3. Story walkthrough
Before you start reading
This page is ONLY for solo career or solo related achievements! Band career/related achievement are on the following pages!
Before you start playing a song
We will start off with the tutorials. Each instrument has a few small explanations, which will help you master the gameplay if you are new to the series. To start with those, select 'Quickplay' from the main menu & then 'Training'. There, you can scroll down to select 'Tutorials'. After finishing each lesson, you'll get your first achievement.
After the lessons are covered, we'll customize our very own rocker. Go to 'Rock Star Creator' from the main menu to create a new rocker. First, we will create a female band member, so pick Female in the menu. Customize her until you think she's alright and save (saving needs to be done for the achievement to pop!). Another easy achievement unlocked.
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
We will continue with creating another rocker, but this time, we will select a male one. We will do some additional things here, so keep your eyes on this guide while your creating your things. For your rocker himself, customize until you are happy. Now it's time to add a tattoo (& unlocking another achievement). Go to the 'Body'-menu & scroll down to 'Tattoos'. There you can select to put one on your torso, left- or right arm. Select edit & let your creativity roll. After saving your tattoo, another achievement is unlocked.
Time to create your own instruments, shall we? We'll start with the guitar. Go to the 'Instruments'-menu, select 'Guitar' & then 'Customize'. Edit everything you want to edit & save your guitar which will let the achievement pop. We will continue with the drums, in the 'Instruments'-menu, select 'Drums' & 'Customize'. Again, edit everything you want and save it. New achievement unlocked.
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
To finish off everything for your band, the only thing left to do is to create your band and its logo. From the main menu, go to the 'Options'-menu & select 'Band Info'. Press the blue fret button (or you can press X if you are playing with a standard x360 controller) to edit your band logo. After you are done, save it to earn another achievement.
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Alright, time for the real work. You already earned an easy 35G, but it's time for the more time consuming achievements.
Career
Select 'Career' from the main menu & then 'Single'. Choose 'Guitar' (or any other instrument you prefer to play) & any difficulty you want to play on. In your first playthrough, you need to play every song possible (except for possible DLC's), to gain an extra achievement after you finished the career; so I really recommend starting your first playthrough on guitar. Complete your first song to unlock your first story related achievement.
Perform as a Guitarist (Band or Solo)
Complete the first gig, which contains 3 songs, to earn another achievement.
Complete a gig (Band or Solo)
Continue with the gigs. After you beated 7 or 8 setlists, you'll gain another achievement.
Complete the majority of the gigs (Band or Solo)
If you get to San Francisco (AT&T Park), you'll get the opportunity to unlock another achievement. This venue has 6 songs (the Encore song is included) & two of them are songs by the famous Jimi Hendrix! This is the only character you don't need to buy (you'll need to buy a total of 8 characters) throughout the whole game & it will net you another achievement! Complete the song "The Wind Cries Many" to unlock this one!
Note: This achievement will only unlock if you play as the vocalist or guitarist!
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
After playing the gig on Time Square in New York and beating the final encore, you will have finished your first career!
Complete a solo career (any difficulty)
At the same time, based on what difficulty you played, you'll get the chance to get 4 more achievements. These achievements are stackable, so if you completed this career on Hard, you'll get the achievements for Easy & Medium as well.
Complete a Career on easy (Band or Solo)
Complete a Career on medium (Band or Solo)
Complete a Career on hard (Band or Solo)
Complete a Career on expert (Band or Solo)
After your career, you'll need to buy the last 'secret' venue & try to 5-star each song on the set list to unlock another achievement.
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Side notes:
- Bass, drum and vocal tour only require you to beat the gigs that don't need to be purchased. You don't even have to 5-star each song, passing the song is good enough. There are some score related achievements, for more info scroll down to the bottom of this guide.
- While going through the career, you'll get the chance to buy other characters; in this case Zack Wylde (after you beat the song "Stillborn" by Black Label Society), Ted Nugent (after you beat the song "Stranglehold" written by Ted Nugent himself) & Billy Corgan (after beating the song "Today" by the Smashing Pumpkins). Each of these characters cost a certain amount of money, but they are needed to unlock 8 other achievements. A quick hint: buy the rocker, play a song with him/her/it (I don't know the gender of Rockubot & Skeleton), let the achievement pop & exit to the dashboard. That way, you'll save your money to buy additional gigs.
