In the blurring areas between gaming and creation, toys and tools, there’s certainly a lot of action, spurred on by platforms for sharing software.

Pulse is a new title for the iPad, an ambient rhythmic gaming experience with a unique interface centering around a series of concentric circles. The graphic design looks gorgeous in its abstraction, as much music visualization and animation as game UI. The developer, Cipher Prime, has done this kind of terrific work before – their work includes the ambient streams of colored particles in Auditorium, the Flash-based browser game, followed by the Mac + PC game Fractal. Items of note here:

• The game combines melodic and rhythmic gameplay elements.
• Pulse is as much interactive album as game, accompanied by a release of songs (including the single below).
• Gameplay can be collaborative, not just single player.
• The title is built in the awesome Unity engine, which means, by the way, Android development isn’t ruled out. Ahem. Let’s hope those OEMs get their tablets straightened out – I repeat my mntra, choice is good.
• The developers credit their community of geeks and musicians in Philadelphia, PA.
• In addition to the existing tracks, the developers are looking for indie musicians in Philly looking to get in on the action. Game developers: the new record labels.

Pulse: Volume One

The title is already earning praise and recognition, including topping the charts and getting featured as iPad game of the week.

Interestingly, as the iPad morphs into game platform, that hasn’t stopped people from reconsidering game platforms as venues for music creation tools. So, by way of contrast and comparison – and in case your Xbox is feeling lonely with all the iPad news – it seems only right to counterpoint Pulse with a new Xbox 360 title also released last week.

Music Box is a Tenori-On-inspired music sequencer for Xbox Live Arcade. It’s fairly simple in conception, but makes clever use of the spare controls on an Xbox game controller, and at only a buck, it’s almost certainly a must-buy for music lovers with an Xbox.

Grab the 99-cent title from the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Developer Vadim of Facetious Creations built Music Box with Microsoft’s XNA toolset, which opens up the possibility of Windows Phone, too. He says the response so far has been terrific. I find it fun to play with – and an interesting diversion for a game console.

For all our complaints about iOS and even Android, game consoles remain the most closed platforms out there. (Indeed, some of the anxiety over iOS I believe stems from concerns the game consoles locked-down model will spread to other computing hardware.) That said, Microsoft arguably does more than any other console vendor to promote indie game titles; amidst some noise, there are some real gems on the Xbox Live Arcade.

So, there you have it – two very different models for two different platforms. Let us know what you think.

Addendum: Many, many games have taken on the idea of games as albums, or at least with strong musical dimensions. There’s a nice list of inspiration listed in the sidebar of the blog for Cipher Prime, just to name a few that offer indie and ambient goodness:
Aether
Blueberry Garden
Eufloria
flOw
Knytt Stories
Machinarium
Osmos
Passage
Samarost 2
Windosill

What if a gaping product hole for musicians were filled by a game company instead of a musical instruments company? There’s no need to imagine: pick up the new Rock Band 3 keyboard, and you’ll see what I mean.

Consider: most sub-$100 and compact keyboards have dumped 5-PIN MIDI DIN ports in favor of USB only – little comfort if you want to plug a keyboard into that DIY sound module or eBay treasure. (Alesis’ QS25 is one exception, but even a $150 M-Audio Oxygen is USB-only.)

And keytars? Fuggedaboutit. Strap-on keyboards or keytars are a great way to play keyboard lines, but they’ve tended to be freakin’ huge. They really do feel like strapping a full-sized keyboard on your shoulder, which can kill the joy of playing them. And the current “entry-level” model, Roland’s Lucina AX-09, has a street of US$600 or more. eBay bidders have made used items similarly pricey.

So, forget for a second that a game is involved. What if I told you you could get a cute, light little keyboard with MIDI DIN, intelligent MIDI mappings, and two great-feeling synth action octaves, all in a strap-on form factor with battery power, for $80?

Yeah. That’s what I thought. So whether you’re a hardened gamer or just looking for a nice, mobile keyboard controller, here’s an in-depth look at how MIDI works on the new Rock Band 3 Wireless Keyboard Controller – forever to be known to everyone outside Harmonix and Mad Catz as “the Rock Band keytar.”

The Hardware, Impressions

Hardware specs:

• 25 velocity-sensitive keys. (Velocity already gives a leg up over some stuff you can get on eBay. No aftertouch, though.)
• TRS port for stomp or expression pedals. (Right now, that means the bass drum pedal, until we figure out a DIY solution. It uses a little 3.5mm jack; working on finding out voltage specs.)
• 1-axis touch strip which maps to modulation and pitch.
• 5-pin MIDI DIN port.
• Xbox 360 (or PS3) game pad, wireless Xbox operation. (For wireless MIDI, you’re on your own.)
• Three AA batteries. (No external power.)
• Optional stand accessory. (This looks cute; I didn’t pick it up yesterday but may yet.)
• 4.6 lbs.

US$80 street, and also available bundled with the Rock Band 3 game.

I’ve handled a lot of “shoulder-mount keyboards,” and the simple reality is, a lot of them have pretty awful ergonomics. The Rock Band keyboard is about the best I’ve handled. It’s light enough that you can hold it in one hand, and compact enough that it’s about the width of a typical adult waist. That means it actually feels like a keytar sized to be played as a keytar.

The keyboard action is just a basic, unweighted synth action, but feels solid enough, and velocity response is consistent. I have to admit: I was very surprised by the quality of the keyboard. You could easily put this alongside so-called “pro” unweighted keyboards in the sub-$200 range and, blindfolded, no one would ever guess this was a game keyboard. I have no idea who built the action (it’s labeled “made in China”), but there would be no shame whatsoever in using it.

One oddity: F3, C4, and F4 each have raised ridges on the left-hand side of the keys, in order to delineate the keyboard’s five zones for gameplay. With proper keyboard technique, though, you won’t even feel them, since the pads of your fingers will hit the middle of the keys. (That is, unless you have larger fingers.)

You also get a standard set of game controllers, and everything either sends a MIDI message or is used to toggle features on the keyboard. Not a button goes to waste.

The touchpad on the neck is probably the weak spot of the design. It’s usable, and conveniently located, but its response is pretty hard to control exactly. It’s also hard to hold down the overdrive button while using it, which is the only way to get to pitch. Then again, your left hand is likely busy holding the keyboard, anyway, just as on all keytars, so a pedal seems the better solution for anything really expressive. I’ll see how I adjust to it over time, though.

MIDI Mapping

As with the guitar, operation is simple: plug in a MIDI cable.

Yeah, okay. There is something to be said for old-fashioned MIDI, huh?

Once you’ve plugged in, you get some surprisingly robust MIDI implementation:

Keyboard: 25 keys transmit normally, with velocity. (No aftertouch. I’m glad we get velocity.)

In drum mode, the keyboard transmits General MIDI drum parts, which is, of course, handy for playing drum patches. (It’s also handy for confusing the hell out of you if you didn’t know that’s what it did.)

Touch controller: 1-axis modulation. Hold down the “Overdrive” button, and while that button is held, it sends pitch bend – which makes pitch bend nearly unusable. (Too bad they didn’t just make the Overdrive button a straight toggle.) Works well enough for Modulation, though.

Octave: Octave up and down shift uses the X and B keys (on Xbox, or the left and right action keys), just as on the guitar – and just as on the guitar, you get four up, four down. Octave feedback is available on the LEDs.

Program change: Top and bottom action keys increment or decrement, respectively, program change. (Y and A on Xbox.)

