The Beatles: Rock Band / 09.09.09

The Beatles: Rock Band Exclusive Interview with Alex Rigopulos and Giles Martin

09-09-2009

We are proud to present an exclusive interview with Harmonix CEO and Co-Founder, Alex Rigopulos and Creative Producer and Music Supervisor for The Beatles: Rock Band, Giles Martin straight from Abbey Road Studios in London.

Alex and Giles took a few minutes to offer The Beatles: Rock Band fans some insight on the difficult process of deciding which songs would make it onto the disc; they also shed some light on what to expect from the dreamscapes and cut scenes featured in the game.

Walk us through the process of picking the music. Giles, what are the first things you were told? How many songs did you have to go through? What are some things you were looking for?

Giles: The biggest challenge in a game like The Beatles: Rock Band is trying to decide how you represent all four Beatles in the right way. The whole idea about any project with The Beatles is to bring the audience closer to them and suck them in as much as we can. We had to come up with a song list, so we discussed a wish list of songs. I went back bearing in mind we have to completely respect the four members, and we have to represent The Beatles as a band. And they were a really great band. So we chose songs, really, based around the fact that it’s all four of them playing. I mean let’s face it, they recorded 250 songs so there’s a lot of material to go from. I made a list, and we talked about it, and we discussed our wish list, and sent it out to the four members [of Apple Corps] – Paul and Ringo, along with Yoko and Olivia. They approved it, and then we started working on the game.

Alex: It’s also worth mentioning that it would be tempting to just make a list, you know, if the game is going to have 45 songs or whatever, to make a list of the most famous and most beloved Beatles songs. But in addition to the filters and factors that Giles just mentioned, there were some other factors as well. While so much of The Beatles catalogue were number one hits and are beloved by tens of millions of people the world over, I think we also wanted to throw some surprises, or some curve balls, into the mix as well. [We chose] some songs that were incredible songs that weren't number one hits, that maybe some people wouldn't know as well, but that we would have an opportunity to introduce to the audience in a new way. So those were some of the other factors that we had to think about as we were crafting this list.

Giles: And the key to this is that it’s gotta be fun to play. You’ve gotta open up doors to The Beatles and really feel like you're interacting with them in a room. So we'd think about how the songs would play, and really, we would reject songs that were maybe very well known and loved by people just because we didn't feel as though it would be a great experience to interact with that particular song. As we work together on doing more material, we're going to have to battle to make [gameplay] as good as possible. And so we tried to start by making things as easy as possible for us. More difficult later.

Alex: Although, there are so many incredible songs in this catalogue that choosing a set of say, 45, for the disc is a painstaking process and is basically a no-win proposition. I’m looking forward to the raging debates that are going to happen after we release this game, where basically everyone is going to insist that the song list should have included “these other five songs” that aren't on there.

What was the process of putting together the initial list from Harmonix?

Alex: I remember putting together the initial song list for The Beatles game, the initial draft song list. For me, I have the entire Beatles catalogue, and I just went through it song by song and made an initial huge list of ones I wanted, either because it’s a great song, or because it sounds like it would be fun to play, or for some other reason. I narrowed it down from about 200 plus songs to a list that was probably 60 or 70 in an initial pass, and then bounced that off of the other creative principals at Harmonix who had strong opinions of their own saying, “no that song shouldn’t be on there. It will be no fun to play” or ”how could you leave off this song?” And so that initial list of songs went through a number of iterations before it ever left the building. Once we had a list that had been through a few rounds of the chopping block among the creative principals at Harmonix, it was delivered to Giles, and then to Jeff Jones, Jonathan Clyde and the team at Apple Corps so that they could start weighing in on their own opinions of what should be there and what shouldn’t, and all these other factors that should be tended to.

How difficult was it to shorten the initial list down to the final 45 songs featured in the game?

Alex: The initial big list before we started whittling down was probably about 60 or 70 songs maybe more. Then after a torturous process of whittling it down and making some hard decisions we ended up with 45 songs.

