Rock Band #98: Christmas Miracle Edition
I was playing a song last Thursday night, and Gloria walked in watched quietly. The singer in this particular song wore a flannel shirt and had a long, unkempt beard. "There's a fine line between grunge and woodsman," she said.My friend John Harwood came over for two hours last Friday and we played Rock Band straight through. We've put in a little over three hours into Band World Tour at this point, and we have 484,000 fans.
483,000 of them are his, obviously. Hello, I'm Ringo Starr.
Playing a song with John is relatively surreal, because he's guaranteed to be 98%+ on almost any song on Hard, which is the level we're playing until we hit the fan cap. So I can play bass/lead guitar (whatever he's not playing), and as long as I hit even 90%, we're almost guaranteed to 5-star the song. I've actually had my mind wander a few times because we'd five-starred a song so early.
We also played the drums this time, and damn, the drums are loud. I always wear headphones, which mutes the sound quite a bit when I play, but as soon as we played a song with me on guitar and John on the drums, it was impossible for me to concentrate on the guitar line. It made me realized how difficult it must be to concentrate at times when someone's playing in a real band.
There was also my Rock Band version of a holiday miracle over the last two nights. For starters, I passed "Vaseline" and "Go With The Flow" on Hard on the drums (ugly efforts both), and when I went back up the set list and played "In Bloom" on Hard, I was able to use the kick-pedal correctly when it was off beat.
I'm not sure how to explain this musically, but what's so evil about the kick pedal is that oftentimes you need to use it in-between beats. You have a steady rhythm going, then the kick-pedal gets inserted between beats (and there's not much time between the beats). I've never been able to play those sections--not even once--but last night, for some reason, it just happened. I wasn't thinking about it, I wasn't really conscious of trying to prepare in advance.
I just did it without having to think. Which is good, because that's when I'm at my best.
That probably didn't come out right.
Today, I passed every song in the next to last set except Boston's "Foreplay/Long Time," which has an absolutely brutal opening. So it hasn't been pretty, but I may be in the final set on Hard soon.
<< Home