III was, in actuality, a side project for Neversoft while working in earnest on this incarnation, because GHIV is a genuine surprise in terms of both quality and depth. If this commitment to innovation and serving the brand’s fans can be maintained, it may have a lot of life left in it yet.

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