Disclaimer: I have no direct or indirect relationship with any companies mentioned here nor any of the websites I may link to, other than simply having a free account at Frets-on-Fire (and all accounts there are free). I cannot gain financially from anything I say below.
I am sure at least a few of you have found isolated bass tracks for some songs up on YouTube. They can be very helpful in transcribing a bass line given that all you are hearing is the bass player with maybe a little bit of bleed-through of other instruments/vocals. But have you ever thought about where most of those isolated bass tracks from the original multitrack recordings came from?
A little over a decade ago, the "plastic guitar" video game fad began with Guitar Hero and then Rock Band. As a real musician these games probably did not appeal to you in any way. But we should be very grateful those games were produced because there are now several thousand multitracks floating around out there because of those two games.
Before I continue, let me explain the why and how those games use the original multitracks. When you play those games, colorful symbols appear on the screen telling you to press corresponding buttons on your fake plastic guitar in time with the music (and it works similarly for drums). The games were designed to have separated audio for drums, vocals, guitar and bass (and later keyboards) that could be muted for any instrument at any time. So when you are "playing" the guitar part correctly, it plays the original guitar part along with the rest of the song and everything sounds normal. But when you miss notes, it mutes just the guitar and plays unpleasant sound effects to let you know you are messing up. This is only possible because the game is playing separated audio for each instrument based on the multitrack recording for the song.
I will mention at this point that these multitracks are (usually) mixed down to work with the game. That is to say that Guitar Hero never had MIDI keyboard support (unlike Rock Band 3), so they never separated the keyboard track from other sounds in the song. They only separated the parts they need for their game to work (guitar/bass/drums/vocals) and the rest of the instruments were mixed down into one track that would never be muted because it wasn't possible to play those instruments in the game anyway.
It took years for clever people to come along and "liberate" the audio files from the games. But it is now possible to download these multitracks for virtually every song that was released in Guitar Hero through 2012 (but not yet the recent Guitar Hero Live or Guitar Hero TV) and Rock Band (including the songs that come with Rock Band 4, but none of the Rock Band 4 DLC, or downloadable content - additional songs they release weekly for a price). That's thousands of mutlitracks for a lot of very popular songs from the past 50 years, including the 70 or songs from The Beatles Rock Band!
It may sound too good to be true, but it really isn't. That said, there are several caveats regarding the recordings plus many things you need to know in order to make use of them.
First off, Activision (the maker of Guitar Hero) was not able to license very many of the original recordings when the game first came out. So just about all the early Guitar Hero games feature soundalike covers not featuring the original artists. That's a real problem for us, obviously. You do not want to waste your time transcribing the bassline to a cover that is probably different in meaningful ways to the original. So be sure you are dealing with the original recording and not a cover. (There are some very helpful links below to lists of the songs that are featured in the game. There are often notes that indicate that the song is a cover. But I still recommend listening to the song and comparing it to what you really want to be transcribing (i.e., your copy of the song from your CD) to ensure there are no tears later. I learned that Beds Are Burning by Midnight Oil and Greg Kihn's 867-5309 (Jenny) are re-recordings by the original artists and those were not noted on Wikipedia when I last checked, for example.)
The good news is that the games so quickly became a huge money making venture for all concerned that it quickly became rare for a cover to appear in the game unless it was a remake by the original artist (perhaps due to a conflict with their original label that still "owned" the performance or because the original multitracks are lost). That said, the vast majority are the original recordings. In fact by the time of Rock Band 3 it moves close to 99% and of course 100% of The Beatles Rock Band is original.
The second thing to be aware of is the nature of the recording technology for the songs you want to listen to. If you are interested in Coldplay's Clocks (a song from 2002), everything will sound perfect. But if you want one of the early Beatles songs from Beatle Rock Band, understand that Paul's "isolated" bass ceased to exist for all time once his bass track was combined with other instruments/vocals to make room for more instruments. That is, those 4 track recordings no longer (or never did) have each instrument completely isolated. In fact to make Beatles Rock Band, one of the engineers that helped create the 2009 remasters had to invent technology to grab the bass frequencies from tracks that had bass, and do the same for other instruments in order to make the kind of multitracks the game needed! The extensive Jimi Hendrix collection has similar issues.
