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Rock Band Platform |OT|

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Duck said:
It's the Nevermind version, IGN says the drum chart has three notes in it.
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Lame. It's one thing when there is no other option, but with the Insecticide version available, I have no idea why they went with the Nevermind version.
 
They obviously took the Nevermind version to cash in another "full" album.

:D

Either saving up for RB3/4/5 or Nirvana Track Pack 02
 
If I were to get into this music game thing for the first time, would Rock Band 2 be the better place to start compared to GH:WT? I'm not looking to get into comparisons or anything, just wanting to know if it's easier to get into and easier to have all of the songs from both games and DLC in one place or not.

I sort of feel like I'm missing out a bit by not even trying either one, but everything seems so spread out and wonky between the two.
 
Kintaro said:
If I were to get into this music game thing for the first time, would Rock Band 2 be the better place to start compared to GH:WT? I'm not looking to get into comparisons or anything, just wanting to know if it's easier to get into and easier to have all of the songs from both games and DLC in one place or not.

I sort of feel like I'm missing out a bit by not even trying either one, but everything seems so spread out and wonky between the two.
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I'd say look at the track lists for each game, and decide based on that which one you want to start with. If you end up liking the genre, then pick up the other game (instruments are cross compatible now).
 
Is anyone going to be in NYC tomorrow for AC/DC Rock Band? My friends say there is gonna be some contest involving it to win tickets to see them and play the new game. I may try and stop by if I'm available
 
McBradders said:
Dudes!

Dudes!

Nirvana is coming :D

Nirvana is coming :D


I am also going to see Burn After Reading tomorrow.

Also 'No Country for Old Men' was the shit! So was Lebowski. Also Nirvana.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

3 weeks until GH:WT!
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? Comes out next week for me.....
 
GoutPatrol said:
Ah, first time I got to play this game in a month. Felt sooooooooo gooooooooood.
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Same here. I spent the night trying out a bunch of the new songs. Was psyched about the Stone Roses song and the Cult. Had to play a bunch of RHCP by my wife's request.
 
LakeEarth said:
Lame. It's one thing when there is no other option, but with the Insecticide version available, I have no idea why they went with the Nevermind version.
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They went with the Nevermind version because they originally planned on releasing the entirety of Nevermind as album DLC. Thing is, they had and are having trouble with Smells Like Teen Spirit, Lithium, and Come As You Are, which is why the DLC was delayed to hell and back.

I'm guessing Courtney Love is wanting more money from those three songs since they're Nevermind's biggest songs. And since Drain You and In Bloom are on two different discs, and because they don't want to release a pack with seven $2 songs and three $3 songs, they just released what they could at this time.

We'll probably see the three remaining songs as a $7 three-pack or something.
 
Grecco said:
Silly quesiton whats visual overscan for?
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If your TV has black bars around the picture for the game, turning on overscan fills in the black bars.

Duck said:
What if it was fun to play?
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Definitely won't be on guitar.

Pisses me off when kids these days first learn that on guitar. My first song was Inna Gadda Da Vidda.
 
After years of enjoying the fruits of Harmonix's work, first on its creation of Guitar Hero, and later on Rock Band and its sequal, we wanted to learn how those rockin' songs make their way into our games. We sat down with Paul DeGooyer of MTV Games and Eric Brosius, audio director at Harmonix, and talked through the life of a song as it journeys from initial selection to your Rock Band menu screen.

Song Selection and Licensing
Choosing what music appears on a disc (or DLC) begins long before a release, but the time it takes to reach completion varies wildly. "At this point, we are more or less in a rolling process with out partners, where licensing and technical delivery on any one track happens very naturally over a fairly comfortable period of time," DeGooter says. "That said, we can move very quickly if there is a new artist with a great track for the game - I think we've turned some songs around in just a couple of weeks." Headaches often emerge while attaining the appropriate music rights. "We work closelt with artists and their management to select songs that the artist wants to see in the game," DeGooyer continues. "From a technical licensing Perspective, the owner of the master recording (usually a label) and the publisher of the song need to approve the use of the song." The rights to some music are so fragmented that it takes months to track down the involved parties. When the music in discussion involves deceased artists, MTV and Harmonix make a point to visit with the artists' survivors in person to explain the game and get permission.