Giles: And we also added and crossed out songs with just thinking of different scenarios for the game itself. I mean, we have Cavern Club, Shea Stadium, Budokan, and we wanted to make sure we represented those eras in the right way. There were so many different forces working to choose this song list. I'm very happy with what we’ve ended up with. I think it’s a good representation of what [The Beatles] have done. But, you know more to come I suppose…

Alex: It’s an incredible list of 45 songs, but one of the opportunities of downloadable content is that [there is] great music that didn’t make the initial cut, or wasn’t appropriate for game disc for one reason or another, and we will have an opportunity to deliver that music in interactive form to the players of the game subsequent to the disc's release.

Can you tell us a little about the dreamscapes?

Alex: So the idea here is that it’s not just a list of songs. We want it to be a sort of narrative progression, a journey through the life that these four guys had together over this period in time where they were making all of this music. So there will be specific scenes in performance venues such as Cavern Club, Ed Sullivan Show, Shea Stadium, and Budokan. Later on there is some fresh creative terrain that we have the opportunity to explore while the narrative setting is that they’re in the studio recording this music, and that's where all of this archival footage is coming from and what not. But once you start getting into the music and start playing it, we can visually kind of plunge into their imagination and put up more abstract visual material which is territory that really hasn’t been explored in these kinds of games before. It is really one of the most rewarding aspects to the development processe so far.

And what exactly are the cut scenes?

Alex: Now in between all of these moments, this sequence of particular performance venues or abstract scenes that we just talked about, we wanted there to be some kind of connective tissue to help advance the narrative – to help educate, maybe help inform the player about the connection between these various moments in what was happening in their lives, and the various moments around them in the moments between these scenes that we’re giving you a window into, and so we produced these connective movies to help stitch the entire thing together into one cohesive experience.

Giles: And also it’s a way of getting across to a different generation of people the scale that The Beatles have. You know, everyone is aware of The Beatles, and it’s funny they’ve sort of defied history in a way, as well as become a part of history. We're trying to get the worldwide spread of Beatles music across in the game – the way their music just spread from Liverpool down by London to the place we’re in now Abbey Road Studios, this music just spread across the world. They're the biggest band in the world still…that's what we're trying to get across and without being too pompous or historic about it. Just trying to make people realize that as they're going forward in the game so is [The Beatles] music spreading around the world.

Alex: Yeah I think particularly younger players or listeners probably don't have an appreciation of just the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon, that there was nothing before and frankly, has not been anything like it since. There are no rock bands in the world today that are the same kind of magnitude or phenomenon that The Beatles were.

Can you explain some of the challenges you dealt with when dealing with some of The Beatles earlier catalog?

Giles: The biggest challenge for us was working with the earlier stuff. We were criticized in Love for using a lot of late stuff. It was easy because it was in 4 track and 8 track, but the material we have for the Cavern Club in the game is 2 track. We’ve been challenged by thinking, how do you interact with that? Do you use different techniques to try and demix material? With improved technology, we’re now at a stage where we don’t have to damage sound. Now you can take away layers and really get beneath the music. We've had to do this extensively with this project and it’s been laborious and painstaking. It’s important that people interact with the game, even on the earlier years. So by removing vocals from a track, people can hear instruments. If you make a mistake playing the bass on “Twist and Shout,” you'll hear the fact that you’re making a mistake on “Twist and Shout.” The Beatles stuff is about 67 percent the band playing guitar, bass, and drums all on one track. If you’re playing the drums on the game and I stop that channel, the bass and guitar would stop as well.

What is the difference between 2, 4 and 8 track?

Giles: In the studio today, we work with thousands of tracks, which means we have all of these faders. We have faders on the desk and we can control each individual instrument. In the case of the drum kit today, you’ll have the kick drum, the snare drum, the cymbals, the high hat, and the toms, on individual tracks. The Beatles started off on two track, which means that more often than not they would record the entire band on one track, which is one channel. Your stereo is left and right which equals two tracks. That’s why in America they have the stereo, and on the left hand side you have the band and on the right hand side you have the vocals.

As time went on they found four track. Now when they started off with four track, they were still working in exactly the same way. So track one, they would have the band playing, which is guitar, bass and drums again. Third track they’d put vocals because it was a double track. Fourth track they'd say, “Oh should we use that guitar solo on there?”

