Here’s a little secret about me.  I wanted Rock Band primarily for the ability to sing.  Oh sure, I wanted to play guitar like I did in Guitar Hero and GH2, and I was curious about drumming, what with it being similar to real drumming, but what I really wanted to do was sing.  I have a decent singing voice.  It doesn’t make dogs howl or anything and I can carry a tune enough to know when I’m way off base, so it’s not like I was looking to be the next Robert Plant, I just really wanted to be the front man for a band.  Even a fake one.  Especially a fake one.

Once I got the game, I went through the guitar tour on Medium and then started vocals on Easy.  Then I did vocals on Medium, then on Hard with a small detour to do drums on Easy.  The vocal tour was, by far, the most fun I had in that game.  Now that Rock Band 2 is here, vocals is still the most fun thing to do, even more so now that you can do the band world tour mode all by your lonesome.

So why is singing the most fun?  A couple of reasons.  For one, singing allows you to be the most expressive of all of the instruments. You can grip the mic two handed, Eddie Vedder style.  You can take it off of the stand (you do have a mic stand, right?) and get down with your bad self.  You can kick, you can move, you can snap your fingers, you can shake your hips, you can even swing the mic around like Roger Daltrey, provided you have high enough ceilings.  When playing drums, you can just sit there.  When playing guitar, you can just stand there, in both cases because you have to keep your eyes on the charts to know what to do next.

Which brings me to my next point, namely that singing is the easiest thing to learn, which then allows you to be more expressive.  The only way to learn songs for guitar, bass or drums in Rock Band or any other instrument based rhythm game for that matter, is to play and play and play.  If you want to sing, you just need to get your hands on a copy of the song, be it from the cd, or downloading the song, or bringing the video up on YouTube and you can listen to it constantly outside of the game.  Once you know the words, it’s much easier to focus on getting the pitch right when you’re in the game, but you can also work on that outside of the game, when you’re your car, or in the shower, or any where you don’t mind having people hear you sing.

The other fun thing about vocals is that no one wants to do it.  Seriously. I bet that if you get a room full of people together to play Rock Band, the only way you’ll get any one to sing is to fill them with booze.  This means that if you sing, you always get to play.  Let everyone else fight over the guitars or the drums.  You focus on the mic, lest it become lonely.

Now, I find that vocals offers the easiest transition from Easy to Hard, but again, I can somewhat carry a tune, and it only takes like three tries before I learn a song, but that may have something to do with having done the vocal tour in the original Rock Band three times.  Outside of the game, I’m sure I sound like shit, but I can drop a 5 star in the game with no problem.  Well, a few problems any way.  Curse you Iron Maiden!  I think that once you learn a song, the tweaks needed to step your game up are so far removed from what you’d need to do to go from Medium to Hard on the other instruments, but again, that’s just my personal experience.   I can tell you that the elated feeling you get when you 5 star a song on Hard isn’t any different when singing then when axe slinging.

So that’s why vocals is the only way to rock.  You can tear shit up, look good doing it and never have to give up your spot.  Plus, everyone knows that the singer gets all of the hottest groupies.