Remixing
While Rock Band and its sequel are chock full of the original maser tracks, in most cases you're not hearing the album mixes. Since the music must be broken down into its disparate instrumental and coval parts, a new mix must be completed that closely emulates the original. "A typical issue is technical delivery - a song may have been recorded with certain tracks 'printed' together, like bass and drums," DeGooyer says. "It takes a lot of time and expertise to separate the parts so they are playable in Rock Band and still retain their musicality."

Most of this remixing is completed by a professional audio engineer who works for the record label using notes and cues from the original mixer to set levels and effects. When that process is completed, the "stems" (the individual separated tracks) are passed to Harmonix, which does a limited amount of additional mixing of the song and adds additional variable audio, such as crowd noise and fade-ins. In many cases, Harmonix has way more than four tracks to choose between - it's not unusual for a complex rock number to include 10 unique guitar tracks running simultaneously. Harmonix picks one or more of these to become a sort of "super guitar" tracks that players will tackle when they play the game, combining the most iconic riffs into a seamless experience. That's why you sometimes start a song like "Pinball Wizard" playing the inimitable acoustic opening, only to shift to the electric lead partway through the song.

Audio Implementation and Quality Assurance
The audio teams at Harmonix is split up by instrumental speciality. Back in the early days of Guitar Hero, individual team members would each tackle whole songs by themselves. Now, with so many complex parts and high expectations for the track layouts, specialized teams of drum, guitar, bass, and vocal specialists tackle individual parts before pulling the song together into a functioning whole.

In almost ever case, a team member starts by laying out the scrolling notes for the song as it will play on expert difficulty. At that point, the other difficulty levels emerge by simply removing notes. Particularly challenging lines occasionally need to be slowed down to nail the exact rhythms of a fast solo or complex fill. "Our guys have gotten pretty good at it. They can get the rhythms and pitches down pretty well," Eric Brosius tells us. "A big part is getting it to fit the restrictions of our gameplay, the five notes on the guitar - making it fit so that it feels like the real thing, even though it's not."

Occasionally, after completing a track, the team decides that one of the other guitar parts might be more interesting, and the process starts over. However, most of the time, the completed layouts move on to the testing team, who hammer out mistakes and suggest stylistic adjustments that keep the song consistent with the other music in the game.

How long does a single song take? In a normal cycle, the audio team (which has grown to five times its size from one year ago) is working on around 10 to 15 songs at once. An individual song commonly takes a week to lay out, and another full week to test and tweak. Occasionally, the process has to move faster. "We've had times where we were hoping to release a song the day that a record comes out, and for some reason the band was still recording right up to the very end, so we would get something two days before we has to submit to Microsoft or Sony," Brosius says. "At that point, it is basically just drop everything, and do what needs to be done to get this thing going."

Once the track layout is complete, the team adds lighting and motion cues for the onscreen band members, and the song is ready for prime time.
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(That's why the chart jumps around on instruments in a HMX song)
Side bars
Big Rock Endings?
In the first Rock Band, Harmonix went out of its way to amplify the feeling of a "live" concert by implementing a number of special endings to songs. The untold story is that after these "big rock endings" were recorded, around half of them were rejected by the original artists, since it involved new musicians tacking on music to their existing tracks. In Rock Band 2, they show up less, and they're almost always more consistent with the original recordings.
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Launch Pad
Many in the music industry are surprised just how far reaching and beneficial a song in Rock Band can be for a band's success. "We hear stories all the time, from Judas Priest being surprised by young kids asking them to sign copies of their 1982 album Screaming For Vengeance, to labels telling us that our weekly downloads are not only selling more music for them, but also influencing radio playlists," Paul DeGooyer tells us. "There are some bands that we would like to think we helped along a bit: Flyleaf got a boost from Rock Band1, Black Tide was our first band to release DLC prior to their debut album, Paramore of course, and now Tokio Hotel. But these bands were all truly great before we put them in the game."
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Notes inside pictures:
Unwritten rules govern the track layout at Harmonix. For instance, power chords often show up separated by a fret, like green and yellow, which the team believes feels more like how it would on a real guitar.
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Some older master tracks are so decrepit that they need to literally be baked in an oven for a time before they can be used for a new mix, which dries the tape and solidifies the glue that holds different pieces of the tape together.
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EDIT: how about that, 31 minutes.
 
