How Rock Band Works

Browse the article How Rock Band Works

Introduction to How Rock Band Works

EA
Lone rockers no more. The Rock Band videogame integrates guitar, bass, drums and vocals. Learn more about the game systems that feature Rock Band with video game system pictures.

When Bob Dylan stepped onto the stage during his 1966 world tour with The Band behind him, it started a new chapter in rock 'n' roll history. Sure, he'd already plugged in and shocked his hardcore followers a few months before at The Newport Folk Festival. But playing with The Band, who called themselves The Hawks at the time, cemented Bobbie D's momentous shift from acoustic singer/songwriter to bona fide rock star.

Now, this isn't to say that people who play the über-popular video game Rock Band at home compare to the genius of one of America's greatest musicians, but you get the drift. While Guitar Hero brought out the solo Dylan in millions across the world, Rock Band has given those shredders a backing band.

Before you start hurling your picks at the computer screen, allow us to acknowledge that, one, Bob Dylan doesn't appear on either game, and, two, that Rock Band and Guitar Hero are certainly two birds of a different feather. Kind of like the Stones and the Beatles. They share a similar brilliance and lasting influence on today's music, but people will wrestle each other to the ground on who reigns supreme.

Game On

It's difficult to talk about Rock Band without mentioning Guitar Hero because it essentially picks up where the other left off. Adding bass, microphone and drumming peripherals to the guitar, Rock Band takes players closer to actually making their own music.

The basic objective of rocking as hard as possible remains relatively unchanged with Rock Band. Only this time, it's a collaborative effort, with anywhere from two to four people jamming in sync. And by taking it from the singular hero to the full band experience, you'll have clashing egos, intraband romance and unrated backstage shenanigans in addition to the pounding notes. Depending, that is, on who joins the group.

How has the public received this change? About as well as Dylan and The Band on that famous tour. As of May 2008, parent company Viacom reported 3 million Rock Band bundles sold at the cool price of around $170 each [source: Sliwinski].

But we haven't even reached the first chorus of the Rock Band story. Consider the following pages your backstage pass.

Pre-gaming: Rock Band Game Basics

EA
The Rock Band rocker maker allows lets you custom create your avatar.

Rock Band for PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 came out in November 2007, followed the next month by the PlayStation 2 version. Wii fans got their turns on June 22, 2008.

With Rock Band, you've got options, especially when it comes to your rhythm-inclined avatars. You can make your in-game characters close to anything you want with the game's rocker maker feature. Do you want to channel Thom York, Karen O or Ozzy Osbourne? No problem. First, select a name, hometown, attitude and physique. Within physique, you can adjust height, weight, face, skin color, hairstyle and hair color. Always wanted a lime green mullet? Done and done.

Once you've perfected your avatar, it's time to pump up the volume. If you want to go it alone, choose from solo quickplay, solo world tour and tutorial. However, bass players beware: solo world tour only works for guitar, drums and vocals. What do quickplay and world tour mean? We'll dive into those details with the multiplayer options since gamers generally agree that, like checkers and chess, Rock Band is best enjoyed with other people.

Within the multiplayer mode, you can select from band quickplay, band world tour, tug of war and score duel. Quickplay is the EP version of Rock Band since you can select single songs to play if you're short on time.

Things heat up when you get into band world tour. This is your chance to make it big. You start out in your chosen hometown and must shred, pound or belt your way across 17 cities and 41 imaginary venues. If you showboat well enough, crowds will actually sing along.

Rock Band World Tour Cities

Rock Band isn't joking around when it says "world tour." Here are the cities you'll hop through:

Amsterdam
Berlin
Boston
Chicago
London
Los Angeles
Moscow
New York
Paris
Reykjavik
Rio de Janiero
Rome
San Francisco
Seattle
Stockholm
Sydney
Tokyo

In world tour mode, your band objective is to collect as many fans, stars and cash along the way to buy more stuff and get to more places. But instead of just beating out a list of songs like automatons, you and your band mates have decisions to make along the way.

As you make more dough, you can hire staff and managers, buy slick tour buses and jets and even get a few hot tattoos. Managers will present special opportunities, such as a sell-out or charity gig. With sell-outs, you can really rake in the money, but charity sets bring you more fans. Live DVD offers can also triple your fan base --
if you rock out.

And speaking of fans, these virtual groupies are your lifeblood. Lose them, and things won't look so promising. Bigger venues, for instance, draw fans in droves, but hit a sour note and you'll kiss away a few thousand or so. We'll get into even more of the world tour fine print in later sections.

For a mellower, yet challenging, jam, there's also the tug of war and score duel. In tug of war, you and someone else trade off on parts of a song, and the game judges who performs better. Since competitors can select different difficulty settings, it evens the playing field. Score duel raises the stakes since both people must play the entire song at the same difficulty level. The person with the highest score wins. Unlike world tour, Xbox and Playstation 3 owners can compete in these modes and quickplay with a friend in the same room or online.

Next up on the set list, we'll check out those sweet Rock Band peripherals.

