NEW YORK -- Rock Band maker Harmonix has always bragged that its employees are musicians. Let's see if its users are, too.
Last month the company announced Rock Band Network, a development tool that will allow players to create and sell their own Rock Band songs.
The songs you play in Rock Band are meticulously crafted by hand, but Rock Band Network is a more automated process. Even so, Rock Band's developers are slowly migrating to the automated Network, says audio lead Caleb Epps.
"I think there has always been some amount of skittishness to move towards an automated system because we were afraid that the quality would slip," Epps told Wired.com in a recent demo at MTV's Times Square headquarters. "But with (Rock Band Network), we saw that we can actually do this in automated fashion and not sacrifice on quality."
"We were waiting for the right tool," he says.
That tool is a combination of Microsoft's XNA development environment, a customized version of a digital audio workstation called Reaper and a proprietary packaging and auditioning tool called Magma.
Here's how the step-by-step process works.
There are five basic steps in the song-creation process: creating the MIDI gameplay in Reaper, compiling the audio into a song file using Magma on the PC and transferring it to your Xbox 360, checking your song out in "Audition mode" via a patched version of Rock Band 2, uploading it to a Harmonix-built website for peer-review, and then, once it passes, selling it in the Rock Band Store.
To create the gameplay, Harmonix is using a custom version of a program called Reaper made by a small company called Cockos. Working with Harmonix, Cockos added functionality to make authoring for Rock Band fast and easy.
"We started out this project (because we) basically wanted to build better tool for internal use," Epps said. "We do all of our authoring by hand right now, and that's pretty insane even though it does make for great games."
Reaper (pictured top) is used for all aspects of making a Rock Band song; not just the music creation, but the character animations, additional sound effects (like the crowd cheering) the venue, the camera control and the lighting. It can be used for audio and MIDI interchangeably, so you can do your mixing and track authoring all in one place. Harmonix has also added a free custom plug-in that allows the creator to watch the gameplay in real time, without having to go back and forth from the Xbox.
The way lyrics are synced to the vocals is through a straight transcription. Harmonix and Cockos have built a new functionality into Reaper where the text file converts it to lyric events and aligns them correctly and automatically. The only formatting that needs to be done is to split up words with multiple syllables. Lyric events can be shifted, if you missed splitting up a polysyllabic word somewhere.
Epps said that the audio team was also working on additional functionality to make the process even easier, like macros that will auto-generate the drum track and automatically set the tempo for each measure.
However, reducing the difficulty of a song still has to be done by hand, because it's hard to automate, Epps said. "That's sort of where the artistry comes in -- that and figuring out how to map the guitar part to five buttons."
Once the song is created, then you'll have to package it using Magma. The MIDI files and the audio stems need to compiled into a package that you can be sent to your Xbox 360. In Magma, you'll also input other information about the song, like the band, the song title, the price, genre, sub-genre, album art, difficulty levels and author.
The author field will be the player's username on the Rock Band Network website, and not necessarily their Xbox Live Gamertag. But Harmonix uses the author name to validate when someone uploads a song to make sure that they are the author of that song.
You can also do rudimentary mixing to your audio tracks in Magma if your audio is slightly off, like if your vocals are too low, so you don't have to return to Reaper for small mix changes. There's also a macro that sets the audio levels to the same loudness to Rock Band, which Epps said is "pretty loud." And for those who are intimidated by having to also craft the camera and lighting for their track, Magma can auto-generate that as well. Though it won't be as good as if you did them by hand, it's one less step to worry about. Plus, you can have Magma auto-generate a template for you, and then take it back into Reaper to customize it from there if you don't want to start from scratch.
As for lip-syncing, this is also auto-generated by Magma based off the vocal track. Players don't have the option to tweak the lip-syncing themselves, though Epps said it does a "really good job." And because Rock Band Network is running on Rock Band 2, there won't be any multi-part harmonies a la The Beatles: Rock Band, in case you were wondering.
Another option that players don't get is control over the fog machine accessory Matthew Nordhaus, senior producer on Rock Band Network, said it would be difficult to peer-review the use of the accessory.
"Not very many people have the fog machines, so someone could put in a song where there was a fog event every 16th note, and it could be that it could get through peer review without anybody having a fog machine to test," he said. "That's an invitation to fog spamming. Then all of a sudden, some poor soul with a fog machine..."
After players transfer their song from their PC to their Xbox 360 via a local network (and not via Xbox Live). A patched version of* Rock Band 2* will add "Audition Mode" to the menu, and it will only be usable to those with a XNA Creators Club membership.
Audition Mode will be used when the player is testing out his song locally and when they're ready to upload his songs or download others' creations for peer review. Audition Mode lets the song author play with buddies locally, and only one song can be tested at a time. If you're alone, you can simply have the other characters auto-play with you so that you can watch and check your authoring. What you play here is mostly what you'd see in-game in Rock Band 2, except there's a clock that shows you the time of your song, and you can also adjust the playback speed. Epps added that the load times here are similar to the length of DLC load times, though it can be decreased when choosing the practice space venue here, which is a static image.