It wasn’t until around 1966 that you would start having the drums on its own [track]. There was no need. Stereo didn't really exist in the ’60s. There was no need to have separate instruments, there wasn’t that desire. They certainly didn’t think they would be turning themselves into an interactive video game in forty years time, so they weren't thinking about us at all in modern times. So the challenge is always trying to separate individual performances. I think it's great that they just worked as a band. What you hear is them in the studio, and what you hear is them on one track just bashing a song out. It just makes life more difficult for us now.

What were the most challenging tracks you had to work with that you had to de-mix?

Giles: The most challenging tracks are the early ones such as, “Twist and Shout” and “I Saw Her Standing There” because they are all just stereos and are using different elements. For example, take “I Want To Hold Your Hand” – its bass, guitars and drums are all on a single track, so we had to be very careful when de-mixing these earlier songs to ensure that we didn’t alter the sound. We have to represent [The Beatles] in the best way possible and they were such an amazing band and amazing players that we have to sync to that. The later the music gets the easier it becomes for us.

How has technological advancements in the music industry affected the process of developing The Beatles songs for Rock Band? Is there a specific piece of technology that helped you the most?

Alex: It’s important to recognize that there’s not one specific technology that was developed where we could just flip the switch and get multitask separation [between tracks]. It's been a painstaking process of going through song by song, track by track, understanding the particular nature of the multitask super position in each track. Even changing from moment to moment in a single track is creating custom filters, custom technological solutions and custom approaches in order to get the isolation we needed. Giles has been very busy this year.

Giles: The funny thing about this is that this probably couldn’t have been done two years ago or a year ago. There are fantastic engineers that are developing systems which enables us to do this as we go along. Technology is moving so quickly that we are in a situation where music can be interactive. This is what is really exciting. This game actually makes you listen to the bass line and guitars and stuff like that. And by stripping away and separating these things, it really makes you appreciate the musicianship of The Beatles. I think that’s a great thing. If it encourages people to do that then it's fantastic.

Alex: There are aspects of the music that, when you listen to the entire mix, will escape detection normally. I had a very personal experience with this with one of the first songs when we got into the game, which was “Taxman.” “Taxman” is a song I heard at least a hundred times in my life and I thought I knew intimately. But the first time I was playing a bass part in that song, I was playing along with the bass line and just having a really great time with it, and then a moment came in the song’s bridge, leading into the guitar solo, where the bass just started going crazy and started running all over the place. It was amazing. An amazing moment in the bass that I had never noticed in a hundred times in hearing this song before. It’s these kind of jewels in the music that we hope to be exposing for the first time once we give an opportunity to people to focus on specific elements of the music one by one.

How does The Beatles: Rock Band differ musically from previous installations of Rock Band?

Giles: It is very different because Rock Band generally favors bands that have lots of guitars and play riffs and stuff like that. People know Beatles’ songs by the words and they know them by singing along. But it’s funny because their instrumentation has always been very precise and very good, and it'll be the first time that people will start listening to what's being played underneath. I think that's a great thing because they were damn fine players.

Alex: They were, and particularly some of the drum parts. There were intricacies in some of the drum grooves that I had just never noticed before and I think people are going to touch that for the first time and it's going to change how people understand this music.

A new feature that will be on The Beatles: Rock Band is the ability to do 3 part harmonies in the song. Can you elaborate on this a little bit?

Alex: For the singing game play in our previous games, we’ve always focused on a single singer singing a single part, but harmonies are such a critical aspect of The Beatles music that this was an area we felt we had to innovate in this game. So one of the new significant game play features of The Beatles game is harmony singing – players will be able to plug in up to three microphones, and the visual interface – in addition to displaying the main melody line – will also display the harmony lines as well. So if there are two or three of you, any of you can pick up the extra microphone and play the harmony parts. Most people are not musicians or trained singers and they can’t sing harmony. They really don’t know how to do it, so when they start singing a particular Beatles tune for the first time and two or three people are trying to do the extra harmony parts, it’s just horrendous. They’re out of tune and they’re just missing the parts completely, and it’s a mess. But it’s a video game and they keep trying and trying, and after about 45 minutes of working on a particular song, these people who couldn’t sing harmony to save their lives, are suddenly nailing the harmony parts of these Beatles songs. It’s really gratifying watching that come together, and it’s really gratifying to imagine that 6 to 9 months from now there’s going to be millions of people out in the world who couldn’t sing harmony, who are all of a sudden coming together around this music.