Beatles Rock Band
Photo: Harmonix

Although the basic gameplay of "The Beatles: Rock Band" is similar to past "Rock Band" games, there's one notable addition: three-part harmony. The developers of the game have added the ability for three players to sing at once and even harmonize with one another to get extra points. MTV News spoke to Josh Randall, creative director behind "The Beatles: Rock Band," to find out just how this innovative feature came to be.

Randall said the idea started out simply. "I think we were just trying to find features that would be very Beatles-y. Typically, on Friday nights here, we go down to the pub and afterwards come back up and play 'Rock Band.' What I noticed, we would get 10 or 20 people playing, but of course only three or four people can interact with the game. But a bunch of other people in the room would be singing along. So I was thinking, 'I wish there was a way we could plug in some extra microphones, so the other people could sing along.' Especially Beatles tunes, since everyone already knows the lyrics, it just makes sense.

It was around that time that the developers had been listening to a ton of Beatles music and noticed that the signature sound for their music was a really powerful three-part vocal harmony. From there, they made it a priority to get the feature in the game.

"It's really cool the way it turned out," Randall said. "In the game, if you wanna just sing the main line, you can. But if you want, you can try and sing the vocal harmony. And if you try and sing vocal harmony, you won't lose points if you screw it up. It'll only add to your points. And if you need to practice to get a better understanding about how harmonies work and sound, we have a whole practice mode where you can listen to any portion of a song."

But even with those features, the developers weren't certain that people would be able to take to harmonizing so easily. "We were concerned that this would be too much of a leap for players, 'cause a lot of people don't know how to sing harmony, but we had a lot of focus tests, and people picked it right up. Then I was at E3, we had a party there, and I was so surprised. People were almost instantly singing in harmony together. It was amazing. Being in a room with people singing in harmony is amazing. It sounds so good, and it just makes you feel good. I'm pretty psyched that I get to have a job where I'm encouraging the world to sing harmony together."

For more on "The Beatles: Rock Band" check out Multiplayer.MTV.com.

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Pearl Jam's Mike McCready
Photo: MTV News

Pearl Jam already have several links to "Rock Band," as they have made their classic debut Ten available in its entirety as a playable download and will be dropping their forthcoming album Backspacer in the same fashion once it's released September 20. And though founding guitarist Mike McCready has played the game and is excited for the Wednesday (September 9) release of "The Beatles: Rock Band," he has a confession to make.

"I honestly grew up listening to the Stones more," McCready told MTV News at the Outside Lands Festival. "But that doesn't mean I don't love the Beatles."

McCready cited the band's harmonies as a musical development that really inspired him, and he also gave a nod to a classic piece of video. "The concert footage on the roof was probably something that was integral in my growing up."

The footage in question is the surprise show the Beatles gave in January 1969 that marked the end of the recording of Let It Be and ended up being the band's final public appearance together. McCready did learn one profound thing from the Beatles. "My manager says you never want to release anything against the Beatles, because they'll always win," he joked. "And they should, because they were phenomenal."

As for "Rock Band," McCready admitted he needs practice. "I play 'Rock Band' with my friends' kids, and they completely beat me senseless with it," he admitted. "I feel like I'm holding them back. I try to play the drums, and I just can't play the drums. I think I need to work on my skills."

But when Backspacer becomes available as a playable full-album download, McCready said players will be able to develop their skills on a few of his favorite tracks. "I would say try the solo on 'Amongst the Waves.' And just rock out to 'Gonna See My Friend.' That'll be fun to jump around to and play. Stomp as much as you possibly can. That's rock!"

For more on "The Beatles: Rock Band" check out Multiplayer.MTV.com.

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The Beatles
Photo: Apple Corps Ltd.

Amid the understandable hoopla around the release of "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game, one of the most significant events in recorded music of the past 20 years is actually taking a backseat: The long-awaited digital remastering of the Beatles' albums, which haven't received an upgrade since they were first issued on CD in 1987 and are finally hitting stores on Wednesday, the same day as "Rock Band."