Here is an answer from an interview Giles Martin gave back in 2009 regarding this:
Even on more modern recordings you can hear some bleed through of other instruments, though that should not prevent you from being able to transcribe the bassline.
Another thing to be aware of is that these games do not want songs to "fade out" at all. So they tend to be slightly longer than the original song unless that song never had a fade out and ends more abruptly. If you are transcribing be aware that you might end up transcribing 20 seconds or so if additional material beyond the original recording.
One last thing is that these were “family” games for the purposes of the video game ratings system, and some songs are censored. This should really only affect vocals, and usually means that a word is muted in the vocal track and not listed in the lyrics, but it can be more significant. In fact there is a whole lyric section to Dire Strait's Money For Nothing that has no vocals in Rock Band 3 (if you are familiar with the song, you'll know which part, and you can understand why they were reluctant to have teenagers singing that!). That annoys certain people, but it doesn't affect us bassists.
When I first encountered these multitracks, I thought it would be cool to use them as the ultimate play-along songs. Have John, Ringo and George play their instruments and sing while I'll play Paul’s bass to Something.
What happened instead is that I discovered another game called Rocksmith, which is the fastest way to learn to play bass or guitar very poorly with poor technique (though that isn't quite how their marketing team sells it). It is a "game" similar to Rock Band but for real musicians in which you use a real guitar or bass (even acoustic) and play the unique tablature that appears on the screen for each song. Now THAT game is one that should have used multitracks, but sadly it does not. Instead you are playing over top of the original recording. As a result, your playing is essentially being complimented by the original bassist and it makes it harder to hear your own mistakes. That's more of an issue for the beginners this game is aimed at, but still.
Thankfully some clever folks figured out how to make "custom" songs for Rocksmith, meaning that if you had the notes for the song and the technical inclination to use all the funky tools necessary to make the song, you could put *any* song into Rocksmith. (I recently put the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah for bass in Rocksmith using an IMSLP transcription, so I really do mean any song.)
Perhaps you see where I am going here, but a few of us realized we could make Rocksmith bass customs with the audio being completely bass-less (like it should be) -- meaning that you do not hear the original bass when you are playing but simply all the other instruments/vocals. I've already made a few hundred such “customs” and it's so much better from a learning perspective to only be able to hear my bass playing over the rest of the original recording sans the original bassist. Thus I now have a fair amount of experience with these multitracks and how to use them. (What I essentially do is make one audio file with all the instruments and vocals for the game, and use the “rhythm.ogg” file (which is where the bass is always found) to transcribe the bass notes for the game.)
Most of the songs in Guitar Hero and, to a lesser extent, Rock Band, are loud/metal type songs. But these games also had songs from the likes of BB King, The Eagles, Billy Joel, The Band, Otis Redding, The Allman Brothers, Chicago, The Police, Earth Wind & Fire, Shania Twain, Brad Paisley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, etc.
Here is a list of songs for the various Guitar Hero games:
Songs in the Guitar Hero Series
This site does a very good job of showing which songs are original recordings. Note that none of the songs in Guitar Hero Live or Guitar Hero TV are available (yet). Those are the last songs in the list, which makes them easier to spot. The rest should be available at Frets-on-Fire (see below for links to Frets-on-Fire).
Here is a list of the original Rock Band 1 “on-disc” songs:
List of songs in Rock Band - Wikipedia
Note that the ones that used the original recordings are in bold on this list. (So "yes" to the song by Jet and "no" to Ballroom Blitz by Sweet.)
Here are the “on-disc” songs from Rock Band 2:
List of songs in Rock Band 2 - Wikipedia
All of these should be originals.
Here are the “on-disc” songs from Rock Band 3:
List of songs in Rock Band 3 - Wikipedia
All of these should be originals too.
Here are the Rock Band Blitz songs:
Rock Band Blitz - Wikipedia
All should be originals.
Here are the songs from Lego Rock Band, which was intended for a younger audience and has more pop than metal:
List of songs in Lego Rock Band - Wikipedia
All should be originals.