D-pad buttons: As on the guitar, these toggle functions, though for the keyboard all four are mapped instead of three. Up turns on and off drum mapping, right changes the pedal to foot controller, down changes pedal to channel volume, and left changes the pedal to expression.

Transport controls: The Back, Guide, and Start buttons on the Xbox gamepad correspond to Stop, Continue, and Start MIDI messages, respectively – so if you’re tracking your next Rock Band Network song in Reaper, you can control your takes right from the keyboard.

Pedals: There’s one pedal port on the side. More on how to use this soon; I haven’t yet tried it. It’s a 3.5mm jack, but I have to find out the voltage. Stomp should work fine with a standard Rock Band drum pedal, and in the default mode, you can use that for a damper pedal. For expression, you need something that sends analog voltage.

Panic: Press the Back, Guide, and Start buttons simultaneously to switch all notes off. (Curiously, this appears not to be the same as on the guitar, but I can only test the keyboard to know for sure.)

MIDI channel: 1. Always. It’s always MIDI channel 1.

Note that there is no accelerometer output from the keyboard. Too bad; that would have been fun (and likely more useful than the two-fingered salute you have to do to get pitch bend from the touch strip). In fact, this sounds like a ripe opportunity for a little hack – maybe a strap-on board that transmits accelerometer and MIDI via Bluetooth.

Applications

Bottom line is, this thing is a joy for controlling computer synths or hardware, and may have just become my portable keyboard of choice, just because it’s fun to strap on. Of course, if you don’t care about the “keytar” form factor, any number of inexpensive keyboards will give you real pitch and mod wheels and some knobs. But if you want to play a keytar, this game controller has become, bizarrely, a must-buy.

As we find out more about the pedals, I’ll share that. In the meantime, enjoy.

Since the very first Guitar Hero game, musicians have found ways of converting game music controllers into genuine music controllers, through various hacks and tricks. But now, no hackery is needed: Rock Band 3′s new “Pro” controllers ship with actual MIDI DIN ports on the back. With the help of Harmonix, we get to look inside how that MIDI implementation works.

The Rock Band 3 Fender Mustang Pro-Guitar, designed as a collaboration between Harmonix and Mad Catz and manufactured by the latter, isn’t exactly a full-blown MIDI guitar. It has strings, but in place of fretting those strings, you instead use 102 fret buttons. (Stay tuned for details of the Squier Strat for RB3, which will be both – actual strings over the frets.)

Non-guitarists won’t mind the buttons: there’s no need to build up callouses. And the frets are located in the right place, so if you do know how to fret a guitar, you’ll find it usable. The other big upshot is price: with a street price of US$150, the Mustang is on the high end of game controller, but very much the low end of things that can simulate a guitar with MIDI.

I don’t yet have a Mustang on-hand — I’m hoping I can find a real guitarists to give one a full play test when it ships late in November. But I can describe how MIDI works on the device.

The hardware:

• Six actual strings sense velocity. (As you can see in the picture, they stop before they get to the fretboard, covering only the distance needed to allow you to strum them.)
• 102 buttons stand in for frets (17 frets, 6 buttons per fret)
• Power from three AA batteries
• 6.3 lbs
• Tilt sensor
• Xbox 360 game pad
• TRS port for stomp, expression pedal input. (Stomp pedals from the game will work; for expression pedals, we’ll need to do a hack or DIY solution.)

Here’s the pleasant surprise: just about everything onboard is mapped to MIDI, including even the game pad and tilt sensor. And there are even two play modes for additional flexibility when you’re working with MIDI.

Thanks to that 5-pin MIDI DIN port, you can connect the guitar to any computer or synth – even a post-MIDI vintage synth found on eBay. (No USB MIDI is provided, but a lot of audio interfaces and keyboards give you a MIDI in port “for free.”)

Configuration instructions: step one, turn it on. (The PS3 and Wii version will have an actual power switch; on Xbox 360, you have to hold down the Guide button, just as on other Xbox controllers.) Step two, plug in a MIDI cable (the one with 5 pins that we’ve been using for over a quarter century). Step three — there is no step three. Turn it on, plug, and go.

MIDI implementation

Octave: Increment and decrement octave are the left and right action buttons (X and B on Xbox).

Program change: Increment and decrement are the top and bottom action buttons (that’s Y and A on Xbox). Transmits on channels 1-6. No, really. There’s a program change message implemented on this thing. The default is 28, the patch for a clean electric guitar in General MIDI.

D-pad buttons switch functions for the pedal, from foot controller to channel volume to expression.

Pedals: Connect an analog pedal, and you can use continuous expression or volume. Connect a digital stomp (that is, one that’s either on or off, like the bass drum pedal), and you send a damper pedal / sustain message.

Panic: Mercifully, there’s an all notes off command issued if you press the Xbox Back, Start, and D-Pad right at the same time. (Hmmm – feels like ctrl-alt-del.)

MIDI channel: By default, the guitar transmits on channels 1-6 — that’s in order to transmit strings separately. Each of the six strings is a different channel.

Accelerometer transmits Modulation on the X axis, Expression on the Y axis, and Pitch Bend on the Z axis, and each can be toggled independently with shift (the Start key) + B, A, and X, respectively. (That’s a good thing, as controlling all three at once would be a little messy.)

Frets and strings: Here’s the tricky part, because you’re strumming something rather than playing a MIDI keyboard. There are two modes:

• “Strum mode.” Hold a fret, then strum the string. The note is sent when – and only when – you strum. The pitch is set by whichever fret is closest. That note is held until you change a fret.
• “Synth mode.” Strumming a string or changing frets will generate a note – meaning, if you like, you can use that fretboard as a 102-key keyboard. (Microtonal fans, go nuts.) Here’s the odd part, though – you need the strum to set velocity, so whichever strum you’ve last strummed is your current velocity. While it’s called “synth” mode, this is the only mode that allows hammer-ons and pull-offs.

We’re going to need to get the actual guitar and shoot some video before that really makes sense. But you get the idea.

You can adjust pitch up and down 4 octaves in either direction.

LED feedback gives you information on what’s toggled and what isn’t, though my guess is you’ll just listen rather than try to squint at the LEDs.

Want Real Strings?

If those buttons look unappealing to you, Rock Band 3 will have an alternative with real strings, the Squier Stratocaster.

In many ways, the Squier is more interesting – especially to actual guitarists, and not just people looking for a new way to fiddle with soft synths. With real strings, it ceases to be a toy, and while pricing and availability haven’t yet been announced, it’s likely to be the cheapest MIDI guitar solution out there.

I’ve confirmed that the MIDI implementation on the Squier will be similar to the Fender Mustang Pro – same channels and messages. It lacks the pedal inputs.

Engadget did a nice hands-on preview of the Strat, with photos and video.

Likely applications

With both “Synth” and “Strum” modes possible, I think Harmonix and Mad Catz may have a hit here. For someone who isn’t quite ready to commit to a MIDI guitar yet but just wants an alternative way to track some MIDI lines, it’s hard to beat basic input for $150, with frets in the right place instead of a piano keyboard. For other applications, I can imagine having some real fun – with the accelerometer and “Synth Mode,” the guitar becomes a very viable, absurdly cheap, velocity-sensitive controller for strange new synths and other creations.

It’s probably some of those oddball applications that will appeal most, as I suspect real guitarists will hold out for the stringed-fret Squier, leaving the buttons to the rest of us.

Beyond MIDI: These are wireless Xbox 360 controllers, too, so if you have any tool that can talk to Xbox controllers on PC, you should theoretically be able to rig up something wireless that doesn’t involve MIDI cabling. But I like the ability to plug into hardware synths with MIDI, no computer necessary, too – and as I say, those MIDI ports are often “free” on gear you already have plugged into your computer.

