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Here's a new interview Mike did with "DC101 At Home" which is streaming on Facebook!

Check it out here.

We are sending our love out to the worldwide Linkin Park community of fans and fans of Chester Bennington today. It is not an easy day for many, and we acknowledge that.

If you would like to use this thread to share stories of Chester, Linkin Park, and more, please feel free.

Please know that we care about you all and we are very grateful that you are a part of the LP family.

And now Chester is trending today!

Mike made an appearance on a podcast from Angry Americans - here's the rundown. It's over 2 hours long.

"The frontman for the legendary rock band, Linkin Park (@LinkinPark), Mike Shinoda (@MikeShinoda) is a true creative genius. [1:01:10] His groundbreaking work spans genres, geography and generations. Mike has performed with brilliant icons ranging from Jay-Z to Paul McCartney. Throughout his career Mike Shinoda has found ways to channel his righteous anger into positive impact. And to connect, unite and empower others worldwide. He’s a leader in the arena. A voice of reason. A conscience. A great American success story. A parent. An activist. A philanthropist. A patriot. 

Mike and Linkin Park have a massive global following--and hold the title as the most-liked band on Facebook and amassing over 7.7 billion YouTube views. He has sold over 55 million albums worldwide, sold out stadiums around the world, and earned 2 Grammy Awards, 5 American Music Awards, 4 MTV VMA Awards, 10 MTV Europe Music Awards, 3 World Music Awards, and “Rock Album of the Year” at the 2018 iHeartRadio Music Awards for Linkin Park’s seventh studio album, One More Light

In 2014, Mike and Paul partnered on a groundbreaking campaign with Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) to support veterans that included dozens of Linkin Park shows and reached hundreds of thousands of people nationwide. And Mike’s got a new project that’s bringing people together and opening doors for others worldwide: "Dropped Frames Vol.1" is out now. He joined host Paul Rieckhoff (@PaulRieckhoff) for an extended, candid and unedited conversation about the new project, his pandemic experience, what he thinks the future of concerts look like, what he thinks about Trump, Black Lives Matter and the toxicity of social media. AND, Mike shares an amazing first car story--and of course, his favorite drink."

Listen to the full podcast here.

It turns out "Dropped Frames" is not only the name of Mike's series of instrumental albums, but it's also the name of a weekly talk show online talking about gaming! So it was only fitting for them to do an interview with Mike, right?

Mike spent the second half of his stream time on July 15th hanging with the guys from Dropped Frames for an hour, and you can check it out below.
 

A few highlights:
 

"When we were on tour for our first record Hybrid Theory, we were on a bus. We were able to get two buses at one point. We were successful enough to get two buses. And in one of the buses we put a big recording rig in the back and it was the size of a refrigerator. They drilled into the bus and strapped it to the bus so it didn't like fall over or roll around. We were running it on a Mac with a keyboard and that's how we recorded a lot of the demos to our second record. By the time we got to our fourth record, it was just all on a laptop with a little keyboard controller. So I've lived through all of that stuff and collected stuff the whole time, so I have, for me, what's a fun mix of the most current virtual instruments and then like the MPC 60 which is full of samples and 12 bit."

"The band, we have collected between all of the band members and touring entities... when we toured, at one point, we had to have six copies of any piece of gear on stage because we needed for the main rig... you know the stories you hear of like Guns N Roses, where it's like, they just collect and collect and collect gear, and they make songs, and Chinese Democracy was an album they worked on for decades. It had studios just full of junk. We were starting to head that direction. The reasoning was that we might have tours that butted right up next to each other in North America, in Europe, and in Asia. Or maybe one of those was in Australia. And we couldn't get all of the gear from one place to another to continue our tour quickly enough. Because they'd have to, in order to do that, you'd have to put the gear on a ship and ship it overseas and that takes time. So we had to have six copies of every drum. Six keyboards. Six vocal mics, all of the compressors, every single piece of gear on the stage including the front of house mixing console and whatever. So, I mean, just a lot of junk at the end of the day. You buy a bunch of stuff, you rent some of it, and then it piles up in a unit and eventually you have try and sell it after it's been bashed to hell because we've been touring it around the world."

