In an exclusive interview with Harmonix boss Alex Rigopulos at this year's E3, GameDaily BIZ questioned the Rock Band developer on the differences in guitar difficulty between their own game and the Guitar Hero series from Activision. Avid players of both franchises are well aware that Rock Band guitar parts are generally easier than those in Guitar Hero, but that's because the difficulty in Guitar Hero is being artificially inflated, commented Rigopulos. Ultimately, he does not believe that Guitar Hero's fret patterns are being true to the real music.

"The guiding philosophy for us when authoring patterns is staying true to the music. What we found was if material in Rock Band was actually easier compared to Guitar Hero, it's because the actual guitar parts are easier, whereas the design mandate for GH seems to be more focused on a gamer mentality in ratcheting up the difficulty. What you see are these note charts that are very disconnected from what's actually happening in the real guitar parts in the music; they might be more crazy from a gameplay point of view, but they're also more disconnected from the music. So for us, that departs from our core design mandate," he said.

Rigopulos continued, perhaps whetting the appetites of guitar fiends everywhere, "That said, we are bringing some music to the platform, which we're not ready to talk about yet, that the nature of the music itself is so insane, it will be the most challenging material imaginable to play in the Rock Band universe."