How “The Beatles: Rock Band” Came Together

Suddenly, The Beatles are culturally relevant again. Not that their achievements have faded a single bit since they disbanded, but the upcoming release of video game The Beatles: Rock Band (Microsoft Xbox 360, Sony Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii) stands at the crossroads of music distributing and video game revolution — and it’s the first significant step by The Beatles towards distributing their music digitally.

And while your mother screams and pulls her hair waiting for the game to come out, you can dig into a piece like New York Times Magazine “While My Guitar Gently Beeps,” which paints a comprehensive picture of what it all means (and what Paul and Ringo think of it). But it takes a technology-savvy magazine like IEEE Spectrum to explain the technological feats that made the magic possible.

Says “The Making of The Beatles: Rock Band” by David Kushner:

Rock Band requires that each instrument — drums, bass, guitar, and vocals — be laid down onto a separate track. This works fine for a contemporary song recorded on a 48-track system. But roughly the first third of the Beatles’ catalog had been engineered using much simpler recording equipment.

Though the Beatles were innovators in the use of two or four tracks, they often put all the instruments on a single track and then used the remaining tracks for ancillary sounds and effects. Apple Corps wanted the game to cover the span of the band’s career, so Harmonix would have to find a way to extract the different instruments from those early songs.

Now, here comes the interesting part, when The Beatles meet CSI (and, no, Paul is not dead):

[The software developing] team turned to audio forensic software normally used by law enforcement and in restoration projects. These tools, equipped with advanced digital-signal-processing capabilities, include more controls than those offered by most audio-filtering packages. Myriad audio parameters can be tweaked in order to zero in on specific sound elements.

(See a detailed explanation here.)

Another interesting piece of information the article gives all you Yoko-haters out there: you need to thank her for the Fab Four looking alive in the game. When she saw the initial animations, she demanded that they were given more “soul.” (Now, be good to her for a change, and repeat “Thank you, Yoko”.)

The game comes out on September 9, which is “909”. Get it, man?

Wait—shouldn’t it come out the day after that… Or is the date “090909,” which, you know, would be a reference to “Revolution 9”? Hm.

Can you play the game backwards?

Ok, I’ll stop.

BONUS TRACK: Best joke on The Beatles: Rock Band so far came from Ben Greenman in McSweeney’s:

“If you depress X and Y while pulling the right stick downward, Yoko Ono will meet John and be unfairly blamed for the breakup of the band.”

Video: The Beatles Rock Band Trailer

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