While most major catalogues of the 20th century by now have been overhauled multiple times, the Beatles' legal affairs — which are probably more complex than many United Nations matters — move at such an elephantine pace that the most important catalog in rock history has remained trapped in tinny-sounding CDs. And although the group's outtakes and BBC sessions were carefully curated onto the Anthology series and Live at the BBC album during the 1990s, the resulting situation was almost tragic: The extraneous material on those albums was available in pristine sound quality, while the Beatles' core albums sounded terrible. So, just in time for the obsolescence of the CD, the group's original releases — the British LPs, along with the Magical Mystery Tour compilation and the Past Masters collection — are finally available in optimal audio quality.

I grew up on scratchy (vinyl) Beatles albums, and I've spent much of the past week listening to the new CDs — every single note of them (except for the non-Beatle orchestral songs on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack), at full volume, in headphones. The question for those who might not share that level of obsession is: Do you really need to hear these revamped incarnations of songs you've already heard dozens if not hundreds of times? The answer depends on how big of a fan you are — and suffice it to say that die-hards will be overjoyed.

The recordings have been meticulously reprocessed with technology I couldn't hope to explain (involving "24 bit 192 kHz resolution via a Prism A-D converter" — head here for details), but the remastering team has been just as meticulous in retaining the original mixes and feel of the recordings. Thus, the closest analogy here is a restored painting: The songs are the same — they even retain mixes that, in the strange logic of the early days of stereo, can have all the vocals and the bass in one speaker and all the other instruments and no vocals in the other — but it's as if a cloak has been lifted from them, bringing forth sounds and details that were obscured on earlier releases. You can hear breaths being taken before verses are sung, previously muffled instruments (usually percussion or keyboard parts), mumbled asides in the backing vocals, enthusiastic shouts in the background (usually from Paul McCartney), and even subtleties like the group seeming to fight off laughter as they sing the final "Mee-ee-ooooo" of "Help!"

The engineers have also done an admirable job of isolating the instruments without sacrificing the ensemble sound; it's easier than ever to hear the individual instrumental parts and the tones of the instruments, and imagine the bandmembers playing them. Hopefully, this will bring belated respect to the understated but masterful work of the eternally underrated Ringo Starr (particularly on "Rain") and George Harrison (especially his raucous work on the White Album and Abbey Road, and his searing solo on the album version of "Let It Be"). But the greatest revelation is in the vocals, which bring a new intimacy to both the individual singers — Lennon's snarl, McCartney's soulful roar — and their peerless harmonies.

Of course, whenever history is revised there are issues, and these remasters aren't without them. The first two albums were recorded on two-track machines, and while the sonic detail on their remasters is remarkable, at times the primitive sound seems confused by the new technology, conjuring visions of a befuddled person being vaulted 45 years into the future: Particularly when overdubs or echo are in play, backing vocals and instrumental tracks will disorientingly swoop in and then vanish, or a voice will come out of one speaker and its echo the other. (This problem does not effect the post-1963 material, which was recorded on four- or eight-track.)

Also, the enhanced clarity cuts both ways: For example, the blown harmonies on songs like "You Won't See Me" and the mistakes on the Let It Be album sound worse than ever. However, it is to the credit of the reissue team that such human mistakes (as opposed to things like a microphone popping or amplifer hum) weren't fixed: The Who, for example, have rarely resisted an opportunity to embellish history by posthumously remixing or even (reportedly) adding decades-later overdubs to archive material. Also, as someone who has long believed Paul McCartney to be the greatest rock bassist in history, the clarity here sometimes makes his melodic and inventive playing, which felt understated in the earlier releases, seem like showboating.

(Of course, there's also the issue of the monophonic releases: Stereo was a new phenomenon in the 1960s, and artists of the era usually released material in both mono and stereo, with differing mixes and sometimes even the vocal or instrumental tracks. To sate the die-hards, the Beatles' mono material has been collected into a boxed set, which was sold out at press time but reportedly will be reissued.)

In line with the meticulousness of the sound, the packaging on the CDs has been dramatically upgraded. The CD booklets contain period photos and exhaustive liner notes, and anything more you'd want to know can be found in the "Anthology" DVDs or Mark Lewisohn's definitive "The Beatles Recording Sessions" book. Each CD also comes with a "mini-documentary" on each album: The two I watched are about five minutes long and contain quotes and studio chatter, but little video — again, see the "Anthology" DVDs (or YouTube) for deeper dives.

