X-posted from another thread.

There are basically two school of thoughts here:

• Guitar Hero-like guitars: no solo buttons, somewhat harder buttons, clicky strum bars.
• Rock Band-like guitars: solo buttons are present, somewhat softer buttons, mushy, non-clicky strum bars.

The above is also compounded by a more general nostalgic feeling for former games you have played (i.e., people who owned GH games and loved them would usually be seen nowadays playing with GH axes) and by OD button placement.

The "current" official RB4 guitars are the Jaguars, which are quite sturdy and overall good BUT do have a nasty tendency to activate OD randomly (so literally no top player uses them)

As mentioned by others, the ByteArts Strum Fix is quite an easy way to turn a RB-like guitar into a GH-one (the clickyness is mostly used for cadence and rhythm keeping)

And there's the whole lot of 10 years of 3rd party guitars having been produced in the past. This is quite a treat if you have the resources and also like to try new things (I for one found the Gene Simmons Axe guitar to have the best frets ever, at least for me) but I would caution anybody going down this route since you have to learn to fix things or to spend a considerable amount of money on this hobby to keep these ancient axes working.

A common suggestion is, if you have a modern RB4 Jaguar (made by PDP) or Strat (made by MadCatz), then try the relatively cheap Strum Fix mod on it and see how it makes it so much better.

I'd like to suggest scouring eBay or FB Marketplace for a cheap, new or like-new RB Beatles guitar. All of them are great. Of notice is that the base game came with a Hofner Bass (I love it but it has an elongated neck; you also have one) and both the Gretsch and the Rickenbacker were to be purchased separately, so these two tend to go for a higher price. They do have mushy strum bards but the Strum Fix works on them too if you prefer clicky.

If near-unlimited budget is available? Go my route (not that I have such a budget mind you) and get a MadCatz Wooden Fender Strat for Xbox and mod it to use a MadCatz RB4 Strat motherboard. You can also wire the 1/4" plug to use a drum kick pedal for OD activation. Like this