Rock Band 3 Pro Keyboard Review

Hello all. As you may remember (the 2 or 3 people that may actually read this blog), I posted a rant at MadCatz for their continual delay and what I felt was their deceptive way in how they handled the entire delay of the XBox 360 MIDI PRO Adapter. This of course prevented me from playing RB3 as I had intended. Last week that little box finally showed up and I had a chance this past Sunday to utilize it.



First. Hats off to Harmonix on a well designed way of taking the experience of playing keys in a video game. I played about 99% in Pro Expert Mode on Sunday. I played part of a song on Medium just to see the difference. I also played the regular keys on part of one song for the same reason. It does a very good approximation of what the actual keyboard part in a song is.

There are some other aspects about the game I'll cover, but let's talk about how close it is first. For someone that grew up playing piano and getting a degree in music the accuracy of what I hear versus what I see on the screen was pretty important. For anyone that had the impression that you were going to "learn" the exact keyboard part of a song, let me dispel that right now. OK, maybe for Animotion's Obsession you will - got my 5 Star Pro Perfect score with that one ;) For most other songs it ranges from pretty damn close to close enough.

I didn't play all of the Pro-enabled keys songs, but I did play quite a few just to see. For the 2 or 3 that I really wanted to learn I spent upwards of 1-2 hours on each to learn them in order to get a respectable score. Most of the others I "played" (if you could call it that) a couple times.

My normal method was to pick a song and start it on Pro Expert. Just to see how difficult it was and get an idea of it. This at first was very confusing. Being someone that's used to connecting stationary dots on a staff to the keys rather than moving dashes on a fluid keyboard it was pretty frustrating to even know what I was supposed to play.

I also didn't get the Keyboard accessory obviously (since I was waiting for this MIDI Adapter) so the color coding to know what octave to play in was also confusing. I used the Transpose function to allow me to play in a more comfortable zone of my Ensoniq VFX:



At first the game wanted me to play on what seemed to be the lower half. I was playing the song Imagine and that's probably the actual area to play it on, but I was looking to play it more on the upper half. Throughout the day I adjusted the Transpose value from -1 to -3 depending on the song. Since I am using a professional keyboard I don't have a color strip to tell me what octave to play in, so by trial and error I figure it out at the beginning of a song. Eventually I'll be able to quickly just know as long as I don't mess with that Transpose function ;)

I still haven't talked about the accuracy as promised. So basically it's close. There are some obvious notes missing from the right hand part in order to insert a left hand note or two into the song. Some songs it's more noticeable than others. "Imagine" and "Piano Man" (which I thoroughly butchered) do this combining method. Imagine is definitely playable as you don't really need to stretch too far. Piano Man looks like it's playable, but I didn't really get passed the Intro on Practice mode. More on that later.

The notes are correct for the song. But since they sometimes eliminate some notes to allow left hand notes to be played your brain may try to fill in those notes. At least mine did. I understand that my drummer brethren had the same issues all along when playing Expert on all versions of RB. If they know the song well they found themselves playing those missing notes. Not sure if Pro Expert solves this or not, and I'm interested in seeing how close Pro Guitar is.

So what about the left hand? Well, attaching a Pro keyboard to the mix doesn't magically add more keys to the screen. I read some forum posts asking if someone used two keyboards could they play the left hand on one, and the keyboard part on the other. The short answer is "No." Even if you could play the bass guitar part on one it would really only be a one note approximation of the left hand anyway. And even so, the right hand is playing left hand notes occasionally, so they would need at least two versions of each song.

Actual playing is good. They screen only shows a little more than an octave at any one time. If you need to go to another octave, one of two things happen. Either the keys on the screen shift the appropriate amount (the bottom key isn't always C), or you "wrap around." For shifting, you get a few measures warning with arrows indicating which direction the shift is going to occur. And it's done well. For the "wrap around;" if you are, say, doing a run of sorts up the keyboard and the next set of notes are in the next octave, then you just play the note at the bottom of the octave you are currently in rather than continuing up to the next one. It's a bit confusing to the brain at first since you are expecting to play a higher note, but are actually playing a lower one. But it becomes second nature quickly.

Another issue I had is with grace notes. I worked on "Whiter Shade of Pale" for a long time. At first I thought that maybe my calibration was off. I didn't seem to have problems with other songs, just this one. And I do have pretty damn good rhythm for a white guy. I can keep a beat. So I did a manual calibration. That somewhat helped from what I could tell. Then I went back to Imagine and couldn't play it to save my life. I went back to doing the auto calibration using the Guitar. I played "Whiter Shade of Pale" again and seemed to be able to hit the grace notes better. Or should I say, the actual note following the grace note. So there may be a bit of a timing thing here. Or sensitivity issue with my synth. Either way, I was eventually able to play it most of the time.

