-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Rock Band DLC Announcements
- Thread starter Snuggles
- Start date
ratcliffja
Member
Soooooo good.... I have a ton of DLC to catch up on whenever I get through Skyward Sword.
PhoncipleBone
Banned
Same here. While I love many of the songs in the pack there are a few I am just a mild fan of. VERY excited about getting Seven Seas of Rhye.
PhoncipleBone
Banned
It is that price in many stores. Gamestop has the bundle with game for $40 for Wii at least, and the keyboard is $40 on all systems alone.
Can you elaborate on this? What are stems?
When you record music, assuming you're doing so in a recent and professional manner, every instrument is a distinct input. This way, if the drummer hits really really hard, you can quiet them down without cutting out the vocals. Or you can apply effects to just one instrument. When all the effects and such are done, each of those instrument inputs is a "stem" (they may also be called "takes", though they are slightly different things). A song as we know it is just a bunch of stems played all at the same time, then condensed into a single file.
Rocksmith, to my knowledge, doesn't need stems since it just plays the song straight out. I don't have the game, though, so I may be mistaken. Rock Band, though, does require the stems to be available, because the game applies its own effects. Guitar/bass have those little effect switches you can use, and more generally when you miss a note the part goes silent.
This is also why really old rock- I'd say anything before the 60s- just about can't come to Rock Band. They didn't have good enough multi-track recording in many places back then (just two or three tracks, well into the 60s) so the stems likely never existed. Once you get into the 70s, though, you're up to 8-track recording or higher in just about every studio, so stems are much easier to come by barring physical damage or loss.
ThanksVision
Member
I bought a bunch of DLC on my old gamertag (B3NJAQU3S). I recently upgraded to a slim and created a brand new gamertag just to kinda start fresh on everything. It's been 2 years or so since I've played any 360 games, so I wanted new beginnings. I recovered my old gamertag and re-downloaded all of my old dlc, but I can't access it on my new gamertag. Is it possible to do so?
My band, Sunny Side Up, is coming to Rock Band Network. We're a Ska-Rock band!
http://sunnysideupska.bandcamp.com/
The songs Corporate Control, She's Rad, and Welcome To The Skalocaust will be available soon!
http://sunnysideupska.bandcamp.com/
The songs Corporate Control, She's Rad, and Welcome To The Skalocaust will be available soon!
PhoncipleBone
Banned
Probably treated like a tambourine or cowbell solo in other songs.
I always thought those were called 'master tracks.' Is that the same thing?
Thanks for the thorough explanation, it makes a lot of sense especially if you've played RB.
Some people use that term for them. Masters are really more the final stage of things before the CD, which tends to mean all the guitars are together on one file and such.
The progression I tend to use is: Band records to takes, producer mixes to stems, mastering engineer finalizes masters. They're not very well standardized terms in practice, though, I've heard a bunch of combinations. I always ask for the "master stems" when doing a project and people generally know I mean.
So, the big debate on the official forums right now is that it may have been leaked that Rush's 2112 is coming to the game. No one knows yet if it's the full album or just the song itself, but hmxhenry is being very, very coy about the leak.
I wonder if they'll pull an Abbey Road Medley on it for the 360 and PS3; there's definitely no hope of the whole thing working on the Wii.
I wonder if they'll pull an Abbey Road Medley on it for the 360 and PS3; there's definitely no hope of the whole thing working on the Wii.
StudioTan
Hold on, friend! I'd love to share with you some swell news about the Windows 8 Metro UI! Wait, where are you going?
That's a bit mixed up.
Individual channels in a recording are called tracks, not takes. Takes are performances. So you might have a singer do the chorus 5 times, each of those is a take. They may be recorded on the same track or different tracks.
A drum set might use 8 or more tracks to record but his performance through the song is only 1 take.
A stem is a stereo sub mix of similar elements or of 1 element that is recorded over multiple tracks.
So for example once you have a complete mix of all the instruments you might have a producer ask for the drum stems which is a stereo mix of just the drums which might have been comprised of a dozen tracks plus all the effects. Or when recording something like acoustic guitar, even though it's a single monophonic instrument, you might have a direct recording (from a pickup in the acoustic) as well as a couple of microphones plus effects. The acoustic might be it's own stem.
Often something like a horn or string section will be exported as a stem since those multiple instruments generally act as a single "part".
Stems are used if you're sending a track to someone who isn't there for the final mix but who may want do final level adjustments on various elements without having to deal with all 50 individual tracks of backup vocals you recorded because he doesn't need those.
Most of the time the mastering engineer will only work with the final stereo mix. They may work from stems but that's usually only if the song has serious problems or if the client is requesting it.
Wasn't the lack of Abbey Road Medley due to Nintendo's then-policy of no duplicate content on the Wii store?
They since have gone back on that policy (now RB also has packs on the Wii), so the Wii should be able to have a pack-exclusive supersong as well.
No, it had to do with the whole "Wii only has 88MB of RAM" thing.