Hard to believe, but there was actually a separate Green Day Rock Band game:
Invalid Link Removed
All are originals.
Here is the listing for Beatles Rock Band:
List of songs in The Beatles: Rock Band - Wikipedia
The songs from Rock Band: AC/DC are all live versions from the early 1990s.
Here are the “on-disc” songs from Rock Band 4:
List of songs in Rock Band 4 - Wikipedia
Should all be originals. And these are the only post-2013 Guitar Hero or Rock Band songs available right now.
Here is a long list of all the songs they sold separately (aka “DLC”) for Rock Band. Note that none made after 2013 are available (yet):
List of downloadable songs for the Rock Band series - Wikipedia
If you are familiar with the Rock Band Network, some of those songs are available as well.
So where do you get all these multitracks? There is an online forum created around an old PC-based game that was meant to be a clone of Guitar Hero. The game was called Frets-On-Fire, and here is a link to their website:
Invalid Link Removed
You’ll need to create an account there in order to access the links to the multitracks, but that’s as easy a process as it was to create a TalkBass account here. Go for it!
The site is filled with links to songs that have been created for plastic drum and guitar players. The vast majority of these songs and links are completely useless to a real guitarist or bassist and virtually none have multitracks. You are really only interested in two threads on the entire site. Those two pages take a while to load in your browser, but contain literally thousands of links to ZIP files containing the multitracks you seek.
The following links will not work unless you have an account over at Frets-On-Fire. Here is a link to all the Rock Band content:
Invalid Link Removed
And here is a link to the Guitar Hero page.
Invalid Link Removed
Both pages will take a while to load. Eventually very long lists will appear showing the songs in order by when they were released (by game). The right side column for each song contains a download link. (If you know how to use a program called jDownloader, you can use it to download entire setlists at a time instead of one song at a time.)
Unfortunately this is one of those sites that is so cool looking that it is hard on the eyes. But once you have downloaded a ZIP file for a song you want, you’ll need to unzip it. What's inside the ZIP file? Here’s a list (not all will have every one of these):
OGG files are very similar to MP3 files in that they are lossy audio files. They are what we are most interested in here. There are many programs that can manipulate or play back OGG files, and I use the free Windows & Mac program Audacity. You can drag all of the OGG files over to Audacity and then mute individual tracks and mix however you wish. Your imagination is your only limit to what you can do with these files. But remember that rhythm.ogg has the original bass to the song.
Here is the rhythm.ogg of Chuck Rainey’s original bassline to Kid Charlemagne by Steely Dan:
Invalid Link Removed
(It starts at about 11 seconds in.)
If you compare it to the available transcriptions, you will hear the discrepancies. But you will also hear how difficult it would have been to transcribe without the isolated bass. In fact the existing transcriptions are heroic under those circumstances; that is quite the bassline!
And if there's one thing I’ve learned from a few years working with these OGGs is just how difficult it is to transcribe some bass lines without having access to the isolated bass. Like many of you I own professional transcriptions (published by Hal Leonard) of many of these songs. I can compare them directly with the actual original isolated bass. You learn how much is missed even by a pro transcriber. It’s really a shame that these “artist-approved” books that actually feature no input whatsoever from the artist (except apparently some Steve Vai guitar books) weren’t transcribed by folks with access to the original multitracks. In fact I find Aiden Hampson's Prince transcription book all the more amazing given that no multitracks for those songs have ever leaked.
But you folks now have access to a few thousand multitracks. You can make 100% perfect transcriptions for these songs now. I can't wait to see the results in the coming years.
In closing I need to say this: If there are any multitracks from those games you want, get 'em now. Those links may go down and it may in the future become difficult to find these multitracks again. I am also not an attorney and therefore cannot give legal advice as to the legality of downloading/utilizing these multitracks. Nor am I responsible for all the pop-up ads you will encounter when trying to download these. You download/use them at your own risk.
Have fun!
P.S., I put this together while under the influence of pain medication. I'm sure I missed some important points and made many grammatical errors. I will try to answer any questions you may have. Thanks to all of you who have contributed here, and especially Lee Nunn, whose wonderful transcriptions I've discovered for the first time this past week.