Cool info, thanks for the highlights. I usually don't particularly like the mixing in these games, but whatever. It's a necessary evil, I suppose.
 
Holy shit, thanks dude! Some pretty cool info in there. Also:
"A typical issue is technical delivery - a song may have been recorded with certain tracks 'printed' together, like bass and drums," DeGooyer says. "It takes a lot of time and expertise to separate the parts so they are playable in Rock Band and still retain their musicality."
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Really? Guess that kills the whole "well the drum track is merged with other tracks" Iron Maiden rumor.
Flyleaf ... Tokio Hotel ... were all truly great before we put them in the game."
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LULZ
 
xbhaskarx said:
I wish there was an option to turn Big Rock Endings off...
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me too.

I thought they were fun the first few months I played. Now I just hate seeing them. At least most songs don't have them.
 
You know, I've always wondered why the drum fills use generic sounding drums/cymbals. Why can't they allow you to use the drum sounds from the actual song you're playing? A technical hurdle? Rights issues? It would be way better.
 
God I'm thorn between RB2 and GH:WT. I have RB2 pre-ordered and ready to pick up tomorrow, but it looks like some people are having issues with the new drums, notably the blue and yellow pads that aren't sensitive enough. I thought they'd iron out everything for the new kits.
 
All of my favorite songs to play on drums have been supplanted by Breaking the Girl. That song on expert is so much fun to play it's ridiculous. I think I'm almost at the gold star score, does anyone know what that is exactly?
 
MrOctober said:
All of my favorite songs to play on drums have been supplanted by Breaking the Girl. That song on expert is so much fun to play it's ridiculous. I think I'm almost at the gold star score, does anyone know what that is exactly?
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GS is about 193157
 
I really want a Violent Femmes pack, or at least just the song American Music if i could only get one. Also what's the word on the rest of the Grateful Dead songs? Weren't there supposed to be 18? I was guessing we'd see three 6 song packs, because i need Friend of the Devil in Rock Band really badly.
 
MrOctober said:
I really want a Violent Femmes pack, or at least just the song American Music if i could only get one.
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I'd almost rather Blister in the Sun, as cliche the lean toward a hit is. And Gone Daddy Gone, if they could do something with the xylophone.
 
Sidenote: do I need to have the RB1 disk once I have done the transfer thinguie? I am getting it tomorrow on the PS3, and I want to trade RB1 to get RB2.
 
xbhaskarx said:
I wish there was an option to turn Big Rock Endings off...
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I like them when the original ending was a series of tremolo picking or such and would be incredibly hard to get down evenly in the game. In this case you're asking someone to replicate "play as fast as possible" it just doesn't work. BRE, however, does replicate tremolo picking very well by asking you to do the exact same thing.

It also sometimes puts me over the top for gold stars so there's nothing wrong with that.

TheGreatDave said:
Because ["Cherub Rock" is] fun to play in GH3.
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This is exactly my problem with the tremolo endings. It's so not fun in GH3.
 
MrOctober said:
All of my favorite songs to play on drums have been supplanted by Breaking the Girl. That song on expert is so much fun to play it's ridiculous. I think I'm almost at the gold star score, does anyone know what that is exactly?
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Yeah, that one is a blast. De-luxe is pretty fun in the same manner too.

I agree about the BREs. They were fun at first, but now they're just annoying. That's one thing I like about Aqualung on drums, you actually get to do a drum riff ending.
 
Hey guys, does anyone have any experience with the Live.com 30% eBay cashback promo? I've been eyeing a PS3 lately for LBP, R2, and some other games, and I won't resist a new 80GB w/ a DS3 for $280. Do you get your money back easily or are there technical issues?
 
TheGreatDave said:
Yep. Cherub Rock is worse for it, and that's one example.
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But Foreplay/Longtime is absolutely epic because of it. That should at least cancel most of the shit ones right?
 
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