Did all your Christmas presents suck? Nothing as exciting as the Rock Band 3 you got last year? Of course, you’ve already played all your favorite Rock Band tracks so much that you’ve gotten tired of them. Well, the perfect solution is to reinvigorate your Rock Band experience by downloading “The Grinder’s Tale,” now available on the Xbox360 Rock Band Network for the low, low price of only 80 MSP ($1)! (Make sure you go to the “Rock Band Network Music Store” on your game menu, rather than just “Rock Band Music Store.”)
We owe this track’s availability to the genius of the guys at Rhythm Authors, who charted the song for the game. (Going through this process has given us new vocabulary words. “Charting” is what you do to program a song for the game. Those little colored dots on the fret board that tell you what notes to play are called “gems.”) It’s a hell of an undertaking when you think about it.
We sent them the stems for each track in the song… essentially turning a 7-minute song into twelve 7-minute songs consisting of only one instrument or voice each. Then, they have to match every note we played with a gem that will appear at the right point in the game. If you miss a gem, that instrument will cut out for the duration of the note you missed (this is really the essence of the whole game, isn’t it?). It’s even more precise with the vocals and keyboards, which need to match up with the exact notes of the performance. Everything needs to fit within standards that make the song playable in the game. And of course, this has to be done 4 times for every instrument (for the Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert levels of game play). The little avatar guys on the game are animated to “play” the song on screen. If that wasn’t enough, due to the fact that we had to chop the song up before sending it to them, the entire thing needs to be remixed and remastered. They do this all without an up-front fee, instead taking a percentage of the earnings. So if you won’t buy the song for us, at least buy it for them!
So far, over 200 people have played the song, including myself, and I have to admit that I’m nowhere near the top of the guitar leaderboard… Somehow I can’t hit 100% notes on the game for a part that I wrote and played, yet other people can!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEK3R7Mgqgc
Hear are some videos we found posted on YouTube by people who’ve played the song:
—All instruments (about 1,500 views of this video so far)
—Bass
—Keys and Guitar (same video here as well, but no one’s gotten to showing us those “Pro Keys” yet!)
So try it for yourself, and if you can get 5 stars on Expert for Gray’s crazy ass keyboard part, I will personally reimburse you the $1 cost of the download!
(If you aren’t into video games, you can always just get the song itself…)