I am sure at least a few of you have found isolated bass tracks for some songs up on YouTube. They can be very helpful in transcribing a bass line given that all you are hearing is the bass player with maybe a little bit of bleed-through of other instruments/vocals. But have you ever thought about where most of those isolated bass tracks from the original multitrack recordings came from?
A little over a decade ago, the "plastic guitar" video game fad began with Guitar Hero and then Rock Band. As a real musician these games probably did not appeal to you in any way. But we should be very grateful those games were produced because there are now several thousand multitracks floating around out there because of those two games.
Before I continue, let me explain the why and how those games use the original multitracks. When you play those games, colorful symbols appear on the screen telling you to press corresponding buttons on your fake plastic guitar in time with the music (and it works similarly for drums). The games were designed to have separated audio for drums, vocals, guitar and bass (and later keyboards) that could be muted for any instrument at any time. So when you are "playing" the guitar part correctly, it plays the original guitar part along with the rest of the song and everything sounds normal. But when you miss notes, it mutes just the guitar and plays unpleasant sound effects to let you know you are messing up. This is only possible because the game is playing separated audio for each instrument based on the multitrack recording for the song.
I will mention at this point that these multitracks are (usually) mixed down to work with the game. That is to say that Guitar Hero never had MIDI keyboard support (unlike Rock Band 3), so they never separated the keyboard track from other sounds in the song. They only separated the parts they need for their game to work (guitar/bass/drums/vocals) and the rest of the instruments were mixed down into one track that would never be muted because it wasn't possible to play those instruments in the game anyway.
It took years for clever people to come along and "liberate" the audio files from the games. But it is now possible to download these multitracks for virtually every song that was released in Guitar Hero through 2012 (but not yet the recent Guitar Hero Live or Guitar Hero TV) and Rock Band (including the songs that come with Rock Band 4, but none of the Rock Band 4 DLC, or downloadable content - additional songs they release weekly for a price). That's thousands of mutlitracks for a lot of very popular songs from the past 50 years, including the 70 or songs from The Beatles Rock Band!
It may sound too good to be true, but it really isn't. That said, there are several caveats regarding the recordings plus many things you need to know in order to make use of them.
First off, Activision (the maker of Guitar Hero) was not able to license very many of the original recordings when the game first came out. So just about all the early Guitar Hero games feature soundalike covers not featuring the original artists. That's a real problem for us, obviously. You do not want to waste your time transcribing the bassline to a cover that is probably different in meaningful ways to the original. So be sure you are dealing with the original recording and not a cover. (There are some very helpful links below to lists of the songs that are featured in the game. There are often notes that indicate that the song is a cover. But I still recommend listening to the song and comparing it to what you really want to be transcribing (i.e., your copy of the song from your CD) to ensure there are no tears later. I learned that Beds Are Burning by Midnight Oil and Greg Kihn's 867-5309 (Jenny) are re-recordings by the original artists and those were not noted on Wikipedia when I last checked, for example.)
The good news is that the games so quickly became a huge money making venture for all concerned that it quickly became rare for a cover to appear in the game unless it was a remake by the original artist (perhaps due to a conflict with their original label that still "owned" the performance or because the original multitracks are lost). That said, the vast majority are the original recordings. In fact by the time of Rock Band 3 it moves close to 99% and of course 100% of The Beatles Rock Band is original.
The second thing to be aware of is the nature of the recording technology for the songs you want to listen to. If you are interested in Coldplay's Clocks (a song from 2002), everything will sound perfect. But if you want one of the early Beatles songs from Beatle Rock Band, understand that Paul's "isolated" bass ceased to exist for all time once his bass track was combined with other instruments/vocals to make room for more instruments. That is, those 4 track recordings no longer (or never did) have each instrument completely isolated. In fact to make Beatles Rock Band, one of the engineers that helped create the 2009 remasters had to invent technology to grab the bass frequencies from tracks that had bass, and do the same for other instruments in order to make the kind of multitracks the game needed! The extensive Jimi Hendrix collection has similar issues.