My next point is style I guess. You see. not every song is played by a musician with the precision of a computer. I don't mean rhythmic precision. Note precision. Rock music can have a bit of sloppiness when it comes to keys. More so with organ than piano or synth in my experience. A stray pinkie might graze that extra key or a finger slides from the wrong key to the correct one, but you did play it. RB3 has no sympathy for mistakes. I've heard the stories from the prior Rock Band games about the actual musicians not being able to play their own songs. Let's face it, this is a rhythm game. The drummers have the advantage.

The other thing with organ parts is the gameplay didn't seem to really fit how I would play. There are chords where I, or many other musicians, would hold a note into the next chord since it's still being played. Example. I'm going from FMaj 2nd Inversion (C-F-A) to a CMaj Root (C-E-G) and I'm keeping the C constant. The game doesn't seem to do this. At least not on every song. BTW, yes, technically I'm describing triads, and yes there are many ways to write these, but it's been years since I've actually had to do theory. Anyway, where I would normally hold a particular note that is common between two chords, the game seems to be inconsistent with that. It sometimes comes across as if it was written as a piano part rather than an organ part. Of course this could be me just being lazy, or the original part does have that break between chords.

Practice mode. This is how I started understanding how to make the visual association with what I saw on the screen and what key to hit. Since the notes were going by slower I had more time. At any point in the section I'm practicing on, I can adjust the speed. So if I really have the first part down and there's that one or two chords that mess me up, I can play it at 100% and then slow it down to 70% when I need to. Playing piano parts at 70% is a bit eerie as the sound sample is obviously being stretched. It's the actual song and not a representation from what I can hear when playing at slower speeds.

Training mode. I didn't use this at first because I was confused as to what it would be. After seeing it a bazillion (so spell check actually has "bazillion" in it) times, I gave it a whirl. It's good in that it covers specific parts of a songs. Those that might be a bit tricky or are the main progressions from what I saw with the one song I used it on. And you can go to 60% speed on this. That's probably how I'll learn the Intro to "Piano Man."

The current selection of songs that have Pro Keys is pretty good. And Harmonix has upgraded some of the older songs to have Pro parts (not just keys). I just hope that they upgrade more of them quick. There are several of my faves from RB2 that have keyboard parts in the original song, but don't have an RB3 version of them :(. Bands like Styx, Journey, Kansas, Boston, Rush, The Who, etc. are just begging to be upgraded. I didn't load the RB Beatles in since it's not an RB3 derivative, but there are plenty of Beatles songs that have some killer keys ("Lady Madonna" comes to mind). Of course, just about any 80s band needs keys. Then anything post-80s that wasn't "alternative," grunge, rap, death metal, etc.

I give kudos to Harmonix for producing a close to real experience for this keyboardist. Almost every one of these songs I've never played the actual song. Yeah that sounds weird. I was classically trained and never joined a band. So learning the classic rock or pop songs wasn't as much of a priority back in the day. And when I got my BA in Music, again I stuck with Classical and composed electronic music. The kind that is never heard on the radio or in a club. I've dabbled here and there with songs but never learned them so well that I could just sit at a piano and belt out a rendition of Piano Man (okay so I did kind of learn that once), "Bohemian Rhapsody," "Saturday Nights Alright for Fighting", "Imagine", etc.

I give Madcatz two grades. A for a product that delivers the functionality it promised. Though I just noticed today that the picture they have and what I have are different. the A,B,X,Y buttons look more like PS3 buttons than XBox buttons. Oh well. As long as it works....

On the second grade, I give them an F. A big fat F for outright lying about when the XBox version would be out. I understand that they will stock their own online store first. I get it. Really. I do. It's their product so if they have a limited amount, why not sell it themselves for a higher profit. But the e-mails I received from Amazon told a different story. At least 3 times I would get an e-mail from Amazon with an expected delivery date only to get another e-mail on or before that expected delivery date stating that they didn't have the product. AND after their press release back on 12/3/2010 stating "...with the Xbox 360® version expected to ship imminently to Best Buy (limited quantities available)..." only to never show up in a Best Buy until last week. I think someone needs to take a vocabulary test for the word "imminently":

imminent |ˈimənənt|
adjective
1 about to happen : they were in imminent danger of being swept away.

Bottom line, if you've been salivating about playing the keyboard parts to many of your favorite songs, pony up the cash to get the adapter if you already have a MIDI keyboard. It's very enjoyable. Just remember that if you expect to play/learn the exact right hand part to a song, you might have to restrict yourself to "Obsession."

l8r,

Marz

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