Stay tuned for when this ships.

Hopefully that gives you an idea whether you want to pre-order this sucker. Knock yourself out.

All photos courtesy Harmonix.

What Harmonix has achieved with Rock Band, and their original Guitar Hero, is remarkable. At their core, these games are descended from arcade rhythm games, reducing music to simple coordination of a few buttons. Yet numerous studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that, in an age in which recording has made musical experience passive for many, the fantasy of holding a plastic instrument is enough to convince people to explore music making again. Rock Band’s collaborative gameplay has people singing and playing again, karaoke style, and more than a few gamers have decided to graduate to real instruments and lessons. Don’t be surprised to walk into a Best Buy and see instruments and pro audio tech in the aisle next to Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The genius of Harmonix is that music is again entertainment, not specialization.

What people may not realize is that designing these games is hard. The illusion of simplicity, the experience of fun – these are some of the most daunting challenges in design, period.

So what happens when Rock Band evolves beyond mere rhythm game?

John Drake of Harmonix colorfully sums up the spirit of the new, real-transcription Pro game: “Good luck on that solo, asshole.”

Ramping up the difficulty of a game to real music was a transformative design challenge. We go behind the scenes to hear how Harmonix approached it, what it means for how music works, and what it can mean for your music — or the next time you want to use a game with friends to hone your musical chops.

A New Game

Rock Band 3, released today, introduces new instruments and new play modes that blur the line between rhythm game and musical exercise. The hardware inputs are now actual MIDI controllers. A new guitar, the US$150 Fender Mustang Pro, uses around 100 buttons to allow real chord fingering positions – minus the callouses. A new keyboard features two octaves, velocity sensitivity, and touch controls. The guitar and keyboard each have standard MIDI DIN output feature extensive mappings of even the Xbox buttons onboard to MIDI control changes and custom MIDI assignments. A MIDI adapter lets you use your own MIDI hardware. (Ironically, this puts the Mad Catz-built hardware ahead of many supposedly “pro” sub-$100 devices, which now have only USB connections. CDM will have a detailed hands-on with information on how to make use of that MIDI controller in a separate article.)

Accordingly, “Pro Mode” songs feature more extensive transcriptions; learning them is tantamount to simply learning the music. Chords are real chords, and, while reduced to an octave or so, the keyboard parts really are what’s in the song. Needless to say, the presence of a keyboard also opens the floodgates to properly providing keyboard music in the game, from Elton John to John Lennon.

To understand how these changes came about, we have an epic interview with some of the folks at Harmonix. Even if you’re not a music gamer, there’s plenty of reason to pay attention: what they have to say could be relevant to getting your music to a wider audience, and many of the design considerations reveal insights into how people process musical information visually.

And if you are a musician and gamer, you may finally have found a music game you can share with non-musicians without dumbing down your playing.

Speaking to CDM: Daniel Sussman, Rock Band 3 project leader, John Drake, program manager of the Rock Band Network, and Matt “Nord” Nordhaus, senior producer for Rock Band Network. (RBN allows musicians to author their own content for the game and distribute it to players.)

Beyond Rhythm Games

CDM: We know already that your games have turned people on to music, and now it seems Rock Band 3 bridges some of the gulf between game and music. What does that mean for the evolution of Rock Band?

John: From my perspective, it’s certainly opened up a whole new angle to approach people who aren’t rhythm gamers. And as rhythm gamers, people who laugh at Expert guitar charts and say, I can five-star this on a five-button guitar, no problem, like Harmonix are wusses. And I’m like, okay, now you have [Ozzy Osborne's] Crazy Train on expert, so, good luck on that solo, asshole.

Daniel: Rock Band 3 is welcoming and doesn’t take into consideration any kind of musical background or education. As it relates to a feature set, we really look at making our game musical, but also fun and crazy interactive. What’s unique about the Rock Band Network aspect is that the RBN experience is not really so much a game – it’s more of a pipeline that musicians can use to get their content, their songs into the Rock Band world. If you think about the musical community out there, the ecosystem is really a way into that musical community. You have a game that appeals to a non-musician, they play the game, they have fun, maybe they take a greater interest in music. They use the game to learn how to play guitar or drums, to appreciate music. They start writing their own music, and then put that into the game world for other people to play and interact with.

It’s a kind of funny thing. I don’t think it was totally intentional – the idea that Rock Band would get to the point where you’re able to play the game on controllers that then you can plug into your laptop to make music and then use that same laptop to do all the game authoring and then put that back into Rock Band. That was sort of where we ended up, and it’s great because it all works really well together, but it speaks to the ambition of the studio.

Do you have a sense of what will happen as these new hardware inputs make their way into gamers hands? I guess you have to wait and see.

Daniel: We’re very excited to see what happens. If you read a lot of the statements we’ve made about the ambition for Rock Band Pro, part of it was to draw a deeper connection to the music. Another part of it, really, was to provide a new gameplay experience to an audience of gamers that had been playing the same game for five years on the guitar, or three years on the drums. Really the problem we had to solve was, how can we reinvigorate the category? How can we give these gamers something new to play? And how can we continue to challenge the music gamer in a way that doesn’t just involve the content? Can we build gameplay around something new and unique, and then use that to drive the progression of the franchise?

What’s been interesting is that we get these hardcore gamers who are the cream of the crop in the Rock Band world, they can beat every song on Expert the day it comes out. And then we sit them down with the Pro guitar, and we say, alright hotshot, you probably want to start on easy. I know that’s a novel concept to you know, but try it. And they do, and what happens is, they’re getting like three stars and 60-65% of the notes. And it’s kind of the same experience they had when they first played Guitar Hero 1, or they first tried the drums in Rock Band 1. And that’s really the phenomenal thing here, is that we’ve found a way to reconnect people to all of this great music through the gameplay. And almost as a bonus, the gameplay is totally steeped in actual musical ability, so by playing the game you develop skill that can be applied to things outside the game. But really, that’s secondary, from our standpoint.

What does that mean for play testing and authoring, then, to have these new tiers of difficulty? I know in the past, the first step in authoring was to just do a full transcription of a song, and then try to reduce it to what’s playable on the game controls at different difficulty levels.

Daniel: Well, I think we still start at the Expert authoring level, which is the basic note-for-note transcription of the song. And then as you pare down from there to get to hard, medium, and easy, consider that it’s more like the “campfire” version of the song. On Easy, it’s really root notes of chords on downbeats. It’s more like you’re playing along with the song; you’re not playing exactly what the song is. And then on Medium, we introduce power chords, so you’re playing that root-fifth combination on downbeats. And then on hard, you start playing the full chords, major-minor chords, open chords, and riffs. Expert is everything. We use a lot of the same design strategy as we pare down from expert to easy that we do in the core game, in the core five-lane game.

Rock Band’s Place in the Music World

It seems like there’s a strong awareness of what RB3 is doing in the game community, that it is at this new level of musicianship, but maybe not in the music community yet.

Daniel: Our focus really has been on the gamer out there, because we want to make sure the experience is accessible and not intimidating. But we see a lot of potential for an intermediate- to pro-level guitar player or keyboard player who wants to use Rock Band 3 as a way to learn new music, to learn new songs. And I suspect that we’ll get there as the game gets out and people realize what’s going on, the guitars get out and people put it together.

