A "triple fag" night

Oh I meant to say "triple fab", the reward for singing a phrase perfectly with all three vocalists. :)

We had a great time trying out the vocal harmonies in "The Beatles: Rock Band" tonight. We actually managed to play all the songs, including the Encore that we skipped last week.

Next week we'll go back to playing some unranked Rock Band 2 songs. Phoenix's internet was down this week, but he'll change ISPs by next week's session due to the frequent interruptions.

For most of the night, Raikan was on the blue harmony line, Bongoo on brown, and Phoenix or Sylvie on orange. Seb also joined us near the end, with Pheonix and Raikan on drums.

Overall, I found singing the harmonies to be a great experience. Hitting the "triple fabs" was awesome as it usually sounded great. But I was annoyed or frustrated with a few aspects of the vocal system:

1. I hated when the pitch lines suddenly shifted up or down. I'm used to RB2 vocals representing the whole range for a given song and not moving. This feature is most likely due to the need to see the distance between the harmony lines, but it did make it quite difficult to adapt after a shift.

2. If someone didn't sing the beginning of a specific harmony correctly, the game had a tendency to lock a player to one of the harmony lines. That made it difficult to adjust the pitch to skip to the desired harmony line. Raikan pointed out that SingStar didn't have the lock-in feature, which made it easier to make adjustments.

3. On certain songs, the harmony lines blended so much that only a very short portion of a given line appeared independently in a segment (ex: brown line near the end of one of the songs). We could adapt to the blended colors, but this made it difficult at times to know which main line to use.

Apart from these issues, I found the vocal harmonies feature to be very well implemented. Kudos to Harmonix for bringing a new dimension to the Rock Band experience.

Highlights:
- Stars breakdown for the 45 songs: Gold stars (10), 5 stars (24), 4 stars (9), 3 stars (2)
- Harmony stats (highest percentage or 100% for one of the harmony lines):
- Bongoo was the "Top Vocalist" for the most songs (25), followed by Raikan (11), Phoenix (5), and Sylvie (4)
- Bongoo was the only one who had some FCs (4)
- One song we didn't like very much which I forgot to mention last week was "Good Morning Good Morning"
- We find out that the Beatles liked to say "Woo" a lot, which we often performed as "Woof"...
- Sylvie did a song with two microphones, and oddly enough, the percentages were slightly different for each one