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
- If you play the career on bass, you will not unlock any additional characters. While going through the career on drums, you will eventually unlock Travis Barker. Complete the song "Dammit" by Blink-182, so you can buy him from the menu. Finish one song to unlock an achievement. After beating the Time Square-gig, Rockubot is available for purchase. Again, play one song with him to unlock an achievement.
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
- Last but not least, vocal career. If you don't want to sing any of the songs; there's an easy solution: the fan-trick! Set the difficulty to beginner and place your mic in front of something that produces enough sound to make the game register your "singing" (I used the speaker of my TV). Like in guitar- and drum career, you'll unlock some celebrities. The first one you encounter is Ozzy Osbourne. Buy and play one song with him. Next up is Hayley Williams. Beat "Misery Business" by Paramore to make her available. Buy her, play one song and achievement unlocked! The last character you need to buy is Skeleton. This one requires you to beat the Time Square-show. Play one show to earn your last 'buy character & play a song with it'-related achievement.
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
- After you completed one song on each instrument, you'll gain an achievement related to it (except for bass once again) and one to complete a song with each instrument.
Perform as a Drummer (Band or Solo)
Perform as a Vocalist (Band or Solo)
Perform as every instrument at least once (Vocals, Lead, Bass & Drums)
- After completing each tour on each possible achievement, you'll gain the achievement which is the second most time consuming achievement in this game. But the 150 gamepoints you get for it are pretty nice, aren't they?!
Complete all instrument careers - any difficulty (Band or Solo)
Score Related-achievements
After you finished the guitar career, you'll unlock an additional gig (as said above). This gig contains the most difficult song of the game (on guitar): "Satch Boogie". Like all other Guitar Hero-games, it comes with an achievement. You need to score 222,222 points (or higher) & this is only possible with 97% (or above) of the notes hit & with a good star power path on Hard or 94% (or above) of the notes hit & with a good star power path on Expert. I recommend practicing each section of the song & putting Hyperspeed on (as said in General Hints & Tips).
Good star power path (Hard): http://pathhero.codemann8.com/view.php?path=4135
Good star power path (Expert): http://pathhero.codemann8.com/view.php?path=91
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Let's get to the drum score-related achievement. You'll need to play "Assassin" by Muse, where you have to score 222,222 points at least. This is possible on Medium, but you need to get at least 99%, a great star power path and keep your multiplier to x8 the entire song, which means you can only miss a note at the beginning or the end of a song. Playing on Hard or Expert means you have a little more room for mistakes, but it DOES makes this song more difficult! Please note that the Rock Band-drumkit can be used as well. I didn't find any paths for the RB-drums, but I guess you can always try to use the same path as the gamers in the video use for the GH-drumkit.
Good star power path (Medium, GH drums): http://pathhero.codemann8.com/view.php?path=4173
Good star power path (Medium, RB drums) (video submitted by on YouTube):
Good star power path (Hard, GH drums) (video submitted by gugge2000gnorman on YouTube):
Good star power path (Expert, GH drums): http://pathhero.codemann8.com/view.php?path=357
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
Last but not least: scoring 123,450 points on "Beat It"... on vocals! It's not as hard as it sounds like though! SIL3NCEikillyou submitted a very useful video on this website, which helped me and a few other gamers to obtain this achievement. Put the difficulty on Expert, set the vocal lag (in the menu 'Calibrate Lag') to 0ms & turn the volumes down from everything EXCEPT for the mic & the vocals. Then, synchronise this video with your game & activate star power whenever it's possible! You don't even need to hum the freeform sections! All credits go to SIL3NCEikillyou off course!
Continue playing to unlock this secret achievement. (Secret)
I'm pretty happy there's not score related achievement for the song "B.Y.O.B" by System of A Down, since that's one hell of a ride!
Mop Up
Just like in GH III: Legends of Rock, there's a GHTunes section at the main menu. Create a song (it can even be a song where you played one note), save it & upload it the GHTunes-server to unlock an achievement.
Another achievement that's possible to gain is where you have to download a 'few' songs from GHTunes, created by other gamers. A few songs are actually 3 songs. You don't even need to play those, just downloading them is enough.
Download a few songs from GHTunes
Note: Apparently, these achievements is no longer obtainable. Activision is looking for a solution so by the time this guide is online, it could be that there is a solution. Let's hope for the best!
That's it for solo play! Let's continue with the band-related achievements!
Note: The "Bling, Bling"-achievement can be obtained while you're playing solo, but I recommend band play! Turn the page to read more!
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