I spoke at a panel earlier this week; it was a panel that was sponsored by NARAS. [That's the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences - yes, the folks who give out the Grammy.] We were talking about digital distribution in this day and age, and how musicians can take advantage of some of the tools. And I was stunned at how few people were aware of RBN, and Rock Band 3. And I still think that in the musical community, music games have this stigma as a game, as a toy. And I don’t think enough musicians out there are as aware of the powerful distribution that’s offered through the Rock Band franchise, and then the actual musical benefits that our game has afforded all the way back. I’m looking for the tide to change within the musical community. I’m in two bands, a lot of people here are very musical people, and deeply, we feel that we want to use the Rock Band platform to promote music and to promote musical experiences, and to encourage people to be musicians. We want to be a part of the musical community, not competing with the musical community in any way.

Have you gotten feedback from musicians as you worked on Rock Band 3, apart from, obviously, the numerous musicians who work for Harmonix?

Daniel: Some. We worked pretty closely with a couple of folks at Berklee College of Music. We’re building this game, we want to make sure that we don’t want to teach people any horrible habits, and all of our chord language is correct, and our fingering is correct, and our ramp is from easy to medium and medium to hard, following loosely with stable, academic doctrine. And so we had a couple of people come in on a weekly basis to play the game. And people were very excited. I think a lot of people have seen the potential of this within the music community. So there are certainly people that are very impressed with what we’ve done and are looking forward to applying it as a tool in the music community.

Do you have hard numbers on the relationship of the game and this game genre to people going out and learning instruments? It seems Rock Band 3 has the potential to make that happen even more.

Daniel: Obviously, it’s too soon to tell what the impact of RB3 will be on, you know, the society that we live in. [laughs] There have been studies, vendors have done studies, Cornell did a study, just on the attach rate between music gamer and how many people play Guitar Hero and then go buy a guitar, how many people play Rock Band and take musical instrument lessons. I know that it’s an interesting topic in the musical academic world. And I think RB3 definitely changes the game. The connection between the game and the actual musical ability is way less tenuous than it has been in previous games. It’s pretty real. I think you’ll see a higher attach rate, but you know, we’ll see.

Some of those hard number… Harmonix provided us with a study, announced in January of 2009, by Fender and non-profit music education organization Little Kids Rock, looking at schools around the United States. The results: educators widely attribute a renewed interest in music education to the games. The study looked at teachers with students in the 8-13-year-old age group.

Results:
67% said guitar enrollment increased as a result of Rock Band and Guitar Hero; 46% bass, and 52% drums. A tiny fraction thought it decreased.

78% said they felt these games had a positive effect.

88% said it had increased interest in classic, guitar-based rock, and a whopping 95% said the two games would help attract new students.

Rock Band Network, Meet Pro Mode, Keys

How are the tools being received in the Rock Band Network community?

Matt: We’re working on the toolset now to add keyboards and harmony to Rock Band Network. The creative community has been incredibly excited about it. I know a lot of them are both holding songs back that have keyboard parts in it, and sort of going after artists who they know might be interested in it. We’ve already had interest from a few major-label artists who have already gotten in touch with us to try to get their stuff in. So I think it’s going to certainly expand the RBN stuff into the keyboard-centric area.

What made the difference for them — is it, okay, now I have an engine that can represent my music, is it that now it’s something that I can take more seriously, or a combination?

Matt: I think it’s more the former. I think these are people who are very keyboard-centric. Billy Joel’s a great example of someone who was added. We’ve had people who said, oh, cool, you have keyboards? I really want to get my songs in there, people who are known for playing keyboards.

John: I think it’s people who make music on that instrument want to see even the representational gameplay. Even if you’re playing keys mode, you don’t have to play the two octaves, we still have that five-button-style gameplay even on the keyboard, I think we’ve always felt a little weird about it when it’s been like, play the organ solo to Smokin’ by Boston on a guitar controller. We did it because it’s an amazing song and we didn’t want to hold it back, but it makes so much more sense, and it’s so much more fun for them to see their music expressed on an instrument, even in a simulation format that’s that much closer to reality. I think it opens the door for them to get excited about it. And then once they’re excited about it, it’s kind of a no-brainer to get their music in.

Of course, as a keyboardist, I’m pleased to see the addition of keyboards; what does that change mean for Harmonix, especially coming from only the guitar and drums?

John: The exciting thing for us is, keyboard is so fundamental in terms of the way that people process and understand music. It’s probably the most linear layout of notes that you can have. It makes a lot of sense to be able to look at a keyboard and be able to understand what that harmonic structure is, versus a guitar. When you see people trying to learn theory from a guitar, they’re able to do it, but it’s a very disconnected and disjointed thing in their minds a lot of the time, if they’re not musicians.

I come from a jazz background. You have great pianists and great piano solos in the context of jazz, but at laest half the time you’re comping. That’s always part of it. It’s such a versatile instrument that can do all those things. I think with Rock Band Network and with Rock Band DLC, what we’re seeing a lot of is the ability to highlight those songs. We’ve got music like Billy Joel, like Imagine by John Lennon, like Bohemian Rhapsody, where the piano has those stand-out moments, where we’re really looking at the keyboardist as featured player. But also we have have songs like Roundabout by Yes, or Freebird by Leonard Skynard, where the keyboard has a standout section or there’s a crazy keyboard solo or sort of insane part, but really it does work as an instrument that’s part of a collaborative effort, which is what Rock Band’s all about. Rock Band’s not about Guitar Heroes, and it’s not about drum solos. It’s about your band playing together. So the keyboard will have its stand-out moments, it’ll cast more light on an instrument that’s often overshadowed.

Matt: The thing about RBN is that you typically see the more the fringe-y, niche-y stuff. It seems likely to be that we’re going to get some of those, like maybe we’ll get a jazz tune where the keyboard comps the whole time. And that would be cool. It’s the sort of thing that we probably wouldn’t release as DLC, because we have more high-profile bands in front of it. But it’s exactly the sort of thing that people put into RBN because they’re passionate about the bands they love and the kind of music they like.

What will the impact of these new levels be on the authoring process? I know you’re working on releasing new tools to work with the new implementations for Rock Band Network; what are you changing?

Matt: We’ve improved a whole bunch of the audition tools to make auditioning much, much quicker and easier — like adding rewind and skip forward, vocal guide pitches and keyboard guide pitches. We actually brought a group of people in, some of the more advanced authors, to check out the MIDI spec, and one of the things they reacted to is that the keyboards are really, really complicated. The difference between five lanes and two octaves doesn’t seem that big, but when you figure out that you’ve got chords and it’s real stuff in real time, it’s a very significant increase in difficulty.

John: Both to author and to play test.

Matt: — and to play. So we’re trying to add some tools to allow them to make sure what they’ve done is correct according to what’s actually in the song.

John: The thing now is that it’s pitch-accurate. So it’s not just charting what feels right; it’s charting what is right.

There’s still compression going on. It’s not the same compression that we do to take all the sonic stuff that you’re hearing down to five colors, but we’re still talking about, if you have a full keyboard part, taking it down to about an octave and a half — you have to think about both the theoretical, what is the best way to do that to make it feel right from a gameplay standpoint, but also how to communicate information so that it’s still pitch-accurate, and it still plays well, with jumping around. When do you leave the bass note in, when do you take the bass note out? It’s a lot of thinking.

It’s not like when we launched originally, when we had four years of guitar authoring under our belts.

So it’s like doing a transcription, in other words — it’s like doing an orchestral transcription for piano, or in this case a piano transcription for toy piano.

John: Yeah, exactly. That’s sort of a funny way to refer to it, but it’s pretty accurate. It’s more an art than a craft.

Learning Music with Rock Band

Last week we got to see GarageBand ’11, with additional lessons, and metrics behind those lessons. In a way, the games and the music tools are converging. It seems like what the games are doing can help with learning music.

