Fifteen New Songs For The Beatles: Rock Band

Harmonix is ready to reveal another 15 songs that will be included in The Beatles: Rock Band when it launches on 9/9/09. So let's cut right to the chase on that, shall we? 

• “Twist And Shout” 
• “Do You Want To Know A Secret” 
• “Can’t Buy Me Love” 
• “I Wanna Be Your Man” 
• “Eight Days A Week” 
• “Paperback Writer” 
• “And Your Bird Can Sing” 
• “Sgt. Pepper’s LHCB” 
• “With a Little Help from My Friends” 
• “Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows* 
• “Yellow Submarine” 
• “Revolution” 
• “Birthday” 
• “Dig A Pony” 
• “I’ve Got A Feeling”  

 
Hey, that's a song list. Righto. Gear. 
 
While we're on the subject: during a demo session recently, I got to see how The Beatles: Rock Band's vocal harmony trainer is going to work. You may be aware of the Fab Four's proclivity for three-part harmonies, and you can have three people with three separate microphones each singing one of the three parts in songs with harmony support. 

For the less musically inclined among you, take a look at some of those harmonies (and several of the newly announced songs) in this fresh trailer. 



 
There's nothing too mindblowing about the way Beatles: Rock Band teaches you to sing harmonies; if you've played the training mode for instruments like drums in past Rock Bands, you'll be familiar with the multi-stage tutorial mode for harmonies here. Over the course of a few short lessons, you're introduced to the concept of multi-part harmonies and shown how they're represented on the Rock Band screen (the core melody is always in blue, while the other two parts use distinctive colors to set them apart).

There's no way to intuit the pitch of a harmony part simply by looking at the lyrics in the Rock Band display, so the trainer encourages you to simply shift the pitch of your voice up and down and watch the pointer to determine whether you're hitting the right notes or not. That's not too hard when you're singing the melody in a song you've been hearing for years, but dissecting a harmony on the fly and nailing your backup part is a lot tougher. Harmonix admits that there's going to be a lot of initial guesswork, repetition, and memorization in getting all the harmonies down in the game's songs, and this trainer seems geared more toward showing you the concept of harmonies and then turning you loose to figure out the individual parts on your own, rather than making you a master at them from the start.

On the upside, the narration is done by one of the studio engineers at none other than Abbey Road itself, and man, that guy sounds mad British.

Even if singing harmonies well is going to be pretty difficult initially, the game doesn't demand perfection. You can choose whether you want the vocal harmonies split out before playing any song that supports them, so you can opt to just have a single lyrical track if you want. And even if you do have harmonies turned on, the three vocalists can sing any combination of the parts they want. You can even have all three players singing the melody if you can't nail the harmonies, though it's worth noting that hitting the harmonies will drastically increase your scores.

There's actually a lot more to The Beatles: Rock Band than just "it's Rock Band, with some Beatles songs." Primarily, there's some really neat, obscure stuff packed in here for serious, longtime fans of the band, but Harmonix has asked us to sit on info about those features until closer to the game's release date. For now, some screenshots!  
 

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