Archive for May, 2008

Well, i’m back after the jolly boys outing to sunny Burghfield where we recorded 3 top choons from our extensive setlist.

And now you can listen to the fruits of our labour over at the rubbersnake page, that’s the tab at the top of this page that says ‘Rubbersnake’.

Go ahead, have a listen, let me know what you think, download them and give them to your fam and chums. Upload them to bittorrent, all that shit, get these songs around the world.

The more people listen to them, the better!

Third Clue: ProcTORRRRR!!!!!

If you haven’t got it already then you’re dumb.

The actors name is G.W. Bailey and here is link to his character, you now need to feel suitably ashamed and start thinking about your own failings at life.

Second Clue: Imagine him swinging a black cane around as he gesticulates.

3rd clue coming at 1pm

Little quiz for all you guys and gals out there.

Who’s this?

Your first clue: He’s been in a series of movies that everyone our age would have seen.

2nd clue coming at 11.30am

Away recording today and tomorrow so these are getting released on a timer. Tomorrow’s is a fun one so that’ll be going up for 9am.

We’ve got Chell from Portal. She’s a lot fitter than she’s been digitised to be. Certainly wouldn’t wipe my cock on the curtains while i’m in her presence…

http://www.alesiaglidewell.com/oncamera.php

As you can guess i’ve been playing Rock Band all weekend and you know what? It’s really really good.

Thoroughly enjoyable. I’m most impressed by the animation, there’s full lip-syncing and more importantly for me, the drums are actually correct. The singer will jump into the crowd, he’ll punch the air at the correct moments. It just looks like an actual gig.

The set list is absolutely fantastic, there’s 67 songs in total and believe me, it’s plenty. But the quality of songs is amazing. Iron Maiden, Radiohead, Black Sabbath, Rush, The Who, Soundgarden, Pumpkins. There are a couple of fillers but i would certainly say that 80% of the songs are high quality kick-ass tunes. Well impressed!

Guitar: It’s easily the best guitar yet, it feels heavier, the neck is longer and it just looks better. The best part is the extra fret buttons at the other end of the neck, when the solos come on you can just press these buttons and you don’t have to strum, so essentially you’re just picking at the solo. Makes it a hell of a lot easier to nail them and makes you feel 10% extra special when you nail the perfect solo on Coheed & Cambria.

Mic: If you’ve played Sing Star on the Ps2 then you’ve done the vocals, it’s looks pretty good, it’s a nice weight and it seems to work quite well, but i suspect that most people who buy this game won’t be touching the mic as much as they will the…

Drums: Let’s face it, this is what you’ve bought the game for. I find it amusing that everyone seems to have this excited fascination about drums, didn’t realise we were so cool!

First thing to warn for any potential buyers; they’re noisy. The ‘dok dok dok’ is pretty off-putting and will certainly annoy whoever it is that’s downstairs at the time (A good thing or a bad thing depending on how much Karma hates you). But how are they to play? I hear you ask. Well, they play like proper drums, i’m about 3/4 of the way through medium and getting onto the tricky songs (Fall Out Boy is particularly annoying, not helped with the fact that i don’t know the song) and i’ll be honest here, I’d hate to see a ‘normal’ person playing the drums on anything more than Medium. You’re essentially playing a real drum pattern replete with crashes, toms and ride cymbal and i won’t lie when i tell you it will take a while for your to coordinate your limbs properly. It bloody better do anyway, i’ve been playing for 14 years to get to where i’ve got to.

As usual i like to point out the downers more than the uppers and here i have 3 major problems with the drumkit.

1. If you’re like me and you have other people in the house to consider then you’ll be making the conscious effort to ‘keep it down’. Certainly the missus won’t appreciate you knocking seven shades of shit out of rubber pads constantly. For any non-playing people in the room it’s the audible equivalent of chinese water torture. Also the natural sound of hitting pads constantly will certainly drown out whatever sound is coming out of the telly unless it’s turned up loud. So whereas you get the feeling of drumming, you don’t get the feeling of playing the drums, I’ll explain here.

A lot of drumming (to me) is based on feeling, you listen how the melody is going, judge when it’s going to change and change the pattern or do the fills accordingly. So you’re listening to yourself play just as much as listening to the rest of the band, you need to know where the changes are going to come, but you also need to know if you’re going the right tempo and if your current rhythm sounds correct. When you’re playing the rock band drums, because you’re hitting them so noisily, it’s tricky to hear the music coming out the telly with a decent degree of clarity. So you have to rely on the visual scrolling fret board. This makes it really tricky to keep within the right timing and tempo. It’s ok when the beat settles for the verses, but it’s a bugger to know exactly what to do 0.3 seconds after seeing what to do on the screen when you can’t hear if you’re fast or slow. With the guitar you get exactly the right feeling when you’re playing as you can hear it perfectly. But that’s not so with the drums. You have to translate the knocking sounds you’re making on the pads for actual drum parts in your head so you certainly need to concentrate more.

To be a little more succinct, the pads are noisy and they put you off.

2. The sticks are shite. They’re too light and low quality. If i were you, i’d go get a nice pair of sticks from a music shop, something like Vic Firth 5B’s, or if you want something a little heavier a pair of Metal N’s, nice weight and feel good in your hands. They’re less than a tenner and will last you forever so they’re well worth it. Me? I found an old pair of Timpani beaters i had lying around and they helped quite a bit with the noise reduction. If you’re after some cheap ones, you could just get something like these.