John: You know, I grew up playing piano. I’m a classically-trained percussionist, and learned piano when I was six years old, and all that good stuff. And the thing that sucks about learning an instrument in isolation is that you play scales, and you play Mary Had a Little Lamb, and you play your A harmonic minor scale. And when you mess up, it sounds bad. And when you do it right, it doesn’t sound that great either. It sounds like a scale.

The fun thing with Rock Band 3 is that the stories we have, we back you with a full band of music all the time. Even when you’re playing your C major scale, or your C major triad, you’re playing it on top of a bluegrass band, or a metal riff. And you feel like you’re accomplishing something. And it makes you want to get over that hump and get over that musical boredom and inertia that holds people down, where they’re not getting engaged on a real instrument. I’m hopeful we get people to feel like they’re learning, to feel like they’re engaging with a game and playing something, and they actually develop some chops and maybe some habits that can get them thinking about musical theory and maybe taking a piano lesson, or reading Keyboard Magazine, or downloading some GarageBand lessons. That’s all good.

It’s like the Jamey Aebersold tapes, where you have a backing track.

John: Exactly. Oh, God, those tapes… I was trained on those tapes. I was trained on… oh, God. They’re good. They’re torture.

So, now we have these full guitars and real two-octave keyboards — was there some iteration to arrive at that solution? I got to poke a little fun at the process when the announcement was made, mocking up a whole staff coming at you in the interface. Maybe at one point there was even something a little like that.

John: God, there was tons of iteration on that. I think this is sort of the genius of Harmonix games. To be very clear. I’m not a UI designer, that’s not my job or my baby, but having seen the iteration process it went through, when you see the end result, when you see the polish, you think, “oh, it must have been a really natural process to come up with this.” But what you’re looking at is hundreds of hours of painstaking thought and work that went into it.

With keyboards specifically, I think the biggest challenge was really getting people who are not used to reading piano roll, and not used to understanding the difference between a fourth and a fifth onscreen, being able to identify that quickly through a seamless UI and jump right in. And I think that our team did a killer job of what’s coming down the display on the screen. I think it’s pretty much the only way you can do it. The idea of having one octave of gameplay at a time, because we tried it with more than one octave.

Matt: And you know, adding the colors. I sat in on all those meetings. I go to all the design meetings. It was fascinating to watch us work through it. We tried not having black and white notes and coloring all the notes, and eventually we ended up on black and white because people are used to that. We struggled with, like, do you light up the lanes when you press them? How thick are the dividers between the lanes? We were tweaking stuff literally until the last day. And it was a nonstop process of iteration through the whole cycle to get it right. It’s very, very hard.

John: And it’s because people are so deep into music here, and want so badly to give people that experience and make it accessible. We can get my mom to play keyboards, and then get a great keyboard player, both being able to sightread something on easy and having a good time, not feeling like they’re reading music and suffering through a rehearsal process.

Matt I think it was a huge debate whether we had a key signature list at the beginning of each song. The keyboard people wanted it, and the design and UI people didn’t want it because they felt it was clutter. We went back and forth on that a bunch of times.

John: At the end of the day, that’s what designing games really is for something like this. If we’re translating a real-world experience, making decisions to give the most amount of information to people without overwhelming them. I think Rock Band Pro really walks that line of filling that screen with all the notes in the keyboard solo in Roundabout, without making you feel like you’re going to have an aneurysm from trying to play them.

My favorite thing is what people said about the pro guitar — that’s been in development as long, if not longer, than keyboards. We’ve been futzing around with that for two-plus years. And playtesting it, people were saying, oh, sure, you can play on it, and it makes sense to you, but you’re a guitar player. And to bring people in who never played guitar before, and give them our tutorial system, to see them like an hour later playing power chords? Playing I Love Rock and Roll? I mean, they’re not mastering it and no one’s playing crazy guitar solos, but to be able to fret three or four chords based on learning it through the game in an hour or two hours. Having them have to stop because their hands hurt — they were grinning from ear to ear, and they were doing it and loving it.

That’s the power of someone learning an instrument and getting excited about it. That’s what we had hoped would happen. The idea that anyone could pick up a guitar and spend two or three hours in our game and walk away knowing two or three chords and how open notes work and how they can move their way around a fretboard — that’s pretty crazy.

That’s the biggest surprise to me — that it fucking works.

It’s why people have been playing music for thousands of years.

All photos: Kyle Mercury. Images courtesy Harmonix.

From the blog:

Samantha Kalman
I’m most thrilled about the new audio features. Big things like fx filters and reverb zones to add atmosphere to your audio are awesome, but little things like reliable synching of multiple playing sources is completely wonderful. Combined with spectrum analysis you can do things like procedurally modify colors, meshes, lighting, or anything else based on audio playback. As someone who wants to make synaesthesia-invoking music games, I am so happy that these features made it into 3.0.

Nicolaj Schweitz
I love the new audio features, especially the possibility to use audio to affect any runtime variable. I can’t wait to see what people get out of this.

The mod tracker file support might start a new epoch in music for games — or should I say a revival of the demo scene trackers.

Unity 3 – What Feature is The Dev Team Most Proud Of? [Unity blog]

Thanks to Zyler Vega for the tip!

From Unity’s site, a description of the “Audio Magic” coming in version 3:

Unity 3 brings Reverb Zones, filters, tracker file support and a bunch of other goodies to the table. We’re also introducing editable falloff curves for all major audio parameters, so you get complete control over your sound ambience.

More on the upgrade at Create Digital Motion.

Kotaku notes that Rock Band 3‘s icons tease something we’ve been awaiting a long time — keys.

It’s ironic that in order to make guitars playable in games, they were effectively made into keyboards, yet it’s taken this long to actually get keyboards. Oh, wait — yeah, there is that whole problem of having as many as 88 keys, two hands, and no convenient way to fit the staff notation into the descending gems view. Not entirely sure how that’ll work out; see also a controller concept, below.

Of course, this also means that, while electronic music is still largely off-limits, synthpop, prog, and synth bands are all now fair game. That’s fantastic news for the Rock Band Network I’ve covered here on CDM, which lets anyone with a copy of Reaper adapt music for the platform.

So, I got one wish… though I do have to say it again, on behalf of the richer gameplay and the chance for VJ backgrounds and electronic tracks. Xbox Network. Frequency. Amplitude. (Or, heck, Google TV/Android. Anything.) Long-time Harmonix watchers know what I’m talking about.

Oh, side note to Kotaku: am I going to have to send Stevie Wonder and J.S. Bach to kick your ass, or will you stop making fun of the keyboard? Yeah, it’s had its embarrassing moments, like any other instrument. It’s no soprano sax, though.

One Big Game is a charity assembled by game developers to raise money for children’s organizations. Musical games look to figure prominently in the series. Design legend Masaya Matsuura (PaRappa the Rapper, Vib-Ribbon), father of rhythm games and without whom there likely would be no Rock Band or Guitar Hero, has signed. And the first title out, from Zoë Mode, is musical in nature, too, in a game called “Chime.”

Chime is an elegantly-designed game and a lovely way to unwind, particularly with Philip Glass’ gorgeous “Brazil” in the track list. (“Brazil” has Glass’ usual musical furniture, but the cut, taken from the Aguas da Amazonia album, is executed by the extraordinary Uakti ensemble and takes on a new set of timbres.) One relevance to Create Digital Music – it’s not a bad way to take a break after a production and/or programming stint. The game is 500 Microsoft Points for Xbox Live, the lion’s share of which goes to children’s charities.