Here is an answer from an interview Giles Martin gave back in 2009 regarding this:
“Well, I don't know if anyone is aware, but the way these games work is you control guitar, bass and drums, if you don't play the bass correctly you don't hear the bass. The biggest problem for us is that a lot of the Beatles stuff isn't recorded separately, they started recording on two tracks, so the Cavern club which is "Twist and Shout," "I Saw Her Standing There," for instance, "Boys" is on two tracks -- all of the drums, bass and guitars together. And so we had someone here at Abbey Road, a guy named Simon Gibson and an engineer called Paul Hicks who filtered everything and so separated, made what would have been multitracks out of one track, if that makes sense ... so created new separate mixes. So when you don't play the bass (correctly) in "Twist and Shout" you don't hear the bass. Sort of like taking your voice off an answer phone message with having the background still on.”
Even on more modern recordings you can hear some bleed through of other instruments, though that should not prevent you from being able to transcribe the bassline.
Note for Guitarists Only:
It is rare for a song to have two basslines. Prince played both a fretless and an electric on one song on his debut album and then never did that again, and there are many songs from the 80s that feature a synth and a “real” bassline. But for the most part there is just one bass in each song. But guitarists know that is rarely true for them, especially in guitar-based music, which Guitar Hero and Rock Band tend to feature. The games feature one guitar path and one bass path. This is a problem if you want to transcribe the lead or they rhythm because the sound file that contains the “guitar” multitrack may very well switch back and forth between the rhythm and lead. Now that doesn’t mean the rhythm is lost in an example where the game jumps from rhythm to a solo, but it does mean that the rhythm jumps to a different audio file – usually “song.ogg” – and then may jump back to guitar.ogg after the solo. In short there are additional challenges for guitarists, though these multitracks are still very, very useful to you too.
It is rare for a song to have two basslines. Prince played both a fretless and an electric on one song on his debut album and then never did that again, and there are many songs from the 80s that feature a synth and a “real” bassline. But for the most part there is just one bass in each song. But guitarists know that is rarely true for them, especially in guitar-based music, which Guitar Hero and Rock Band tend to feature. The games feature one guitar path and one bass path. This is a problem if you want to transcribe the lead or they rhythm because the sound file that contains the “guitar” multitrack may very well switch back and forth between the rhythm and lead. Now that doesn’t mean the rhythm is lost in an example where the game jumps from rhythm to a solo, but it does mean that the rhythm jumps to a different audio file – usually “song.ogg” – and then may jump back to guitar.ogg after the solo. In short there are additional challenges for guitarists, though these multitracks are still very, very useful to you too.
Another thing to be aware of is that these games do not want songs to "fade out" at all. So they tend to be slightly longer than the original song unless that song never had a fade out and ends more abruptly. If you are transcribing be aware that you might end up transcribing 20 seconds or so if additional material beyond the original recording.
One last thing is that these were “family” games for the purposes of the video game ratings system, and some songs are censored. This should really only affect vocals, and usually means that a word is muted in the vocal track and not listed in the lyrics, but it can be more significant. In fact there is a whole lyric section to Dire Strait's Money For Nothing that has no vocals in Rock Band 3 (if you are familiar with the song, you'll know which part, and you can understand why they were reluctant to have teenagers singing that!). That annoys certain people, but it doesn't affect us bassists.
When I first encountered these multitracks, I thought it would be cool to use them as the ultimate play-along songs. Have John, Ringo and George play their instruments and sing while I'll play Paul’s bass to Something.
What happened instead is that I discovered another game called Rocksmith, which is the fastest way to learn to play bass or guitar very poorly with poor technique (though that isn't quite how their marketing team sells it). It is a "game" similar to Rock Band but for real musicians in which you use a real guitar or bass (even acoustic) and play the unique tablature that appears on the screen for each song. Now THAT game is one that should have used multitracks, but sadly it does not. Instead you are playing over top of the original recording. As a result, your playing is essentially being complimented by the original bassist and it makes it harder to hear your own mistakes. That's more of an issue for the beginners this game is aimed at, but still.