3. It’s too easy, so it’s too hard. The patterns are all over the shop in their attempt to simplify the rhythm. So i end up playing parts of the kit instinctively when the notes aren’t on the screen; mostly the bass drum. Then i realise i shouldn’t be playing the bass drum, which makes me lose concentration on the snare and hi-hat. Bloody annoying.

So consequently i’m really struggling with self-restraint. Hopefully it’ll get a bit more natural on hard. I do realise this is more of a personal gripe as most of you will equate more hits to being more difficult, but for more it’s really hard to pull right back and not play the bass drum where there clearly is one.

That’s about it really. Don’t get me wrong, i really love the game and i’m looking forward to the day i can pay people to be my friends so they’ll play rock band with me, the drums are great fun and will be the one instrument that everyone fights over while the mic gathers dust on the floor.

As long as you can live with my points above, especially the noisy pads, then you’ll have many many hours of rockin’ bandy goodness.

Nicked from this place (always give credit where it’s due)

Whore burning: Burn those bitch whores!

Face-Stepping: Simply killing an innocent bystander isn’t enough. You’ve gotta assert yourself to make it count.

Drown your date: Nothing says “I need some space” like throwing your special girl into a large body of water.

Driving on the sidewalk: Make someone’s mundane life a little more exciting and grind their bones beneath your car!

Using helicopter blades as a weapon: Nothing makes us smile more than seeing a human body flung down the street at 50 mph.

Maiming hospital patients: The next time flu shots are being handed out, everyone will know to get the HELL out of your way.

Blow up a petrol station: Stick your 112.9 a litre up your arse and burn!

You too can rent roman, the voice actor is looking for work now:

Yup, that’s the latest search phrase people are typing in by their thousands so i thought i’d oblige.

http://www.pornotube.com
http://www.redtube.com
tube8.com

http://www.empornium.us
http://www.torrentz.com

the first 3 are flash streaming sites and the second 2 are torrent sites, it’s pretty much all you need for a smut-tastic wank-frenzied festival.

Just don’t let the missus/mum catch you with pants round your ankles taking Captain Picard to warp speed.

Imagine if that happened. Go on, just imagine it. Right now.

Imagine her walking in right at the point when you’re in your vinegar strokes, you know, the event horizon. Imagine the look on her horrified face and how embarrassed you’d be. And you wouldn’t be able to look at her in the face for weeks after coz she knows you like watching chicks with dicks fuck hairy biker fellas up the arse.

Go on, picture it?

Can you picture it really clearly?

This could be YOU...

Anyway, enjoy your thrap…

Well that’s just effing great. I get home all excited last night, there’s the instruments but no sodding game. The instruments box is enormous and weighs about 6 kilos. So i sit there for half the night just looking at the fun things i could be doing if play.com weren’t such fucking retards.

Most annoying thing is, the missus has said she’s not going to purposefully wait in for the postie as she’s meeting a mate at half 10. Great! Just fucking dandy!

So i’ll have to leg it out tomorrow morning to go pick it up from the postman with those red cards that they stick through the box if they can’t be arsed delivered your goods properly, that means i’ll get to play it for a couple of hours while the little man is asleep on saturday lunchtime. Then i can’t even play it saturday night coz the flaming eurovision is on and the missus has no-one else to watch it with so i have to sit there looking interested and entertained for 3 hours.

I relented and got the instruments out last night and put them together, guitar looks different, it’s a fender strat this time, it’s slightly bigger, feels slightly heavier (i’m comparing it to the ps2 gibson sg here), the strummer doesn’t click this time, i don’t know if it’s been made a little analogue so you strum harder and you play louder or what, the 2 most important bits are the fact that the buttons on the neck aren’t fully coloured any more, they’re just coloured on the top and bottom of the button, the face is just beige like the rest of the neck, and of course there’s the extra buttons at the end for shredding, so i’ll never use those coz i’m a bit rubbish at GH.

The mic is pretty solid, looks like it was modelled on a Shure SM58 but a little shorter and a tiny bit more ‘plastic-y’.

The drums aren’t as bad as i thought they would be, but they’re not as good as i hoped. The floor pedal is spring powered with rubber feet on the bottom of the pedal itself so it doesn’t make as much of a satisfying ‘thud’ as a real floor pedal, but i suppose it’s good if you’re playing upstairs. The sticks are incredibly light and cheap. I would certainly recommend going out to a music shop and buying some Vic Firth 5A’s instead of these, they feel so much nicer, a lot better weight and much less scratchy. The pads themselves actually push in about a centimetre, there’s virtually no bounce and they give quite a loud ‘dok’ when you hit them, but they sound like what they are; a cheap digital drum kit.

Overall i reckon they’re not too bad, certainly not as bad as i was dreading. They could have been like the truly awful Donkey Kongas which i played with for about 20 minutes then they went to that great dust gathering place under the desk never to be touched again other than to be kick back under when they fell out.

One way or another, i’ll be playing rock band tonight, whether it’s online or not, i’ll have to wait until tonight to find out.

As for tonight, well i have a little contingency if we miss the postie today…