Fun as it is, Chime also reveals some of the limitations of musical gameplay; whether or not that’s a fault is really up to the user/gamer. The gameplay is almost a direct homage to Lumines, Tetsuya Mizuguchi‘s puzzle game. As with Lumines, you place interlocking blocks into patterns, with the basic mechanics derived from Tetris. Chime is actually slightly simpler; there’s no color matching involved, only the creation of matching “quads” – areas of the grid 3×3. The more of the space you manage to fill up, the higher your score, which is oddly satisfying. (Sure, other animals have survival instincts and stuff like that imprinted in our brain; humans seem to be basically obsessive-compulsive as a species. Great.)

How is this a “music game” and not just a variant of Tetris? Well, again borrowing (liberally) from Lumines, Chime has a playback “wiper” that scrolls across the screen from left to right. In fact, it’s not so much that Chimes or Lumines are music games as it is that digital musical interfaces in general tend to use left-to-right, linear, step-sequencing grids. The tracks are all pre-composed, whether Glass or Moby, so the blocks themselves just add little musical “flairs,” kept in time to the music.

And that brings us to the limitation: it’s funny to me that these games tend to do so little musically. Lumines, at least, provides satisfying rhythmic cues that align with gameplay. Chime is so subtle, you’re barely aware that the blocks impact the music at all. Aesthetically, that works well: the addition of music feels seamless, focusing the user on gameplay – and this is a game.

But perhaps it’s not really game design that’s at fault. Music lacks a strong generative tradition, and musical interfaces are only now taking baby steps into anything that looks different from conventional interfaces. Indeed, it seems what’s urgently needed is for people who work on interaction design and people who work on music to start to work across disciplines. In fact, I’m seeing far more innovation with game interfaces than musical interfaces.

Of course, that’ll require a lot of programming time. And that means you’ll need a break. And for a break, I still recommend Chime. Sure, the musical selections are a bit oddly matched, with Lemon Jelly’s Fred Deakin, Moby, Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll, Markus Schulz, and … Philip Glass. But it’s still quite fun. And you can say you’re doing it for the kids.

http://www.chimegame.com/

Games really are reshaping music. Despite their relatively simple gameplay, the Guitar Hero and Rock Band franchises originated by developer Harmonix are stimulating interest in real music making. It’s no accident that you can walk into a Best Buy and, next to aisles of video games, find a growing selection of serious musical instruments and technology.

These titles are also stimulating interest in music and artists and producing a new distribution outlet, at a time when the distribution picture for music can seem bleak. But until now, that outlet has been limited to big acts, big tracks, and big deals with big labels. It has only promoted music you already know, not the discovery of new music. Rock Band Network could change all that.

We took a detailed look in August at how Rock Band Network worked technically, and how authoring a song for RBN could give you the same level of gameplay and choreographed graphics that the official Rock Band tracks get. But now here’s the big news: at long last, RBN is opening to the general public, starting with an open beta for artists and play-testers.

What it is: Rock Band Network is a new set of authoring tools (built around Reaper), a submission process (built around Microsoft’s Xbox 360 XNA Ceators Club), and an upcoming store to host indie tracks called the Rock Band Network Music Store.

What it costs: Rock Band Network membership is free, but you’ll need a $99/year XNA Creators’ Club Premium account to submit or test music.

What you’ll need: To author titles, you need an Xbox 360, a copy of the Reaper software, a set of free plug-ins for Reaper for RBN, the XNA account, and either a Windows PC or Mac. (You’ll need Windows, either virtualized or on another machine, in order to actually load the tracks for testing, but you can author on either; see below for more.)

What it gets you (as an artist): If you make it through the peer-reviewed submission process, you stand to set your own pricing and receive 30% royalties (retail, excluding tax) on everything you sell.

What it gets you (as a peer reviewer): With the XNA Creators’ Club membership, you can play as many tracks as you want without any additional charge, in exchange for your feedback. Tired: squeezing into sweaty, overcrowded bars at CMJ and South by Southwest to hear new acts. Wired: Scouting for new acts on your cough with your Xbox 360. And that could make a nice community of music, depending on how this evolves.

Where the tracks will be distributed: Anyone with a copy of Rock Band 2 (and presumably future versions of Rock Band) can play your tracks. Releases will initially debut on the Xbox 360 store for 30 days. A “selection” of tracks will also appear on the PS3 and Wii stores after that. (The approved songs will stay on the RBN Store on Xbox 360, regardless.)

When does all of this happen? The open beta launches today for peer reviewers and artists. The store is due, um, “real soon now.” (No specific date yet.) The game itself is ready to go, at least on Xbox 360: a patch introduced way back in September added the ability to play RBN tracks.

CDM Talks to Harmonix

John Drake, Program Manager for Rock Band Network, took some time out to answer my questions on the eve of launch.

CDM: What will the Rock Band Network Store look like? Where will you get access to it? Will it be a similar store on the PS3 and Wii?

John: The RBN store will run in parallel to the existing Harmonix DLC store, and will be in the same menu location within Rock Band 2. The RBN store has more info about each song than our existing DLC store does, and it has more ways to discover new music: you can search by subgenre, album, country of origin, record label, even the author of the song.

The PS3 store will be very similar to the Xbox 360 store. Details of the Wii RBN presence are still being worked out.

Ed. note: It’s especially nice to see the RBN store on equal footing. I had high hopes for the XNA-produced games on Xbox Live, but those titles aren’t displayed or listed in exactly the same way, which I think has hurt the initiative a bit.

CDM: In addition to the XNA Premium subscription, you still need Windows to support testing your own tracks, yes? Do you need a Windows PC to be a playtester?

John: You need to run Windows in order to transfer song files to the Xbox 360, because we use Games for Windows Live to manage the transfer. We have informally tested running Windows on a Mac on a number of virtual machines, as well as BootCamp, and most of them work perfectly for transferring files.

Ed.: I can add, a number of the Harmonix guys are Mac fans, so you can believe they tried the virtualization approach!

CDM: Since we last talked, there has been a private beta. Were there any additional improvements / changes since our August conversation? What kind of feedback have you gotten?

John: The closed beta has been absolutely invaluable to help us shape the experience for the new members just now joining the program. We’ve cleaned up and organized the documents section of the website, added a great deal of new information, clarified policies for submitting songs, and generally made sure that the pipeline is running smoothly. None of the major processes are any different than initially designed, but we have changed a million small details to make it better.

It’s important to note that the members that have been in the beta have been absolutely extraordinary: patient, intelligent, hard working, thoughtful, and helpful to each other as they worked through the inevitable issues that cropped up as we readied the site for launch.

CDM: Have any currently-available tracks come through the private beta process? (Jonathan Coulton’s?)

John: We currently have nearly 40 approved tracks, including tracks by the inimitable JoCo, and a bunch more up for playtesting and peer review. We’re expecting even more great content to go up for testing in the next few days, and we’re excited for people to join our playtesting ranks to get even more songs through the pipeline!

CDM: I see TuneCore is offering track preparation services. Have you seen similar offerings begin to appear? (For some of us, doing the authoring may actually be satisfying – we’re weird that way!)

John: There’s a great variety of services cropping up from authoring houses offering with different programs to create songs for bands. These range from straight, up-front fee structures to a $0 down, pay us out of your royalties deal. It’s really exciting to see how different groups are responding!

*PS, I’m with you on the satisfaction of authoring. I’ve been working with my band to put our whole last and current record (17 songs in total) up for RBN. It’s a lot of work, but it’s super rewarding to get involved in the process! And it’s really doable if you’re used to making music as a passion!

CDM: Outside RBN, are these tools beginning to be used on Harmonix’s own tracks? (I believe that was in the works when we last spoke.)

John: It was always the intention that the tools we developed for the Rock Band Network would be integrated internally at Harmonix and that has begun to happen. With the industry leading amount of content we produce (over 1000 songs and counting) anything that makes the job of our unparalleled Audio Team easier is welcome, and in most cases the Rock Band specific tools were built by members of the Audio Team themselves!

CDM: Okay, enough of the nit-picky details… what’s it mean for you that you finally get to take this to public beta? Now with a few months more perspective on it, what do you think this will mean for musicians to get on this platform, revenue aside?

John: As our Senior Producer Matthew Nordhaus said about Rock Band Network, “It completes me.” We’re already thrilled with the community working within RBN and we’re hopeful to see a lot more great content and enthusiastic playtesters signing up at Creators.RockBand.com now that we’re open!

Additionally, we’re really proud of our teams here at Harmonix and MTV Games, who have designed a really smart way of getting great music into the hands of fans. Empowering musical groups of all sizes and genres to be able to post their own content for sale is really a dream come true at Harmonix. Adding the great variety of music for our passionate fanbase only makes it that much sweeter. We’ll be even more excited when the store turns on and those first tracks sell!

Go Check it Out

I hope to help document both how artists are using RBN and the technical process for doing this yourself over the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can hop on the beta yourself if you’re interested:

How to submit a song: http://creators.rockband.com/docs/Website
Scroll down to “Adding a song to the pipeline.”

How to become a peer reviewer?
http://creators.rockband.com/docs/Playtest_Process

And yes, I still want to see an Amplitude/Frequency Network that’s friendly to electronic music, minus drums + guitar. I think Harmonix knows a few of us feel that way.

Jonathan Coulton on Rock Band Network, from the awesome PAX.

PAX ’09 Rock Band Network Panel #3 from Harmonix on Vimeo.

Everything you need:
http://Creators.RockBand.com

Video interview by G4:

There’s a lot of hype around the latest schemes for changing how artists get their music to fans, but not actually a whole lot of news. (It always seems to boil down to a website with some unpronounceable name.)

Well, this is news: Harmonix is opening up Rock Band to anyone who wants their music in it, and giving you the same sophistication of tools they use themselves. That’s a real game-changer – literally.

And I don’t mean just for the actual game Rock Band. Sure, Harmonix was the house that made music games a phenomenon in the US. They learned well from Japan’s Masaya Matsuura, perfected music games’ mechanics in Amplitude and Frequency, popularized the formula by launching Guitar Hero, then rocked collaboration with Rock Band before convincing the infamously-guarded Beatles to finally embrace digital tech. But the sad reality of game music in general is that it’s been a playing field for the old guard – it’s licensing deals with major labels to promote music you’ve already heard. It’s the top hits on the radio, redigested onto your game console. There’s commercial calculation behind even the tune that’s in the background while you’re paging through a screen in Madden. Harmonix has already changed some of the economics, and disrupted even what could be a hit, as kids discover classic metal for the first time or geeks grab music by Jonathan Coulton and Stephen Colbert. But that’s not quite the disruptive shift in game music so many people have expected.

I think Rock Band Network could be the first real sign of that shift.

Rock Band Network promises to be something really different. How?

• Anyone can get their music in the game. You don’t even need a label. You need a few (cheap) software tools, a computer, and some basic MIDI chops, and for a fraction of the cost of pressing a couple hundred CDs, any artist can get their work into Rock Band 2.
• It’s a real community-driven process. Your A&R people don’t have to shmooze with MTV. You don’t have to enter into some complex developer agreement with Microsoft or Sony. There isn’t even a shady, mysterious review process like the Apple iTunes App Store. Actual Rock Band fans will get to play your music and tell you that the animation needs fixing and the difficulty level needs to be fixed on the drums.
• You use Reaper – an actual music production tool for grown-ups. Harmonix could have given us some weird in-game tool they cobbled together themselves. Instead, they give us a special verison of Reaper, the brilliant, full-blown Digital Audio Workstation that inexplicably costs just US$60 but blows the pants off a lot of better-known tools. So you actually get to assemble your music the way Harmonix has been doing for years, with a real tool. Fortunately, the process has been made much easier and copiously documented, but it’s nice to be treated like adults for a change.
• If it works, Rock Band is just the beginning. It’s impossible to see into the future. RBN is a leap of faith both in the artists and the game fans, in terms of their taste and the amount of effort they’ll invest. But if it works, Rock Band Network could change the way people think about interactive user-created content, well beyond just furniture in the Sims or Little Big Planet.

Anyway, enough of the big picture – let’s talk details. I got to sit down with the Rock Band Network team from Harmonix high above Times Square in MTV’s offices this week to get a full-blown demo – including some seriously fun nerding out with composer/sound designer Caleb Epps, plus Senior Producer Matthew Nordhaus and MTV’s games man, Paul DeGooyer. (In a sign that the big media world still doesn’t quite get what’s going on in this field, no one at the Viacom security desk had even heard of Harmonix.)

The team was extremely generous with technical details of Rock Band Network, and walked me through the process of how artists would get going with RBN. Here’s a first look at that process.

What You Need to Get Started

$60 Reaper + free plug-ins + a computer + Windows to beam over the music + an Xbox 360 to test on.

1. Reaper (Mac, Windows) For the authoring itself, you may be surprised: you don’t need some special tool. You use Cockos’ brilliant, lightweight, Reaper. It’s not even Reaper Rock Band Edition. Reaper for Mac will work, too. Cost: US$60 for the standard license, or US$225 if you’re already a huge rockstar.

http://www.reaper.fm/

2. Reaper plug-ins (Mac, Windows) Reaper plug-ins: this download is the real magic, adding everything from shortcuts for making tempo maps to color-coding tracks to helping you add lyrics, animations, and everything else that makes your song into a Rock Band track… game. Gamesong? Songgame? Cost: Free.

3. MAGMA Packaging Tool (Windows) MAGMA is a simple tool that facilitates getting those files packaged up with artwork and keywords and such, and moving them over to the Xbox 360 for testing yourself and for sharing with the rest of the community. It is Windows-only because it relies on Microsoft’s networking functionality with the console, but Harmonix says they’ve had no problem using it on the Mac via an emulator or Boot Camp. Cost: Free. (or the cost of Windows if you’re on the Mac).

4. Xbox Creators’ Club Membership: Join Microsoft’s game development community, and you get access to a special Rock Band creators area that lets you upload and share your tracks – and other tracks from other users (which is where item #5 comes in). Cost: $99 /year (Note that there are some discounted ways to get at this for shorter terms, and you get all the game developing features of the community, too, in case you want to try to make your own game in XNA.)

5. An Xbox 360 and Rock Band 2: You do want to actually play the results, right? (Unfortunately, because of the reliance on Creators Club, Sony’s PS3 isn’t yet supported, though some sort of PS3 distribution is planned for the future.) Cost: About to come down thanks to sales – and now you get to write off an Xbox 360 on your taxes.

Total cost: as little as $100-160 or so with the various pieces, or a little more if you need to pick up an Xbox 360 and the game and/or equip your Mac to run Windows.

By the way, Ars Technica claimed this month, based on the experience of one developer, that Xbox Live [is] not ready for user-generated content. That claim is simply wrong. Sure, LittleBigPlanet is cool on PS3, but the infrastructure for moderating content is there, on the community created for the XNA game development platform. And the tracks for Trails HD (the game mentioned in that article) or even LittleBigPlanet really pale in comparison to what Harmonix is about to unleash. It’s the first time a game has really been a platform, which was long the vision of Harmonix’s founders.

