Fortnite maker Epic Games will now allow certain guitar controllers to be used with Fortnite Festival, the game’s (worse) version of Rock Band. But, as Fortnite is famously a small indie game with limited resources, the launch of this new mode based on a game that has been around for nearly 19 years has been shot through with problems.
You may have been waiting for this update to drop! To dig through your garage and fish out your old Guitar Hero controllers, long dormant, biding their time, only to find that they don’t work with Fortnite Festival at all. Even those who do have compatible controllers have been struggling to get them to work! It’s all been a bit of a mess.
We’re here to help. If you have a PDP Riffmaster, or another compatible guitar controller, here is how to get it to work with your console. If you’re using one of the older Rock Band or Guitar Hero controllers from the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, sadly, they do not work at all. See Epic’s compatibility chart below to make sure your guitar is included.
PS5 (and possibly PS4)
I’ve only been able to confirm that this fix works with the Riffmaster controller so far, but I have no reason to think it would be different for Rock Band 4 controllers.
If you turned on your console, opened Fortnite Festival and selected your setlist all using your guitar controller, you could be forgiven for expecting the game to know you’re using a guitar controller. It doesn’t! The error message most (all?) users are getting when they actually get into a song is “Swap Device,” frantically trying to get the game to register the guitar as the unpausable notes on the track stressfully fly by.
Here’s how to solve this:
- Select the Main Stage mode of Fortnite Festival.
- Use the orange button on the guitar to select either “pro guitar” or “pro bass”.
- Select your setlist.
- Ready up and jump into a song, which will bring up the “swap device” message.
- Press the menu button on the guitar. Annoyingly, this doesn’t pause the song, so you’ll still have to watch helplessly as the notes sail by.
- Quickly turn on your DualSense controller. Select your profile when it asks who is using the controller.
- Then (and this is key) exit out of the menu by pressing the red button on your guitar.
After that, you should be able to play the setlist normally. Note that after each song, the game will try to reset your instrument mode to a regular guitar, so before moving to the next song, you’ll have to navigate back over to either pro guitar or pro bass.
You will need to repeat this each time you turn on the PlayStation to play Fortnite Festival. Infuriating, I know.
Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One
I have not been able to try the following fix for myself, but I’ve worked with a friend to test it remotely (thanks for the heads up, friend of the site Donald Duong), and I found it corroborated on this Reddit post, so that bodes well.
It’s much the same as the PlayStation fix, only this one is apparently permanent, and I’m jealous.
The way to solve this is to:
- Select the Main Stage mode of Fortnite Festival.
- Use the orange button on the guitar to select either “pro guitar” or “pro bass”.
- Select your setlist.
- Ready up and jump into a song, get the “swap device” message.
- Press the Xbox button on your regular controller.
- Then (and, again, this is key) exit out of the menu by pressing the red button on your guitar.
After that, it should just work. Enjoy!
In closing
It seems like these weren’t the only errors introduced into Fortnite in this latest patch. I’ve been getting more crashes in the Lego modes (and a lot less XP. RIP to the idle XP farm exploit). I keep getting errors saying my connection is bad (despite my Xbox speed test saying my download/upload is 350/300mbps, which should be plenty) and David (our Kotaku AU overlord) has experienced Festival dropping all kinds of frames.
Hopefully these problems will be fixed in the next update (which will presumably also break something important).
Good luck, gamers.
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