In the last 15 years of my life I’ve veered almost entirely to the electronic side of the musical spectrum, but I can’t deny that my roots are in headbanging. I just got Guitar Hero 2 and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s freakin’ amazing. It’s giving me a nice flashback to my musical youth, and it’s an interesting study in interaction design, interface design, game design, graphic design… it goes on and on how interesting and fun this game is.

As I’ve been going through the game (just passed medium, woot) my wife and I have both come to the conclusion that there are so many songs that we’ve heard all our lives but never really appreciated them for their guitar work. Amazing, no? Well, if you already play guitar, maybe this is old news to you, but I never had guitar playing on my list of things to do when i was a kid, so I just never had the ear skills to pick apart a rock track in the unobvious places until now. Some of the newer tracks are incredibly hard to play and start to feel *incredibly long* after about 4 minutes. Others which are more familiar to me feel like so much fun to play and seem to end too quickly.

Now, I know, or know of, most of the tracks in the competition playlist… but there were a few that I didn’t, so I figured I’d go through the itunes store and see if I could locate them. With the exception of 1 track, (danzig’s Mother) I was able to find them. Here is the list with links to the itunes store:

1. Opening Licks

• Motley Crue – Shout at the Devil
• Danzig – Mother
• Cheap Trick – Surrender
• Wolfmother – Woman
• Spinal Tap – Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight

2. Amp-Warmers

• Kiss – Strutter
• Nirvana – Heart-Shaped Box
• Police – Message in a Bottle
• Van Halen – You Really Got Me
• Kansas – Carry on Wayward Son

3. String-Snappers

• Foo Fighters – Monkey Wrench
• Alice in Chains – Them Bones
• Iggy Pop and the Stooges – Search and Destroy
• Pretenders – Tattooed Love Boys
• Black Sabbath – War Pigs

4. Thrash and Burn

• Warrant – Cherry Pie
• Butthole Surfers – Who Was in My Room Last Night
• Mathew Sweet – Girlfriend
• Rolling Stones – Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’
• Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child O’ Mine

5. Return of the Shred

• Rage Against the Machine – Killing in the Name Of
• Primus – John the Fisherman
• Sword – Freya
• Thin Lizzy – Bad Reputation
• Aerosmith – Last Child

6. Relentless Riffs

• Heart – Crazy on You
• Stone Temple Pilots – Tripping on a Hole in a Paper Heart
• Stray Cats – Rock This Town
• Allman Brothers – Jessica
• Jane’s Addiction – Stop

7. Furious Fretwork

• Anthrax – Madhouse
• Living End – Carry Me Home
• Lamb of God – Laid to Rest
• Reverend Horton Heat – Psychobilly Freakout
• Rush – YYZ

8. Face-Melters

• Avenged Sevenfold – Beast and the Harlot
• Suicidal Tendencies – Institutionalized
• Dick Dale – Misirlou
• Megadeth – Hangar 18
• Lynyrd Skynyrd – Free Bird

Any of my friends readin’ this have a PS2 version of guitar hero and want to meet up to play? hit me up!

Technorati Tags: guitarhero2

I know I’ve been completely asleep for the past 5 years, holy hell, take a look at this:

I’m… speechless. That was freaking amazing. Get to about the 1:20 or so… WTf?!?!?!?!

Technorati Tags: djwoody, skills, turntable

Back in the day, I was learning how to beatmatch using the one turntable my family got me, a ScratchMaster mixer, and a program my brother wrote for me with my design direction. It was called QT Turntable. It was built on quicktime back when you had to upgrade to get it to understand MP3 files. (o-o-old school.)

The big thing about QTTurntable was that it was barebones. It had the basic audio file playback controls you’d expect, and then it also had some very specific DJ controls. I wanted an audio file player that I could adjust the pitch of like I could on my Technics SL1200-mk2, so my brother built it for me like the above screenshot. The most major feature aside from adjusting the playback speed was the temporary pitch adjustment (horizontal slider with the pointy indicator). This simulated grabbing the spindle of a turntable platter and spinning it up just a bit or putting your finder on the side of the platter to momentarily slow it down. This is a super-basic DJ skill that you use when you’re trying to get your track beatmatched with another.

This program was awesome, and I DJ’d 3 parties with it successfully. When Mac OSX rolled around, you could still sort of watch it not work in Classic mode, and then recently I got the “circle-slash” icon on it to let me know that this program isn’t really a program anymore. So sad. I got to take a weeklong cocoa training class at Big Nerd Ranch, but recreating this is slightly out of my scope of possibility currently.

I’ve since gone on to buy or use many digital DJ solutions including Final Scratch 1.5, Hercules DJ Console+traktor, and dj1800. The all have very good tools for all-inclusive DJing, but sort of fall down on something. It’s usually the interface. Heck, even ours was challenging to use, I’ll make no claim otherwise.

I know there’s nothing like DJing with vinyl, and I sure wish I had the money, back strength, interest in physical media, time to go record shopping, and physical space to keep doing that… but I don’t. My beatmatching future is digital.

So many people are into this digital djing thing now, and I think that’s way cool. I just wish I could get this kind of pitch control. Maybe not even all of the pitch control we had, just nice big horizontal sliders, and my temporary pitch nudge controls.

Technorati Tags: qtturntable

Peter was a late addition to the First Friday event at Works/San Jose for september 2007. He did a music set and then did visuals for us for the rest of the night. He wrote to let me know of his upcoming gig:

Hi All,

I’m participating in the Illuminated Corridor on Wednesday evening at 7:16pm, near 8th and Folsom in SF. We’re filling the walls of the Prelinger library with projections from their archives, and filling your ears (and the neighborhood fm radio spectrum) with sound.
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