Surprise! There's a new, slightly different guitar controller bundled with Guitar Hero 5. The sparkly red controller includes a redesigned touchpad, which now uses digital input instead of analog. The touchpad area also has small dots to indicate the fret color, and "slight reliefs" on the neck. Neversoft's Brian Bright told IGN that "all of these changes to the slider allow you to hit the tapping sections with better precision – we also removed the purple rope in the tapping/slide sections of game play by the way :)."

Activision has yet to determine whether this guitar will be available by itself or if it will be restricted to GH5 bundles. What is much more certain is that there will be a new Guitar Hero controller every single year, just in case Activision can convince some current guitar owners to upgrade.