As for the digital releases of these albums, well, due to the above-mentioned legal dramas, there aren't any yet. The press release about the CDs tersely reads: "Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalogue will continue. There is no further information available at this time." Still, for some of us, the fidelity of these CDs is reason enough to keep a working stereo in the house.

And hey, if for some reason you don't like the way they sound or simply don't want to spend the money, don't worry: The long-awaited release of these remasters guarantees that within weeks, the old Beatles CDs will be available at garage sales all over the country — at bargain-basement prices.

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"The Beatles: Rock Band"
Photo: Harmonix

While playing "The Beatles: Rock Band," players will see computer-generated scenes of the Fab Four performing their hits. Since the Beatles existed in a time before the popularity of the music video, the developers of the game were forced to retroactively make music videos for the iconic songs to play throughout the game. MTV News spoke to Josh Randall, the creative director behind the game, to understand the challenges of bringing Beatles songs into a video era.

"We had to come up with full music videos for over 20 Beatles songs," Randall said. Some of the "videos" in the game are reused for the 45 songs in the game, with lip-synching and animation changes depending on the tune. "[It's] a daunting task, especially when you think most people, when they listen to this music, they've always had a picture in their head of what a particular song means to them. So it was up to us to come up with visuals that met or exceeded those expectations. We knew this was going to be a pretty big challenge."

But it's one thing to re-create the iconic scenes from, say, Shea Stadium or the Ed Sullivan Theater. It's another thing entirely when you want to capture the Beatles' psychedelic era.

"With our previous 'Rock Band' games, we've sort of nailed showing a band performing onstage," Randall said. "We've got that down. We know how to do that rather quickly. But [with 'The Beatles: Rock Band'], taking them to fantastic new locations was a lot of trial and error on our part — the technology to make it work but also aesthetically where they should go. We wanted it to be psychedelic, but Apple [Corps] and Giles Martin were like, 'Don't do old psychedelic stuff. We want to come up with new imagery that's psychedelic. You don't want to do, like, the trippy melting stuff.' We're definitely all inspired by that stuff, so we tried to inject it here and there, but we tried to make it more modern psychedelic."

The end results are some of the strangest visuals to ever grace a video game.

Randall has some personal favorites that really pushed the boundaries. " 'I Am the Walrus' is really out there. It was this weird promotional film that they made, so we took our cues from that and kept pushing. Some of the trippier ones we have in there are 'Within You Without You/ Tomorrow Never Knows' and 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.' They're like these journeys through psychedelic space, for lack of a better definition. I love playing those in the game. We've been trying here for years to play with more psychedelic musical stuff, so it was really great for the art team to embrace that stuff and push it forward."

For more on "The Beatles: Rock Band," check out Multiplayer.MTV.com.

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Incubus' Mike Einziger, Ben Kenney and Brandon Boyd
Photo: MTV News

For some musicians, hearing the Beatles for the first time inspired them to make music, write songs and start a band themselves. But for others, exposure to the Beatles represented the first real introduction to rock music. Such is the case with Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger, who cites a trip to Knot's Berry Farm as a formative experience.

"I saw Beatlemania, which was a lip-synch show with Beatles impersonators, when I was, like, 5," Einziger told MTV News backstage at the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco. "I went home with my friend Andrew, and we strummed on broomsticks and my mom got us a Beatles album that I lip-synched to. That was probably the first time I liked a band, now that I'm really thinking about it."

Frontman Brandon Boyd had a similar experience in his youth, though for him the effect was not as clearly defined. " 'Strawberry Fields Forever' was a big moment in my childhood," Boyd said of the psychedelic track from 1967. "It was the first time I was fascinated by music. There are quite a few of their songs where I didn't understand why I was feeling like I was, but I would just go into it. I think I was too young to assume that I would want to make music. I just knew it had a magical reaction in me."

Einziger thinks "The Beatles: Rock Band" is an excellent addition both to the video game world and to the Beatles' legacy. "They really were very universally appealing," Einziger said. "They wrote music that as much as you wanted to get it out of your head, it was sort of stuck there. That's not easy to do. ['Rock Band'] is really fun, and a lot of young people are going to discover the music of the Beatles through video games, and I'm OK with that."

For more information on "The Beatles: Rock Band," check out Multiplayer.MTV.com.

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"The Beatles: Rock Band"

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