New Rock Band Peripherals

Carrying the unopened Rock Band box from your car to your house could easily be a two-person job. Inside that hefty package, you'll find a guitar, drums, microphone and a mess of wires to set up. Note the lack of a dedicated bass. Since the guitar and bass operate on the same controller, you'll need an additional one to complete your full four-piece group.

The Rock Band instruments

Rock Band drum pads can take a hefty beating. But how does the video game recognize when you smack them? The drum pads actually are made up of multiple layers that translate the force of you striking them into an input signal [source: Yoshitomi et al]. Under the pad you smack is something called a vibration transmitting plate. The plate absorbs some of the shock and also sends the vibration to a piezoelectric device. Piezoelectric means the ability to convert mechanical stress -- in this case, you pounding your heart out on the drum pads -- to electrical potential. Attached to the piezoelectric device is a cable that takes that electrical potential and shoots it to the video game software.

And let's not forget about the all-important foot pedal that regulates the bass beat. When you press down on the pedal, you activate a switch that transmits a signal to the video game [source: Yoshitomi et al].

Crooning into the microphone is another can of worms. Rock Band evaluates vocal performance based on pitch, rhythm and phonemes (or consonant pronunciation). Harmonix borrowed this vocal technology from an earlier one of its games called Karaoke Revolution. Basically, you sing into the microphone, which is attached via cable to your console. The video game software reads the input signal from the microphone at a rate of 60 times per second [source: McHale and Egozy]. It then converts those signals into a "digital data stream" from which the singing analysis module pulls specific information [source: McHale and Egozy].

The module compares the pitch, rhythm and phoneme information to the music data stored in the software. To understand how the software does this, think of the song as a pie. The developers code that pie into tiny slivers, or timestamps. That way, when you sing the first "hey, ho" in "Blitzkrieg Bop," the software recognizes the time that you sing it and then finds the time-stamped piece that most correlates to it.

When you're not singing and want to add a little tambourine or cowbell (and what song doesn't need more cowbell?), you can pat the mic for the desired effect. Since Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" comes standard on Rock Band, this feature will come in handy.

You know what else comes in handy when playing rock 'n' roll songs? A guitar and bass. Get the low down on these on the next page.

A Familiar Friend: Rock Band Guitar and Bass

EA
The Rock Band controller doubles as bass and guitar, but the box only comes with one.

The guitar and the bass peripherals both work on the same controller. Similar in design to the Guitar Hero controller, the Rock Band guitar/bass looks more like the real thing since the fret buttons are camouflaged with the color-coding along the side of the neck, rather than the top.

As with the other hardware, operating the guitar/bass is all about timing. The fret buttons select the note, and the strum bar executes the timing. The lever inside of the strum bar sets off an electrical chain reaction that communicates to the software the note you just played. For more detailed information about the guitar controller, read How Guitar Hero Works.

Guitar Controller Snafu

As mentioned on the previous page, when you purchase Rock Band, you get one guitar controller. Since the bass and the guitar work off the same controller, that means you need another one to complete the square of your rocking foursome. This leaves Guitar Hero fans at an advantage because they can simply plug in their old Gibson styled controller. Right? Not so fast. Neither Activision nor Harmonix wants to give free products to each other, leading to peripheral compatibility issues.

According to Joystiq.com, the only console that will allow you to use your Guitar Hero 2 and 3 controllers for Rock Band is Xbox 360 [source: Miller]. PlayStation 3 and Wii users will have to buy an additional axe from Harmonix. The Rock Band controller also isn't compatible with any Guitar Hero games.

The Rock Band guitar also has a second set of fret buttons near the body. These activate during the solo sections of the songs when rockers can wail to their hearts' content. You can also use the whammy bar to give sustained notes a "wah-wah" quality. Spicing up the familiar Rock Band controller, you also have a pick-up switch at your disposal that can make five different sound effects during solos and overdrive, which you'll learn about later.

Music data for each of the songs -- broken out into mic, drums, bass and guitar -- are stored as waveform files [source: Yoshitomi et al]. Waveforms store the music as disparate sections, which is how the game can judge when you've royally missed or hit a note. Depending on the mode and instruments you select to play, the software will pull the corresponding waveform files to allow you to either play solo or with three other people.

On the next page, we'll put our instruments into action.

Rock Band Gameplay

You and your band mates have molded your avatars, selected your mode and respective levels, instruments are in hand, and now it's time to rock.

If you have a full four-person band, the Rock Band screen may look cluttered at first. There's a lot of action to ensure that all members know their parts. Locating the vocals guide is the easiest, since the words slide across the top of the screen karaoke style. Moving down, you'll see three parallel scrolling strips that look like guitar necks. These direct the bass, drums and guitar.

The Rock Band display screen when a foursome plays. Drums are in the middle with bass on the left and guitar on the right. Vocals top it off.

For Guitar Hero vets, the bass and guitar parts follow a similar pattern. The notes are color-coded according to the sets of fret buttons at the neck. When the colored tabs reach the band at the bottom of the screen, that's your cue to strike the note.

Because of the kick pedal, drums work a little differently. The drum pads are color-coded to match up with the gems on the screen, but you'll also notice intermittent orange strands that stretch across the guide. Those strands are your kick pedal cues.

