I recently went to a Rock Band Network workshop in Austin that was put together by Pyramind and sponsored by T-mobile. As a gamer, it was a really neat experience to meet some of the creative talent that has put together one of my favorite video games. As a musician, it was really cool to find another socially interactive product for content and connecting to fans through a popular medium. What really appealed to me was going through motions to actually set up a song through the process and learning about the Rock Band Network.
It can take a whole company to take a song and develop it for game play. You have to start with the music and record the stems, which are separate audio tracks. Then you have to translate the stems into measures and beats and then to notes corresponding to the controller. A really cool feature I did not know about was you could set instances in the track to follow the digital character so the animation that goes on while you are playing look authentic. It’s designed to be so authentic you can tell if a bassist is playing slap or pick style and what words the vocalist is in the animation is singing.
This is a long and tedious project that can take several days to work through and often there are companies that divide the work.
Once everything is complete, the song then goes to the Rock Band Network, which is a community of artists, programmers, and gamers that give feedback and can affect whether or not a song is allowed to be on Rock Band. The community watches for authenticity, profanity, and quality work. It is essential that if you are going to publish your work on the network that you get a sense of common mistakes so that you can publish as quickly as possible.
The best part of the whole night was getting to play Rock Band with executive producer Jeff Marshall and Gregory J Morgan of Pyramind.
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