During E3 today, Harmonix and MTV have announced the formation of a Music Advisory Board chaired by Little Steven himself. For those of you who don't know, Little Steven is one of the founding members of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, and also played Silvio Dante on The Sopranos. The advisory board consists of musicians and industry experts, who will be helping Harmonix with song choices in regards to their upcoming game, Rock Band. Harmonix have also released the first image of the electronic drum kit. The picture is of the 360 version.

Harmonix has its work cut out for itself. Not only is the company in the midst of creating the most ambitious music rhythm game to date, it also has to select a fist-pumping track list for the game and the 100 downloadable songs that it has set as its goal for the first year. The work gets even tougher when you factor in news that Rock Band will have two new songs released every week for download and that the title will be the first to offer full-length albums as part of its game.

To help lighten the workload and ensure quality throughout, Harmonix and MTV Games have announced the formation of a Music Advisory Board. This group, chaired by Steven Van Zandt, will guide the dev team in the artist, album, and track selection process.

Your Rock Band track list is in this man's hands.
"The Harmonix team is honored to have a musician and producer of Little Steven's stature involved in the music selection for Rock Band," stated Alex Rigopulos, co-founder and CEO, Harmonix. "Steven's expertise is vast, from his status as a founding member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, his encyclopedic knowledge of rock music history and well-known skill at pulling people together. He is the perfect choice to lead the team to steer us through the thousands of musical choices we are currently facing."

The advisory board will be made up of musicians and industry experts and will work with Harmonix on both the disc and downloadable track choices. The group will also be tasked with seeking out up-and-coming artists to introduce to the public through the game.

Coinciding with this announcement, Harmonix has also released the first image of the electronic drum kit that stick wielders will use to keep the beat. The image shown is the Xbox 360 version of the controller. No word yet on whether the kit will be wireless (the wire in the image is the pedal connector) or not. The slightly different prototype drum set IGN used for a recent hands-on preview was wired.

Warsun via xbox360.ign.com »