There's a certain giggly fun to playing with less than four charts, but let's restrict the question to the most common road widths.

I find five lanes to be more fun. Four lanes is too easy.

Depends on if the keys lane is doing enough.

Let's try to cast aside any notions of 'depends on the song.' The Linkin Park songs and "Do You Feel Like We Do" are bawls in Blitz because of lanes doing very little, but the same is true of "Cool for Cats" with only four lanes (and probably plenty of other songs). If all else is equal, is it more fun to play with four lanes, or five?

Five, it's more stuff to do.

Five, all round...I guess. It IS a very circumstantial question.

Five lanes is generally worse because more often than not it's got one lane that barely does anything, usually keys or bass. So you have to really make an effort to hit every note in that lane and it almost feels like you're playing one instrument

It isn't very fun

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Originally Posted by SheSaidSheSaid

I find five lanes to be more fun. Four lanes is too easy.

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That's because you have superpowers.

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Originally Posted by HeyRiles

Five lanes is generally worse because more often than not it's got one lane that barely does anything, usually keys or bass.

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Agreed. I really hate "background" keys charts/lanes that don't really announce their presence after being empty for three checkpoints.

I'm a boring old fart who likes things to be nice and orderly. That's why I generally prefer four lanes. But I'll be happy to play five as long as I like the song and there's a reasonable amount of activity in all five of them.

Any track is worse with lanes with infrequent notes, especially if they're the outlying lanes because you have to travel further to get to them and with only one adjacent lane they're harder to maintain in tandem with other lanes. A sparse Bass lane can be done in short visits while you're focussing on Guitar or when you're focussing on Drums, but a sparse Keys lane is really only convienient when you're working on Vocals.

5-lanes just make this problem worse because there's even further to go to reach those outlying infrequent lanes when they occur, and that lane 4-lanes-over can often be entirely offscreen, so it's harder to scan for upcoming purple notes as well.

I voted four lanes. I've only played a handful of songs with keys worth constant attention and not just really, really long sustains.

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Originally Posted by SheSaidSheSaid

Let's try to cast aside any notions of 'depends on the song.' The Linkin Park songs and "Do You Feel Like We Do" are bawls in Blitz because of lanes doing very little, but the same is true of "Cool for Cats" with only four lanes (and probably plenty of other songs). If all else is equal, is it more fun to play with four lanes, or five?

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Well, of course, if all else is equal, I can't think of anyone in their right mind who wouldn't rather have the five lanes. That's kind of like asking whether playing with four buttons or five buttons is more fun in Rock Band guitar. The problem is that in practice, there are way too many songs that have such sparse keys parts that it completely ruins the rhythm of the game, because you're constantly having to keep an eye out for keys notes that can screw up your performance on the actual active tracks, only to often discover that you can't even raise the multiplier cap all the way anyway.

So sure, if it's a song where the keys are prominent, I definitely prefer five lanes to four. Otherwise, not particularly.