Peer review is done on forums at the Rock Band Network website, where players can post their songs and offer suggestions. While your songs are in play-test or peer review, you can make updates to that song and release a new version based on community feedback. Harmonix is doing "some amount of review" on its end, Epps said, but mostly just checking for unauthorized use of copyrighted material.
"We're going to be looking to make sure that you're not putting up 'Stairway (to Heaven),'" added Nordhaus. "For the most part, for someone that's not well-known, we're simply going to rely on the honesty of the people who are submitting. And if they're not honest about it, they're subject to getting their song revoked and getting banned from the system and all the bad stuff. So no covers, no samples. If you don't own the express rights to everything on the track, we can't use it."
Following peer review, your song, in theory, is ready for sale. The patch to Rock Band 2 will include a separate store for Rock Band Network, which will allow anyone to search for tracks by various categories, such as genres, sub-genres, difficulty, authors and ratings (1-5 lighters). There are new ways to discover music, Nordhaus said, like a list of the most recent songs uploaded, the top picks by Harmonix staffers and "random" to take you to a randomly selected track.
Songs can be at one of three prices -- 80, 160 or 240 Microsoft points ($1, $2, $3). Thirty percent of the profits go to the song creator, while the rest is divided between Microsoft and MTV Games/Harmonix. XNA delivers checks to users on a quarterly basis.
There are also free demo versions of every song, in which you can try any instrument in the song, and play local multiplayer. Songs can last from 30 seconds up to 20 minutes, and the demos will feature one minute or 35 percent of the song length, whichever is less. Any songs you download will be featured in a new Rock Band Network song list, with demo versions clearly indicated. And after you've played a demo, you're prompted to either buy it or delete it.
"That way we can help keep people's hard drives as free as possible; we've already been taking enough space," Epps added.
Got all that? If not, Harmonix is creating an expansive and comprehensive set of documents written by the Harmonix audio team. It will all be available on a Wiki page, so the documents can be tweaked as people learn the process. There will also be specific forums on authoring and the tools pipeline where users can trade tips.
"We'll continue to define Reaper and add features down the line as we find new ways to improve on this workflow," Epps said. "Once people get up to speed on this, they can blaze through it in five minutes."
But what about the noobs with no ProTools or XNA experience? "For someone starting fresh, I'd say it'd be pretty hard," Epps said. "I've been using computer music programs for a really long time, but I think that if somebody sits down and reads all the documentation we've put together, and just commit to that, I would say if you put in a good week, you can get yourself a good base and really start working."
"And we're also counting a lot on the community to help noobs though the process in the forums," he continued. "And we found that the XNA community... has been really one of the most supportive, mature communities out there."
"There's going to be people from Harmonix on the forums everyday trying to ease people into this process and make it as painless as possible," he said.
The developers at Harmonix not only see this as a step in streamlining their own internal processes, but they hope to expose players to new music and give players the chance to have their music heard.
"For bands, it's a good way to get your music out to five million Rock Band players, and the fact that we have free demos is huge," said Nordhaus. "And for gamers, it means a whole slew of new tracks to play, and not constrained to a weekly release schedule either."
"It's a total leveling of the playing field," Epps added. "Everybody's using the same thing."
Well, not a total leveling. If you're a would-be Rock Band author with only a PlayStation 3 or Wii, you'll have to grab an Xbox 360 for now.
"In terms of actual content creation and Audition Mode and things like that, that leans really heavily on the XNA backend," Epps said. "So as it sits currently that's not going to be available to PS3 users."
However, Epps explained that after the Rock Band Network Store launches on the 360, Harmonix is looking into taking content from the Xbox 360 store and porting that over to the PS3 through the same Rock Band Store front-end in a Rock Band 2 patch.
As for Wii, things are much more uncertain. "Wii, we're still looking into because it's kind of difficult because we can't patch games on the Wii," Epps said. "There are a few different approaches we could take to it; we could just release some Rock Band Network stuff through our standard DLC store. It's hard to say: We're still looking into it on how to make that possible, but we're certainly going to try our hardest."
Reaper is available for $60 for a non-commercial license (if you make less than $20,000 a year), but the free 30-day trial version is fully functional. The installer for Magma as well as Reaper plug-ins and add-ons are up and running now in Rock Band Network's closed beta.
Rock Band Network is scheduled to enter open beta in October.
See Also:
- a href="https://stag-mantis.wired.com/epicenter/2009/08/rocking-in-the-free-world-rock-band-outsources-song-creation/">Rock Band Crowdsources Song Creation
- Create Your Own Rock Band Tracks
- Behind the Scenes of* The Beatles: Rock Band*
- How Beatles Rock Band's Vocal Harmonies Work
- Hands-On: Beatles Rock Band's Reward System, Drum Trainer ...
