Guitar Hero 5 taking the stage on 1 September

Guitar Hero 5 has abandoned the franchise's traditional Halloween launch in the US, with Activision Blizzard revealing that the latest four-piece rhythm game will take to the main stage on 1 September -- just over a week before archrival The Beatles: Rock Band strums its opening tune on 9 September.

Guitar Hero 5 will be available for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii and PlayStation 2. The game will include 85 new master recordings, with songs thus far announced including The Rolling Stones' Sympathy for the Devil, Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire, Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower, The White Stripes' Blue Orchid, Tom Petty's Runnin' Down a Dream, and Kings of Leon's Sex on Fire.

As with World Tour, Guitar Hero 5 lets gamers accompany playable tunes on the guitar, bass, drums or microphone. The publisher is also lifting the restriction on the one-instrument, one-player rules that have defined the series. Instead, rhythm kings will be able to use any combination of instruments for any given song, with Activision giving the example of two guitars and two sets of drums rocking out together.

Activision has also said that all World Tour downloadable content will be compatible with Guitar Hero 5. The publisher also said that all-new features introduced with Guitar Hero 5 will be retroactively applied to tunes from the older game.

Along with revealing a release date, the Guitar Hero Web site offered the first details on Activision's '5 Tickets, 5 Concerts' sweepstake. Players are tasked with sleuthing out the answers to a number of band-centric clues that can be found through various Web sites, blogs and TV shows.