If this song can fit in the PS2's RAM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjQfmLwmmNs
A console with more than 4x the usable RAM should just be fine with 2112.
edit: Wii also has Super Bowl Smash Up on it too.
ridethepiggy
Banned
It's amazing on all instruments.
The PS2 version of Let There Be Rock (Live) had a pre-rendered video playing for the background. It's also not even the longest song in that game. :-D
Harmonix said they couldn't get the Abbey Road Medley to work on the Wii for technical reasons. I'm not sure what else needs to be said, especially regarding the possibility of a song that's even longer than that.
The technical reasons were:
1) Nintendo did not allow packed content at the time
2) Their restrictions on sizes of content pieces
The first has definitely been changed (Rock Band 3 has packs on Wii), and I'm pretty sure theat the second one has been relaxed as well, since Wii also had the pack-exclusive Ozzy songs.
http://www.livestream.com/tbktv
Pack's up. I'm going to play through it on Guitar, then Bass, then Pro Keys on expert so people can see charts if they want.
Pack's up. I'm going to play through it on Guitar, then Bass, then Pro Keys on expert so people can see charts if they want.
Next week is Rush, as expected, but not 2112, as rumored. Which is also kinda expected. Non-Rush songs are only $1 each.
Available on Xbox 360, Wii™ and PlayStation®3 system (December 6th, 2011):
• Rush – “Fly by Night” X
• Rush – “Caravan” O
• Rush – “The Spirit of Radio (Live)” X O
• Black Veil Brides – “Rebel Love Song”
• Volbeat – “A Warrior’s Call”
(These tracks will be available in Europe on PlayStation®3 system December 13th)
The Rush tracks will be available as “Rush Pack 01,” with all songs available for purchase individually on Xbox 360, PlayStation®3 system and Wii™. Tracks marked with “O” feature support for keyboards; tracks marked with “X” will offer Pro Guitar and Pro Bass expansions for $0.99 per song.
Price:
$5.49 USD, £2.49 UK, €3.99 EU (440 Microsoft Points, 550 Wii Points™for the “Rush Pack 01” pack.
$1.99 USD, £.99 UK, €1.49 EU (160 Microsoft Points) per song for the Rush tracks “Fly by Night,” “Caravan,” and “The Spirit of the Radio (Live)”
$2.00 USD (200 Wii Points™
$0.99 USD (100 Wii Points™/80 Microsoft Points), £0.59 UK, €0.79 EU per song for Black Veil Brides’ “Rebel Love Song” and Volbeat’s “A Warrior’s Call”
$0.99 USD (100 Wii Points™/80 Microsoft Points), £0.59 UK, €0.79 EU per song for eligible Pro Guitar/Pro Bass upgrade
PhoncipleBone
Banned
Yay! Spirit of the Radio!
Boo! No 2112.
Boo! No 2112.
There's a little bit of language in the blog post that seems to imply you shouldn't give up hope just yet.
It's probably the same live track that Guitar Hero got, so if you're familiar with that you can adjust your expectations accordingly.
EYEL1NER
Member
I don't care too much for Rockabilly, but since it is the closest thing to Psychobilly, I'll download any of it.
And I guess next week is a good week for Hendrix, but as someone who doesn't care for him...meh. Might get "All Along the Watchtower" but I don't know.
PhoncipleBone
Banned
Will cherry pick from the Hendrix pack. Awesome to get Voodoo Child.
Yea, Monday's going to have a livestream with DLC announcements and giveaways and other general tomfoolery.
distantmantra
Member
All Along the Watchtower all over my face.
YES.
YES.
ratcliffja
Member
Amazing songs... but no pro guitar for Voodoo Child? Come on, Harmonix, that's ridiculous.
ratcliffja
Member
Touché, brother.
butter_stick
Banned
Burn it.
Ken Masters
Banned
I don't have this game but I'm amazed DLC is still going on and going strong for this game. Are the sales for the DLC that high?
For Rock Band Network it's essentially like "Rock Band Indie" because they are released without any involvement from Harmonix as far as I understand ... for those I doubt they are that high, I have sucked at some songs on first try and still ranked like #300 in the world.
The 'official' songs that are released on the main store, if they are songs that people like to sing at parties or have huge nostalgia for, they seem to still sell pretty well.
Otherwise there is a contingent of hardcore players that will buy nearly everything that poses a challenge, I don't think it's super huge which is why it's a challenge and I personally think music games should evolve their business model to some sort of subscription model instead.
Harmonix says that their DLC business is profitable. It probably helps when you're reliable and show up with new content every single week for the past 4 years. I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually have enough content to go to a subscription model. The only thing they've had to pull was RBN for Wii, and that's because RBN for Wii was pulling in horrible numbers. Like some songs sold 4 copies on there. 360 version was TON OF COPIES, PS3 version was SLIGHTLY LESS, and the Wii version was "Harmonix lost money porting this song"
http://www.rockband.com/blog/hmx-holiday-livestream
First future DLC artist announced via their charity livestream: Huey Lewis and the News
They also said they're still working on Spoonman/Give It Away
First future DLC artist announced via their charity livestream: Huey Lewis and the News
They also said they're still working on Spoonman/Give It Away