Tour

Lore & Background

In the Rock Band world, every band starts in a basement or a dive-bar slot, playing a handful of covers for a thin crowd. Tour mode is that journey rendered as a game loop: the setlist in front of you is the band's current repertoire, and each song you nail adds to the credit jar at the merch table. Miss too many notes, and the crowd thins; the next track stays locked behind a paywall you can't yet afford.

As the setlist grows, the implied venue grows with it. The early songs tend toward simpler, more forgiving arrangements; the later entries demand tighter timing, more complex fills, and vocal runs that punish a sloppy pitch. The progression is not gated by a story or a character arc—there is no narrative cutscene between tracks—but the difficulty curve and the expanding song pool create a clear sense of a band that is, song by song, getting better and bolder.

In Rock Band 2 the concept was handed to the player: custom tours let you set your own unlock order, your own credit thresholds, and your own mix of genres, turning the mode from a fixed career into a personal practice curriculum. The underlying principle stayed the same, though—Tour is where you go when you want the game to tell you what to work on next.

In Their Own Story

The amp hums at 6 p.m. and the setlist taped to the monitor reads only four songs tonight. You slot the guitar in, hit the first track, and the notes scroll in a lazy, forgiving rhythm. By the end of the chorus you've got a small pile of credits sitting in the corner of the screen, and the fifth song's title flickers from grey to white. You take a sip of water, check the drum pad for a loose stick, and queue the next one. The crowd in the game's crowd-cam is a little bigger now. It's not a stadium yet. But the setlist is longer, and that's enough for tonight.

Reader's Guide

New player: From the main menu, select Tour. You'll see a vertical setlist—some songs are lit (unlocked), some are dimmed (locked). Pick an unlocked song, choose your instrument, and play. Your accuracy percentage at the end determines how many credits you earn. Spend credits on the next locked song to unlock it, or buy a song outright if you've saved enough. Repeat until the whole setlist is open.

Veteran depth: Guitar/Bass (Pro mode): Instead of the four-color note highway, Pro Guitar and Pro Bass present a six-string fretboard. You must pick the correct string (E, A, D, G, B, e) by pressing the corresponding string button while holding the fret position. Chords require simultaneous string presses; bends and slides demand you hold and drag. Accuracy is judged per-string, so a wrong string on one note of a chord still scores that note as a miss even if the fret is right.

Drums: The standard four-pad plus cymbal layout maps kick to the bottom pad, snare to the center, hi-hat to the top, and toms/cymbals to the side pads. In Pro Drum mode (Rock Band 3 onward) you get a full kit with separate crash, ride, and multiple tom pads; the note highway shows individual pad icons rather than color-coded circles, and you must hit the exact pad shown.

Vocals: Scoring uses a pitch window around the target note. Your microphone input is tracked in real time; staying within the green band scores a hit, drifting into the yellow band scores a partial, and missing the band entirely is a miss. Harmony tracks in later titles require you to hold the harmony button while singing the lead, and the scoring window tightens slightly on the harmony line.

Did You Know?

• Tour credits are earned per-song based on your final accuracy percentage, so a 95% run on a hard song can yield more credits than a 100% run on an easy one.
• Rock Band 2 introduced Custom Tours, letting players define their own setlist order, unlock thresholds, and credit costs for each song.
• Your Tour progress is saved to the console's profile, so credits and unlocked songs persist across sessions and can be shared among players on the same console.
• Free Play and Tour are separate modes: you can play any unlocked song in Free Play without spending credits or affecting your Tour setlist progression.