[Editor’s Note: Be sure to join IGN and Harmonix for the world gameplay premiere of Rock Band 4 in our live stream on Friday, May 15 at 12pm PT/3pm ET/7pm GMT. That's 5am AEST on Saturday.]

see deal Rock Band 4 - PlayStation 4 $59.99 on Gamestop

I am basically tone-deaf, and a night of karaoke with me is nightmare fuel. But I don’t care: I love singing in Rock Band, and I want to get better so I can take advantage of Rock Band 4’s

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“ You could make something up that’s totally different.

Rock Band 4 First Screens 6 IMAGES

Rock Band 4 embraces a much more “live” element from top to bottom . Its Gigs feature is a light way to engage with your bandmates in-game and between songs; authored fills keep drummers on their toes while giving the impression that this is their version of a given song. Vocal improv is a singer-centric feature that lets talented folks with impressive pipes to lend their voice to a song in a way an exhausted or excited live performer might.Speaking about older Rock Band titles, Harmonix’s Dave Plante told IGN, “Sometimes when I’m singing, especially if I’ve had a couple drinks or I’m at a party, I want to be a little bit looser with it, so I’ll choose a lower difficulty so I can sing a little more expressively without failing out.” Rock Band 4 solves this problem, and pays singers back for it.Plante is an excellent singer. Rock Band 4 is much more welcoming of his sort of singing style -- the sort that sounds excellent, but deviates from the rigidity of Rock Band’s karaoke pitch bars. Now, he explained, “You can sing part of the phrase with the line, and maybe at the end you want to pop up high to a different note or sing a different counter melody…maybe you want to sing one of the harmony parts you seen, but you’re doing solo vocals. This new improv feature allows you to do that in a way that’s really, really powerful.”Unexpected variations on the familiar makes music exciting. Singing in a different register, but in the key, still sounds great. Rock Band 4 rewards you for this. Stepping outside the comfortable boundaries of a song’s established pitch yield bonus points for improvisation.This allows for a lot of interesting opportunity for vocalists. Green Day’s “Bullet in a Bible” is one of my favorite live records, and I love the vibrato singer Billie Joe Armstrong gives to lyrics that have a consistent pitch on an album. In certain songs, pitch I know intimately drops lower, sails higher, or sounds angrier depending on how Armstrong wants to present his voice. I love this, I want to give it a shot, and I love that Rock Band 4 pays players back for putting their own stamp on someone else’s music.“The thing I’m actually really excited about is for people to encounter this feature and maybe learn about ‘oh, okay, well I hear the relationship between the chord of the guitar and the keyboardist is playing them in the song, and now that relates to how a vocal melody is written,’” said Plante. “Just because that’s how they sing it in the song doesn’t mean that’s the only melody that would fit that chord progression in the song. You could make something up that’s totally different.”As someone who can't sing, the flexibility to experiment is very appealing to me -- and it gives me the opportunity to try something new, to learn, and get better.For more on Rock Band 4, stay tuned all month long with IGN First

Mitch Dyer is an Editor at IGN. Green Day Rock Band is his favorite one, by far. Talk to Mitch about Dota 2, movies, books, and other stuff on Twitter at @MitchyD and subscribe to MitchyD on Twitch