Rock Band is ready for a comeback tour. Today, Harmonix announced Rock Band 2 is set to ship for Xbox 360 this September and PS3 later in the year. However, theis sparse on details, so we went straight to Harmonix to learn more. We spoke with Lead Designer Dan Teasdale to get the full scoop on the mega-sequel. Teasdale gave us his thoughts on user-created content, improving accessibility, upgrading last year's model and more.

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Yes. We've been developing Rock Band as a music platform from the start. All of the songs that you've purchased so far (and will be able to purchase in the future) are instantly playable and fully supported in Rock Band 2. We've even added some cool new features that let you play your DLC in different ways, which I think people will be very excited to get their hands on.Absolutely! We've been working hard with Microsoft and Sony to develop a way to share content between games, and we're really happy that we'll be the first game to support fully functional cross-title DLC.As far as Harmonix is concerned, there's no difference between "Rock Band 1 DLC" and "Rock Band 2 DLC" – we're just releasing awesome songs every week onto the Rock Band platform, all of which are playable by the Rock Band titles that support DLC.At Harmonix, we have a very clear method for making games – we innovate, then we perfect. With Rock Band, we innovated by being the first full band game that you can play in your living room or online.Rock Band 2 takes all the lessons we've learned from making a multi-instrument music game, addresses them, then adds some amazing new ways for you to experience your music library that have never been seen in a music game before. We've been scouring forums and parties everywhere for what people liked and didn't like, and I'm pretty confident we've addressed everything I've heard people ask for.On that note, we've also secured what I can easily say is the best setlist I've ever seen in a music game. The PR team would kill me if I revealed some early, but it reads like a who's who list of rock music. We have a couple of surprises that we'll be announcing soon regarding this.Rock Band 2 really is the ultimate rock experience, and I think people will find it hard going back to the original Rock Band after playing Rock Band 2 for a few minutes.One of our biggest focuses of the design team has been to make the game "party safe." We've made navigation improvements to Rock Band 2 across the board based on the feedback we've been getting both from fans on forums as well as from our own personal experiences at Rock Band nights.I'm pretty sure John Drake (Harmonix PR Coordinator) will hit me if I confirm or deny anything, but I can say this: We've taken almost everything people have asked for in Rock Band and added it to Rock Band 2, as well as including some "first time ever" features. Our World Tour campaign mode is no exception to this.