Now, let’s get into actually making your music.

The Tempo Map

Since Rock Band is assuming …well, a rock band, you’ll need to allign a tempo map with the audio so the software knows where the bars are. Caleb Epps showed me some of the nifty shortcuts that make moving from bar to bar snappy and automagical. Reaper itself has actually incorporated feature enhancements to accommodate the Rock Band workflow – which, in turn, means that the wider Reaper community may find improvements that impact them outside of preparing tracks for the game. I’ll cover this process in more detail once Harmonix unveils the wider beta.

MIDI Mapping and Animation

Here’s where the real work begins. When I visited Harmonix in Cambridge as they were developing the first Rock Band game, I found one guy hunched over a copy of Cubase doing just this: adding MIDI events for the game play at different skill levels. Now, in Reaper, you’re doing a process that’s just as sophisticated – it’s just much more user-friendly and quicker. (Harmonix says they’re gradually adopting the tools for the Rock Band Network internally, and some of their work already uses it.)

Especially nice: you’ll see color coding that matches the different game controllers.

MIDI isn’t just used for the notes in gameplay, though. You also add notes for the vocals, with the “+” key signifying a syllable extending across notes and another character designating notes that can’t be sung. (Bob Dylan, I’m looking at you.)

Most interestingly, you can tightly control animations, down to when the onscreen drummer chokes a hat or the camera cuts to the singer or the lighting in the venue activates, all using MIDI events. Check out the “Text Events” dropdown in the screen grab above.

If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. Fortunately, Harmonix says that the finished release will include tools that, say, allow the software to intelligently generate the animations. You can come back and tweak those if you wish, but you won’t necessarily have to manually add every single camera move – even though that’s traditionally how Harmonix does it.

All of this gets saved as standard MIDI files, so theoretically DAWs other than Reaper could perform the task, too – though for now, I can’t imagine wanting to leave Reaper, given the level of integration and documentation. But it’s nice that Harmonix hasn’t invented some crazy closed format, because if this takes off, I could see people creating other tools.

The Simulation

Now, if you had worked at Harmonix up until recently – as I saw when I did that first office tour – you’d then have to figure out how to get this song over to an Xbox console to play test it. Happily, you don’t have to do that any more. A convenient plug-in will pop up a graphical representation of any of the four parts. You can watch them animate through and get a real sense of what it’s like playing the game.

This is implemented as a standard plug-in, but the UI requires Reaper to work properly, so for now, it’s restricted to Reaper.

MAGMA and Play Testing

Good game design is all about play testing. So, when you’re distributing your music as a game, it’s essential that you actually play it as a game.

Yep, that’s right. This is the stage of the process where you have to play your Xbox. (Shame.)

MAGMA is the tool that packages in artwork and beams the track over to your Xbox 360 console. Provided your computer and your console are on the same network, the process of getting a built track to the Xbox is nearly instantaeous.

You can “audition games” locally, thanks to a patch to Rock Band 2 allows anyone with a Creators Club membership to play the games. That means you can easily test your own tracks on your Xbox, but also explore what other people are doing. And the community will ultimately determine which tracks are good enough to be approved.

In other words, if you don’t want to make your own Rock Band tracks, but want to become a virtual Xbox music “scout,” you could sign up for a membership and look for the next big thing by playing their music – interactively – on Rock Band.

That’s got to be better than dealing with all the CDs that usually show up in your mailbox.

The best part of all of this to me is that people can offer feedback. You can get through the first pass of your music, but then see how it’s playing with other people. Need to fix a camera angle? Dial down the difficulty on one level? Now you’ll get real feedback.

Interestingly, this also complements Microsoft’s other purpose for the Creators’ Club, which is to encourage independent game development using their elegantly-designed XNA game tools, some of which ultimately make it to Xbox Live Arcade. I think there’s actually a chance this could breathe some life (and users) into that service. Now, if only Microsoft would build more robust audio tools into the game toolkit so some crazy indie developer can built the next Frequency or Amplitude …but I digress.

Q&A

Anticipating the kind of questions you may be asking yourself…

When does it all happen? The network is now in closed beta. A larger beta is planned for next month, with a full launch expected around October.

So who will use all of this? I think there will be several groups:

1. Indie bands with tech savvy.

2. Indie bands who aren’t tech savvy, who will learn Reaper to get this working – and wind up using Reaper and other computer audio tools to produce their next album. (Harmonix promises extensive documentation to give them a hand. I’m sure CDM can help, too.)

3. Electronic artists who build a cottage business around prepping other people’s tracks.

4. Game developers and game fans who pick this stuff up because they love Rock Band, and wind up getting further into music.

And while 1-3 are certainly interesting to CDM, I hope we get to interract with people in that fourth category.

Isn’t this going to be too hard for some people?

Yup. Yup, it is. On the other hand, Harmonix is going to great lengths to make this easier – and if you are a skilled MIDI sequencer, you’ve just found a business opportunity.

I’ve got a Mac and a PS3.

Don’t sweat it. A lot of the Harmonix folks are Mac users, alongside the happy Windows users. It could be well worth running in an emulator or a second partition, and you can still do all your music production on the Mac. As for the PS3 – well, you can either make friends with an Xbox owner, or watch for the sale I hope is coming. You do need a hard drive, but otherwise this seems a reasonable investment.

Will I get paid?

We’ll talk more about this in a future story, but yes – thanks to the Xbox Creators Club payment infrastructure, you can expect to get paid early and often (payments arrive quarterly), meaning this could be a decent revenue stream at a time when they’re hard to find.

Performance licensing is apparently not applicable to Rock Band (I did ask about that); that’s, again, a topic for a separate article.

What if my instrumentation doesn’t fit Rock Band?

Check out the Rock Band catalog. There’s some flexibility here, as long as the game play works. You just need to make it work for the default setup so that people with a mic, a guitar, a bass, and a drum kit in front of their TV can have a good time.

And as I talked to Harmonix, we talked about the fact that previously unavailable genres could look really fantastic in the game – yes, Norwegian Death Metal, your time has come! (Now, if we just got vocal harmonies as in The Beatles…)

I also expect some really, really odd submissions in the community. (“The World’s Hardest Rock Band Track,” anyone?)

Meanwhile, I’m hoping that Harmonix will re-release their back catalog, Frequency and Amplitude, on Xbox Live Arcade, and then doubly hoping they’ll let people author for them, for all of us fans of electronic music with unusual instrumentations, and the unusual gameplay mechanic of those games. (Their new PSP game, incidentally, quietly returns to that game style.)’

On the other hand, I don’t expect Harmonix to do everything here. If this works, Rock Band could be just the beginning.

Changing the World of Music

Harmonix has long talked about wanting to create a “platform” for music, but I think it’s really Rock Band Network that could get them there. Rock Band alone can’t be the exclusive future of interactive music – that’d be boring. But if Harmonix pulls this off, it could be a real catalyst for transforming all recordings into an interactive experience – not just the established hit parade we’ve already seen. And that’s utterly huge.

I also think it’ll be well worth the time of CDM to watch as this evolves. We talk a lot about alternative controllers, about interaction design, about the merging spheres of games and music, but also about musical integrity and creativity and new outlets for spreading musical material. Rock Band Network could bring all of those ideas into mainstream consciousness in new ways.

And, oh yeah – it’ll be a heck of a lot of fun to play those tracks, and to get people playing your music. Stay tuned.

Sign up for the beta and get more information here:

http://creators.rockband.com/