Today is Thursday and Friday comes afterwards
Okay Internet, have you feasted your eyes on this?
Rebecca Black’s Friday on Rock Band from The Nerdery on Vimeo.
That’s a few of our Nerds playing the infamous Rebecca Black song on Rock Band. Pretty fantastic, right? So how, you may wonder, did this happen?
Well, The Nerdery’s Ken Sykora was about a bottle in to a wine.woot delivery when the inspiration struck.
“My significant other isn’t always as privvy to the viral videos that we nerds take for granted,” Ken said. “So I was sharing with her the greatness (ironic greatness I guess) that is Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” For some reason she must have also been living under a rock because didn’t quite understand the concept of ‘Rick Rolling’.”
It was during this YouTube education session that in the perfect drunken state of mind that Ken made a connection between “Friday” (the song), Friday (the day), our Bottlecaps, Rick Rolling, and our monthly-ish Rock Band sessions post-Bottlecap.
“It was this series of connections that made me realize what needed to be done,” Ken said. So Ken went to work.
“I yarrr’d the mp3 off of the interwebs, threw it in the Reaper (the official Rock Band Network editor), and just started making things happen,” he said.
“RBN files are essentially just a big midi file that maps perfectly with a set of .wav files,” Ken said. “Then I put it into a compiler called Magma which produces the files used to play a Rock Band track.”
The screen shot shows Reaper (left) with the the harmonies up, and the compiler on the right. This is not the first RBN track Ken has authored, but he said it is the first track he’s done with vocal harmonies.
Click the screenshot to embiggen
“I sent a proof-of-concept to the band (Gillian, Justin) [Editor's note: you must click to see Jusin's profile pic & title. Also, in the video Sara rocks the vocals.] with just the single vocal track, and they were both quickly and enthusiastically on-board.”
Ken said the hardest part of the whole project was getting done quickly while managing to keep it a secret before the Bottlecap.
“I had to keep myself from tweeting the videos to YouTube that I’d been making to show the progress,” he said.
“It was also fun, fun, fun, fun, trying to drop subtle hints on Twitter about how everyone was about to get Friday-rolled,” he said. “I tweeted the “Friday” video, and made a ton of references throughout the day.”
So how as playing it?
“It was on no fail mode,” Ken said, “Since I’m obviously not the author of the song, there was no way for me to split out the tracks in typical Rock Band style (where if the drummer screws up, the drums stop playing). So there’s no way we were going to fail and even if we did the music would still keep playing. It was basically a really glorified, epic, karaoke track.”
And what was The Nerdery’s reaction?
“It’s hard to tell from the video (the crowd is really dark and you can’t hear them), but everyone loved it,” Ken said. “It got huge applause at the end, people were shouting encore, and the actual team that was giving the Bottlecap were shaking their fists at me. When Matt Albiniak got up to talk he said to everyone ‘man… how do you follow that?’ Which was particularly great for me because if you know Matt, you know that he hates pop music, and is totally a music snob.”
Ken said this kind of project is a prime candidate for being done again, should the appropriate song come along and that he’s secretly hoping whoever owns the rights for “Friday” to give him the full quality tracks and let him submit this to the official RBN store.
