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.