We have yet to see official gameplay for Rock Band 4 but we have had a look at the new controllers for the game and how Harmonix is changing things up to give us that rock star feeling all over again. Well, to clarify they have given IGN exclusive "first rites" to the Rock Band 4 and the virtual rock star feeling as it is Guitar Hero Live that is aiming for the real feel. Now that is out of the way we can dig right in to what we can expect to be plugging into our PS4 or Xbox One later this year to experience what Harmonix and Mad Catz will be bringing with Rock Band 4. Here's a quick rundown of the new features for the controllers.

First up we have the new guitar for Rock Band 4. It looks a lot like the old guitars that we have been virtually rocking out with over the last iterations of the franchise. Looks can be deceiving and un-telling as the new Rock Band 4 guitar, while dropping the wooden grain to the neck, will sport quieter buttons, and a stiffer strum bar. No more of those annoying clicks when you have to play the game a bit quieter to not wake the neighbors. The strum bar on the other hand looks to have a great improvement over the last versions that would become very loose and thus lead to dropped notes. Hopefully no more DYI fixes moving forward for the Rock Band 4 hardware.

Next of course we have the new drums for Rock Band 4 that look a lot like the drums we have been beating on since Beatles Rock Band. In fact that version of the drum kit was used as the starting point here. Not to mention the fact that Harmonix watched a bunch of the DYI fixes that players, myself included, would perform on said drums to make them quieter and more responsive. The new drums for Rock Band 4 are being touted to produce better quality with less real world drumming noise so we can here the professional drumming over our more piss-poor version of it all. We are not all pro drummers are we? Rock Band 4 wants to make sure only we know that I guess.

Last up, and the one that seems to have had the most improvement, is the Rock Band 4 microphone. Harmonix and Mad Catz are promising fewer distortion issues and better pick up for some of us singers who can't belt it out like no tomorrow. That means you can keep your real world singing low and Rock Band 4 will still score you as if you had some professional pipes. For those who can sing to the stars though there is also a new feature that will allow you to add variation to your singing so you can further make the song your own. In fact as long as you have the correct tone to it all you get a better score for mixing things up. Not everyone is Dave Brockie or Till Lindemann after all.

What is a bit curious here is that there doesn't look like there is going to be support for all of the pro versions of instruments in Rock Band 4. Or to that extent the keyboard. Maybe it hasn't been shown off just yet or maybe Harmonix wants to truncate a lot of the 80's and 90's music to make us rock stars again and not synth-pop stars. This could also be just another announcement being chambered for later reveal. I just hope that Rock Band 4 gets the long awaited mouth harp addition to the game… but not really.

Are you excited to get your hands on the new equipment for Rock Band 4? Are you curious why we are going back to the standard three instruments for the game? How about that new vocal variation system that we can play with in Rock Band 4? Let us know what you think down in the comments and keep a close eye out here for more things Rock Band 4. They say it why can't we?