While touring the grand halls of X08, I had a chance to sit down with Jordan Hodge, PR Coordinator for Guitar Hero publisher Red Octane. Jordan and I had a pretty lengthy chit chat about all things Guitar Hero. Here's the highlights;

Q: Since joining the Activision family, we've seen a lot more Guitar Hero than we have before. Are you at all worried about the brand getting diluted?

A: Everybody is like "well there's so much" but then the other half of the people are saying "I don't have enough, I want more. I want more than weekly DLC on Rock Band." I loved Aerosmith and I'm glad I was able to get these 40 songs for basically a discounted rate. I want every piece of music available and I want the opportunity to buy that. If Aerosmith isn't your thing, if Metallica isn't you're thing, you don't have to buy it.

Q: Fair enough, everybody likes options. But wouldn't producing all these titles stretch the development team a little thin?

A: It's growing very quickly (the development team). there are a lot of people that have their hands in the Guitar Hero franchise. Neversoft isn't the only developer to work on (Guitar Hero). Vicarious Visions does the Wii version and they've been doing some really cool stuff there.

Jordan and I also spoke about the difficulty issues in Guitar Hero III and whether or not the team had taken the feedback to heart. He assures me that they've learned from their previous experience and have made sure there will be a far more linear rise in difficulty this time around.

We were given a quick peek at the World Tour Music Studio. What we saw was impressive. Dozens of drum kits, effects pedals and tempo changes are going to make sure that no two tracks sound alike. Creating seems to be a pretty straight forward process as well. You'll be able to share your tracks online through Xbox LIVE (and one can assume the PSN as well). On a sad note you won't be able to export the tracks you create to your hard drive. That means no playlists of "The Jim Squires All Girl Band" first EP. If you were hoping to use Guitar Hero World Tour to do some real world music mixing, it looks like your tunes are trapped.

The last topic of conversation was probably the stickiest -- how do things stack up against the competition? We discussed a number of things that Rock Band 2 will be doing, and whether or not we'll be seeing them in Guitar Hero World Tour. Here's a list of not;

• No cross-game DLC: the previous games didn't feature additional instruments, so neither did the downloadable content.
• No copying of tracks from previous Guitar Hero games: same reason.

It's important to note that this doesn't necessarily rule out future DLC, but at this time they had nothing to announce regarding this. After talking with Jordan it became pretty clear that Activision felt the future of Guitar Hero wasn't in it's past, but in it's Music Studio. As long as it's as accessible as he made it look, I think giving up the tracks you already own in exchange for this is a worthwhile sacrifice.

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