Inside Rock Band’s Sonic Secrets
It takes a lot of sonic wizardry to get a song featured on Rock Band. The process is similar to remixing/remastering a song for CD: The master tapes need to be unearthed, and a new mix—which ideally sounds just like the old one—has to be created from scratch. This by now is standard practice in the CD world; as ‘70s and 80’s tracks are prepped for the higher-resolution digital format.
But in a game like Rock Band there’s further work to do: Individual instruments need to be isolated for the game, so they can turn up or drop out as you play. In a sense, everybody who jams to a classic song on Rock Band hears their own unique mix of that song: If your drummer craps out early, you get to hear “Enter Sandman” without the drums. If you’re playing solo on bass, you get to hear your song with the bass jacked up a little louder. So if you’re not busy trying to get your part right, you can listen closely and hear pieces of the track that you never heard before.
As Harmonix’ audio director Eric Brosius explains, there are two processes involved: When a song is licensed for Rock Band, studio engineers first re-assemble the album mix from the original multitrack tapes. Ideally some of the original engineers will be involved, so the Rock Band version will sound like a sharper version of the record. The mix is then sent to Brosius, who can isolate the various parts and start translating them into a Rock band track. “When I get the songs, they’re broken up into stems—The individual parts, but with all the tricks and equalizing that were done in the studio,” he explains. “Then we can cut the stems into specific parts for game play.”
There are a lot of discoveries to be made on those tapes, especially when you can isolate the vocals. Listen carefully to the bit in “Suffragette City,” where David Bowie says “Ah, hit me” before the guitar solo. You can hear Bowie giggling after he says it, like he knew how silly it sounded and liked it anyway.
The better you think you know a song, the more surprises the master tapes may yield. As a prime example, Brosius punches up the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” If you’ve rocked to this track, listen closely to the very end of the song—You can hear Pete Townshend play a strong lead-guitar lick over the final power chord, something that wasn’t really present on the record. A long-lost bit of Townshend guitar: This is exactly the sort of thing that makes record geeks’ mouths water.
"Think you knew your favorite songs inside and out? Listen again."As Brosius explains, those lead-guitar parts were part of the original tracking session, the parts Townshend played live in the studio with Keith Moon and John Entwistle bashing away (as evidence, he turns up the lead-guitar track: You can hear Moon’s original drums leaking through). “The power chords that everybody knows as part of the song—Those were added later. When it came time to mix the record, they decided they liked the power chords and put those up front—The first lead guitar is still there, but it’s a more distant echo on the record. We turned it back up, mainly because it’s more fun to play along to.” Another secret in “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: When Roger Daltrey comes in for that big “Yeeeaaah!” after the keyboard solo, he overloads the mike—The voice crackles all over the place. They never bothered to re-do it, probably because the scream was too good to lose—but you can really hear the distortion once you isolate the voice.
Even a seminal punk band like the Clash yielded some surprises. Even wonder why the drums sound so good on “I Fought the Law”? Because there’s two drummers on it (or more likely, drummer Topper Headon recorded his part twice)—something that became clear when Brosius picked the mix apart. Thus, the drum parts you play in Rock band are a composite of those two original drum tracks. The Spanish backup vocals that you’re used to hearing on the middle verse of “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” originally ran through the whole song; and the parts are still there on the tapes—You can hear a little more of the Spanish bits on Rock Band than you can on the record. And listen to the way the two guitar parts intertwine on the chorus—Play the song on expert and you’re doing guitar bits that Strummer and Jones had to work together to create.
Other songs present a particular problem. Since all the songs in Rock Band are performed in live situations—whether a club, a theater or an arena—you have to imagine that these studio tracks are being played live. Which means that they have to really end, not fade out like a lot of studio tracks do. So how to get rid of a fadeout? In some cases, we’ll get a longer version of the master, so we can keep it running until the band ends the tune. But sometimes an ending has to be created: On the Police’s “Next to You”, for instance, Sting and the lads kept repeating the closing line until the song trailed off—That didn’t sound too good, so a more forceful riff was flown in from an earlier part of the song. The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” came with the fadeout intact, so Brosius took one of Charlie Watts’ hardest drum hits from earlier in the song, and let Keith’s guitar linger just a bit, to create a “cold” ending. It’s a subtle change, but it makes it feel more natural in the game when the song ends and the crowd starts cheering.
You can catch a lot of these variations when playing songs in Rock Band; just pick a song you’ve loved for years and key into the individual sections. As for me, I came out with a newfound appreciation of the bass in Metallica’s “..And Justice for All.” Who even knew there was any?