Thankfully some clever folks figured out how to make "custom" songs for Rocksmith, meaning that if you had the notes for the song and the technical inclination to use all the funky tools necessary to make the song, you could put *any* song into Rocksmith. (I recently put the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah for bass in Rocksmith using an IMSLP transcription, so I really do mean any song.)
Perhaps you see where I am going here, but a few of us realized we could make Rocksmith bass customs with the audio being completely bass-less (like it should be) -- meaning that you do not hear the original bass when you are playing but simply all the other instruments/vocals. I've already made a few hundred such “customs” and it's so much better from a learning perspective to only be able to hear my bass playing over the rest of the original recording sans the original bassist. Thus I now have a fair amount of experience with these multitracks and how to use them. (What I essentially do is make one audio file with all the instruments and vocals for the game, and use the “rhythm.ogg” file (which is where the bass is always found) to transcribe the bass notes for the game.)
Most of the songs in Guitar Hero and, to a lesser extent, Rock Band, are loud/metal type songs. But these games also had songs from the likes of BB King, The Eagles, Billy Joel, The Band, Otis Redding, The Allman Brothers, Chicago, The Police, Earth Wind & Fire, Shania Twain, Brad Paisley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, etc.
Here is a list of songs for the various Guitar Hero games:
Songs in the Guitar Hero Series
This site does a very good job of showing which songs are original recordings. Note that none of the songs in Guitar Hero Live or Guitar Hero TV are available (yet). Those are the last songs in the list, which makes them easier to spot. The rest should be available at Frets-on-Fire (see below for links to Frets-on-Fire).
Here is a list of the original Rock Band 1 “on-disc” songs:
List of songs in Rock Band - Wikipedia
Note that the ones that used the original recordings are in bold on this list. (So "yes" to the song by Jet and "no" to Ballroom Blitz by Sweet.)
Here are the “on-disc” songs from Rock Band 2:
List of songs in Rock Band 2 - Wikipedia
All of these should be originals.
Here are the “on-disc” songs from Rock Band 3:
List of songs in Rock Band 3 - Wikipedia
All of these should be originals too.
Here are the Rock Band Blitz songs:
Rock Band Blitz - Wikipedia
All should be originals.
Here are the songs from Lego Rock Band, which was intended for a younger audience and has more pop than metal:
List of songs in Lego Rock Band - Wikipedia
All should be originals.
Hard to believe, but there was actually a separate Green Day Rock Band game:
Invalid Link Removed
All are originals.
Here is the listing for Beatles Rock Band:
List of songs in The Beatles: Rock Band - Wikipedia
The songs from Rock Band: AC/DC are all live versions from the early 1990s.
Here are the “on-disc” songs from Rock Band 4:
List of songs in Rock Band 4 - Wikipedia
Should all be originals. And these are the only post-2013 Guitar Hero or Rock Band songs available right now.
Here is a long list of all the songs they sold separately (aka “DLC”) for Rock Band. Note that none made after 2013 are available (yet):
List of downloadable songs for the Rock Band series - Wikipedia
If you are familiar with the Rock Band Network, some of those songs are available as well.
So where do you get all these multitracks? There is an online forum created around an old PC-based game that was meant to be a clone of Guitar Hero. The game was called Frets-On-Fire, and here is a link to their website:
Invalid Link Removed
You’ll need to create an account there in order to access the links to the multitracks, but that’s as easy a process as it was to create a TalkBass account here. Go for it!
The site is filled with links to songs that have been created for plastic drum and guitar players. The vast majority of these songs and links are completely useless to a real guitarist or bassist and virtually none have multitracks. You are really only interested in two threads on the entire site. Those two pages take a while to load in your browser, but contain literally thousands of links to ZIP files containing the multitracks you seek.
The following links will not work unless you have an account over at Frets-On-Fire. Here is a link to all the Rock Band content:
Invalid Link Removed
And here is a link to the Guitar Hero page.
Invalid Link Removed
Both pages will take a while to load. Eventually very long lists will appear showing the songs in order by when they were released (by game). The right side column for each song contains a download link. (If you know how to use a program called jDownloader, you can use it to download entire setlists at a time instead of one song at a time.)