Every band is only as strong as its weakest player. So what can you do if someone majorly sucks wind and fails out of the song? Here's where your star players can step up to the plate. Comparable to star power in Guitar Hero, you can attain overdrive by hitting a succession of white notes. When your overdrive meter fills halfway, you can activate it by tilting your guitar or bass and completing a special drum or vocals solo that the game will cue. Kicking into overdrive will save a fallen person and rack up some extra points. However, you can only save the same person twice.

Once your band has its moves down, there are a number of ways to blow out your score. You want to look for chances to boost your score multiplier. Drums, guitar and vocals can get up to a four on the multiplier, and bass can reach six. Why can the bass get more? Many Rock Band reviewers see the bass as the most lackluster of the instruments. To compensate, bassists can enter into a bass groove by hitting a series of notes where they reach that holy grail of score multipliers.

You can also do this through the unison bonus. During random sections of the song, your individual score multipliers will get a jolt if you play in perfect synchronicity. You'll know when this happens because the words "Unison Bonus" will pop up on the screen. There are also solo bonuses, which are your times to shine as an individual performer. A percentage will show up on the screen over your instrument to let you know how accurately you're catching the notes. For guitar and bass players, the second set of fret buttons at the base of the neck don't require strumming, so take advantage of them to snag all those riffs.

Then there's the big rock ending. This is your band's chance to tack on additional points near the end of the music. Before reaching the final notes on some songs, the note gems will disappear and the guides will fill in, resembling a rainbow. Scream, pound and burn up your fingers on the second set of fret buttons for a score explosion. But make sure to hit that final note in the song because failure to do so will erase any earnings from all that jamming.

Up next, we'll take a look at the financials and see how many gold and platinum records the Rock Band and its developer Harmonix have achieved.

Rock Band Management

The Rock Band video game developed by Harmonix Music Systems, Inc. dropped during the 2007 holiday season. If Harmonix rings familiar to you, it should. These were the developers of Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II and Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s. As enthusiasts may tearfully recall, Harmonix and publisher RedOctane broke up and went their separate ways post-GH II. Gaming giant Activision snapped up RedOctane in 2006, followed by MTV's acquisition of Harmonix for a handsome sum of $175 million. What resulted was a very literal battle of the bands.

Guitar Hero cornered the market on music games and incited what many considered to be a revolution in the industry. But when splitting with RedOctane, Harmonix left with some aces in its back pocket -- patents for the underlying technology that the series is based on. Cha-ching!

Harmonix Music Systems founders Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos are today's Big Boi and André 3000 of the video game world. Together, they have a Midas touch it seems, in spite of the split from Guitar Hero producer RedOctane. Egozy and Rigopulos' roots are firmly grounded in rhythm action games, starting out as fellow students at MIT before building titles including Karaoke Revolution, Frequency and Amplitude.

Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Eran Egozy, Harmonix co-founder and vice president, and Greg LoPiccolo, vice president of product development.

Although now owned by Activision, the Guitar Hero franchise surpassed $1 billion in North American sales in January of 2008, setting an industry record [source: Berardini]. Rock Band has held its own as well since its November 2007 release, with parent company Viacom announcing that the game had sold more than 3 million units as of May 2008. Its first quarter financial report for 2008 also attributed Rock Band as a main driver in the company's 33 percent revenue boost [source: Associated Press].

What are people buying besides the $170 retail game? The game's Web site hawks merchandise to soup up and protect your instruments, including drum bags, guitar/bass faceplates, mic stands, straps, stools and drum silencers (so your neighbors won't call the cops). For the high-end rockers who want to take it to the next level, there are $200 cuff links, $2,400 jackets, piles of T-shirts and actual playable instruments for sale. But before you go on a spending spree, remember you can't pay for your gear with that cool cyber cash you earn in the game.

Then there's the downloadable content, or DLC. The video game has cut deals with musicians to place these songs and albums online. Harmonix adds new songs each week to its in-game store and the Xbox and PlayStation 3 marketplaces. By allowing players to continually download and learn new songs, Harmonix is extending the life of the game. Rock Banders have definitely taken that cue, buying 10 million songs as of May 2008 [source: Sliwinski].

Artists are chomping at the bit to get in the Rock Band mix as well. As with Guitar Hero, the game has opened up a new forum for musicians to gain cred and coin. Motley Crue got wise to the idea and released a single exclusively on Rock Band. Not a bad move considering that sales on the video game exceeded those on iTunes and Amazon.com by almost four times [source: Kohler]. Individual songs range from 99 cents to $2.99 [source: Snider]. Full albums from Metallica, The Pixies, The Cars, Judas Priest and more are also going for upwards of $15 a pop.

What's next in this corporate battle of the band games? Take a look at the Guitar Hero Web site for an idea. Looks like Activision is bringing out its own version of a full-band rhythm action game, entitled Guitar Hero: World Tour. As for Rock Band, you can expect to be able to battle in world tour mode online. Both Harmonix and Activision have hinted at allowing players to make their own music via video games as well.

To stay tuned with Rock Band and other hot titles, check out the links on the next page.

Lots More Information