Bon Savants RockBand Dev

Sorted “You Look Like Hell, My Belle” into RB tracks

We settled on a first RBN song, "You Look Like Hell, My Belle". It's a peppy little jam with some nifty riffs and hooks that should be fun to play along with.

Followed instructions from Harmonix and sorted the raw tracks, all 30 of them, into just 7 tracks for the game:
SNARE (mono)
KICK (mono)
CYMBALS (and all other drums, stereo)
BASS (mono)
GUITAR (playable guitar track, actually a mix of guitar & synth, stereo)
VOX (lead vocals, stereo)
TRACKS (all other tracks, like 2nd guitars, Rhodes, and backing vocals)

Before the edits, 30+ tracks

After much consolidation, down to 7 tracks.

This didn't take all that long, pretty much a full day once I set down to it. I'm using ProTools with the new MBox Micro, a little USB dongle that allows me to mix on my laptop. No input capability, but since these songs are already tracked that's fine.

Hardest part today was deciding which parts to make playable for the guitar controller - most Bon Savants songs have lots of instrumentation going on without a clear "lead guitar" part. We can always change our mind on these details and the most important thing is to make progress so we can get some experience with Reaper and the other Harmonix tools.

Incidentally, for the benefit of other audio geeks out there, I'm really digging the Cytomic compressor "The Glue". Super flexible with a really broad range of sounds. Using it mostly on drums so far but no doubt I'll find other uses. Inexpensive, too.

-Thom