Unfortunately this is one of those sites that is so cool looking that it is hard on the eyes. But once you have downloaded a ZIP file for a song you want, you’ll need to unzip it. What's inside the ZIP file? Here’s a list (not all will have every one of these):
album.png = the artwork for the album this song was on
crowd.ogg = the fake crowd noise created for the game - rarely seen and unnecessary
drums_1.ogg = some of the isolated drums
drums_2.ogg = more of the isolated drums
drums_3.ogg = even more (sometimes there is no drums_3.ogg, and sometimes there’s also a drums_4.ogg)
guitar.ogg = the main isolated guitar track
keys.ogg = the keyboard(s) (only present in some Rock Band 3 songs)
notes.mid = this is not a standard MIDI file and 95% of the time will contain nothing of use to you
ps.dat = otherwise useless file used by a PC game called PhaseShift – you can delete this
rhythm.ogg = our isolated bass!
song.ini = song information used by PhaseShift
song.ogg = instruments/vocals not in other ogg files, often the “other” guitar, sometimes horns/keyboards, background vocals or some mix of these
vocals.ogg = the lead vocals
crowd.ogg = the fake crowd noise created for the game - rarely seen and unnecessary
drums_1.ogg = some of the isolated drums
drums_2.ogg = more of the isolated drums
drums_3.ogg = even more (sometimes there is no drums_3.ogg, and sometimes there’s also a drums_4.ogg)
guitar.ogg = the main isolated guitar track
keys.ogg = the keyboard(s) (only present in some Rock Band 3 songs)
notes.mid = this is not a standard MIDI file and 95% of the time will contain nothing of use to you
ps.dat = otherwise useless file used by a PC game called PhaseShift – you can delete this
rhythm.ogg = our isolated bass!
song.ini = song information used by PhaseShift
song.ogg = instruments/vocals not in other ogg files, often the “other” guitar, sometimes horns/keyboards, background vocals or some mix of these
vocals.ogg = the lead vocals
OGG files are very similar to MP3 files in that they are lossy audio files. They are what we are most interested in here. There are many programs that can manipulate or play back OGG files, and I use the free Windows & Mac program Audacity. You can drag all of the OGG files over to Audacity and then mute individual tracks and mix however you wish. Your imagination is your only limit to what you can do with these files. But remember that rhythm.ogg has the original bass to the song.
Here is the rhythm.ogg of Chuck Rainey’s original bassline to Kid Charlemagne by Steely Dan:
Invalid Link Removed
(It starts at about 11 seconds in.)
If you compare it to the available transcriptions, you will hear the discrepancies. But you will also hear how difficult it would have been to transcribe without the isolated bass. In fact the existing transcriptions are heroic under those circumstances; that is quite the bassline!
And if there's one thing I’ve learned from a few years working with these OGGs is just how difficult it is to transcribe some bass lines without having access to the isolated bass. Like many of you I own professional transcriptions (published by Hal Leonard) of many of these songs. I can compare them directly with the actual original isolated bass. You learn how much is missed even by a pro transcriber. It’s really a shame that these “artist-approved” books that actually feature no input whatsoever from the artist (except apparently some Steve Vai guitar books) weren’t transcribed by folks with access to the original multitracks. In fact I find Aiden Hampson's Prince transcription book all the more amazing given that no multitracks for those songs have ever leaked.
But you folks now have access to a few thousand multitracks. You can make 100% perfect transcriptions for these songs now. I can't wait to see the results in the coming years.
In closing I need to say this: If there are any multitracks from those games you want, get 'em now. Those links may go down and it may in the future become difficult to find these multitracks again. I am also not an attorney and therefore cannot give legal advice as to the legality of downloading/utilizing these multitracks. Nor am I responsible for all the pop-up ads you will encounter when trying to download these. You download/use them at your own risk.
Have fun!
P.S., I put this together while under the influence of pain medication. I'm sure I missed some important points and made many grammatical errors. I will try to answer any questions you may have. Thanks to all of you who have contributed here, and especially Lee Nunn, whose wonderful transcriptions I've discovered for the first time this past week.
Last edited:
