Wondering how The Beatles Rock Band's biggest new feature, vocal harmonies, works? Since I spent several of my nights at E3 trying it out, please allow me to elaborate.
You can connect up to three microphones, including Microsoft's sparkly wireless Lips mics. (Convenient, as the karaoke game comes with two of them, and it'll greatly cut down on the controller cord tangle that would result from using three USB mics.)
The three microphones are counted as a single "player." On the screen where you select your instrument difficulty level and choose between guitar and bass, you'll be able to pick either "solo" or "harmonies" for the singer.
If you pick "Solo," it'll just have one line, for the lead vocals. If you choose "Harmonies," up to three lines will be shown at once: blue for the lead, and orange/brown for the two harmony parts.
Sounds difficult, right? Here's the helpful catch: You don't need to decide who sings what part. If you want, everyone can sing the lead vocals. Hitting the harmonies is additive, not punitive; if you sing two distinct parts, you'll get a "Double Fab!" score for that phrase, and if you sing all three you'll get the coveted "Triple Fab!" Anyone can sing any part they wish.
As you might imagine, some songs are easier to sing in harmony. The easiest would be something like "Octopus' Garden" or "Back In The U.S.S.R.," in which the parts are totally separate -- somebody can sing the melody while somebody else takes the lies beneath the ocean waaaaaves part, for example.
Slightly more difficult, but still easy to fudge, is "I Feel Fine," or other such earlier songs where the harmonies follow a pretty standard formula and are easy to pick out of the mix. Where it gets tough is "Day Tripper," which has very strange close harmonies -- I sang it quite a few times but wasn't able to pick out more than a few of them on the fly.
How about scoring? When the song is done, you can switch between a simple view of the score and a more complex one. The simple view combines all scores into one and shows you how well the whole group did -- if at least one person hit each note, then you'll get 100%. (This happened a lot.) If you flip to the breakdown, it'll show you what percentage of each of the three color-coded parts each person hit.
There's really something about Beatles Rock Band and singing -- I don't know if it's the wonderful music that everyone knows, or the fact that three people can join in, but whereas many people shy away from singing in Rock Band 2, everyone seemed to love grabbing the mic for the Beatles at E3.