Mike didn't do a Q&A on July 15th as it was just an art stream and an interview with the "Dropped Frames" talk show.

- "Taka said a few years ago he worked with you and Steve Aoki. What happened to that? Did it become Last One to Know?" - "I believe that it did. I don't know when he said that and I don't know what he was focused on, but I wrote Last One To Know and I just liked the song and then I played it for a few people and Taka did do a version of it. Steve and his manager just loved it and they wanted to do something with it and they had suggested Lights and I think she's great. I think she's super cool. And I think the thing about it was just that on that one I had always imagined it being a female vocalist. I actually wanted it to be a female vocalist for the whole song. That was my thing. I didn't want it to be my song at all, but they did, so that's how it ended up working out."

- "Back in the day what did you think about people who downloaded music illegally?" -> "I've talked about this like a billion times I think. It didn't really bother me. I always said the trade off is, like, if you never buy the stuff that your favorite groups are making, if you only downloaded it for free, then effectively that group could basically like, go away. If you think about it, that's the whole problem with downloading for free and why people would say, "Oh you're stealing from the band", or whatever. If you were a band coming up and nobody paid you for any of your stuff, then you quit. So that's sucky. If you love the band, it's a shitty thing to happen. And that's true for anybody, any group. If you look at the number of followers or downloads or you put up stuff in your store and nobody buys it, it's like "Oh, nobody cares, so I guess move on." It is what it is."

- "How do you guys decide where to go when you're planning a tour?" -> "There's an art to planning a tour. Obviously part of it is what makes financial sense, where are the fans, where have we been, where have we not been. Sometimes it gets kicked off by like, an offer from a festival or another band to tour with. Like if a couple of big festivals in Europe are happening over the summer and they make an offer to the band, it's like, "Ok we've got one show at the beginning of July and one show at the beginning of August, so we fill in the middle, you know." So there's a few festivals or whatever. For us, it was easier than most because we had relations with a lot of the festivals and could go headline and stuff like that. But on my own, on solo tours, I wasn't going to be headlining festivals. So I could find different festivals. There were ones that I got offers and then I would do like, do some of them and not want to do others. It was a lot more... you had to finesse it."

- "Hola from Hawaii! I met Joe when he was doing a mural for POW! WOW! Hawaii. Is it true you were considering doing a mural for it?" -> "I was! I was supposed to go and then some stuff came up and I couldn't. Part of the problem is that.... POW! WOW! is a really great art show, they do them in Hawaii and other places and I've wanted for years to come to the one in Hawaii. And it's always like, right next to my birthday and stuff comes up right around my birthday. I just haven't been able to make it out, but I really want to. If you haven't seen that, just wherever you live, look it up. POW! WOW! Hawaii is like, a really great art show. They paint murals and stuff like that all over the islands."

- "If you could collaborate with any artist right now, who would it be?" -> "I don't know. I love the guys from Brockhampton, they're great. I think Denzel Curry is really talented. I don't know."

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/681482794

The Tuesday, July 14 recap for Mike's stream.

- "How did Second to None come about?" -> "Second to None was a beat, I think I came up with that beat after the Fort Minor record, I think. And I wanted to hear somebody rapping over it, I didn't want to just put it on my own. We were working on the Styles of Beyond record and I kind of pitched it to them. And we ended up just doing it. I think we didn't know what would happen with it, but we were like, "Oh yeah this is dope, this is a dope beat." My concept for it, for part of it, I was listening to like 1988, 89, and 90s rap. Before Big Daddy Kane started making songs for like, girls. Like he was making R&B songs. At first he was doing like, hardcore rap and then he was like, making songs to be an R&B star. I loved back when he was dancing too, with it, which was so crazy. If don't know anything about Big Daddy Kane, look up Big Daddy Kane at the Apollo. K-A-N-E, that was like one of my favorite eras of stuff as a little kid, like seeing this stuff. And so Second to None was created with that in my mind."

- "I want to know how you guys made the first sound in Battle Symphony. Is it a sample?" -> "I think that was part of the demo, like the vocal demo. And chopped up music from the demo, super effected. So treated both of those things together as if I sampled it, and then effected that. Played it on pads and stuff, as I recall."

- "How did it feel hearing Kidz Bop cover In The End? Did you have any input on it? -> "Uh, no. When somebody covers something like that, they just do it. You can get in the way of it, but it's like kind of, I don't remember how it works. I think the way it works is, you could like, sue them. So your option is to let it go or to threaten them to not put it out. But you can cover a song as long as you're staying true and not really changing the song. Then you just need to make the parties aware that you covered it. I think that's how it works, I'm not 100% sure. At the time, I remember being NOT happy that Kidz Bop covered In The End. But also, it was like, it's a huge song and they're going to cover any song that's huge, so you don't have a lot of say in the matter."

- "What tools of the trade did you add from working with Rick Rubin? Any cool stories of working with him?" -> "The stories I always tell about that, the sessions with Rick, the main change for us was we were making an instrumental and writing over it. And that's different than sitting at an instrument and writing chords and melody. And so he was trying to get us to try to move more in that direction. I had kind of been doing that, think I wrote the chorus to In The End and Breaking The Habit just chords and vocals. Castle Of Glass too. I think you can tell, like there's like the way the chords and everything interlocks with the vocal. I think you can feel that in the song. And I think that's why Rick was trying to get us to do that. So over the course of a few records he got us closer to that in progression over time."

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/679529291

It was just all around a weird release. Soundcheck Session, so a significant portion of it was not in front of a crowd. The only two songs from the show were In the End and Numb, which were the two piano songs. The entire thing just didn't make any sense, and releasing it as video only with no way to stream the audio.

If Crossing A Line and Make It Up As I Go were on there, why couldn't there be a proper release of the PT live songs?

Mike's first Q&A summary in a while, here's the recap and highlights.

- "Could you active your phone number in Italy and other countries?" -> "Here's the thing. The number that I have released to you guys, I do it with a company called Community and Community is not yet available in other countries. They are getting there, they are a growing start up. What they have to do, is they do deals with the phone companies basically to acquire numbers and then they assign those numbers to the people that work with them. So they gave me a number. It's very hard for me to keep up with texting people back. But the texts do come through to my app on my phone. I don't get pinged every time somebody texts me because that would be too crazy because the followers are in the five digits so there is a lot of people. But I see more than I respond to. And it does come to me. I should do it more, I don't do it enough."

Mike talked about lemon tea and ginger tea helping him with his throat and voice.

- "I was wondering if you ever plan to release a live album from the Post Traumatic Tour." -> "I don't think I'll do it. I kind of don't want to do a live... I feel like those shows are very special and I don't think I'm going to release it. I think that people saw it, if you didn't, the stuff is online already. I don't think I need to have an official version."

There was a huge explanation on publishing and royalties, how complicated it is, how countries where songs are recorded actually have a say in the publishing, etc. Mike said he is trying to get it so the Dropped Frames music can be used in Twitch streams by other people. He said he is not the one taking down Linkin Park music online, it is extremely complicated.

- "Release a vinyl version of Dropped Frames." -> "I will if there's enough demand. That doesn't mean, by the way, that Dropped Frames has to sell a bajillion copies. It just means that there have to be enough people that want vinyl so that the vinyl will pay for itself. In order to make a product, you have to produce a certain quantity so I would have to have enough people who were interested in buying it for it to make sense. I don't know how to quantify that."

- "Can you tell us why songs like I'll Be Gone and Promises I Can't Keep were never performed live?" -> "You know, it was just that we only have so much room in the set. The guys have never wanted to play longer than 90-100 minutes or so. We sometimes stretch that a little bit. That was the limit. The more songs that we have to add, the more the band has to know all of those songs and I don't think that, I guess I just didn't have the interest or brain space to add more. We did add a lot, we did play so many. At some points we were rotating three different setlists with maybe a 1/3 of those being unique to that setlist. So it was a lot to remember. I could have probably done more, but I think that's because of what I was responsible for. I don't know how to explain that. It wasn't really me, I would have done longer sets, I would have done a little bit longer."

- "Do other members of the band have home studios too? Can you tell us about them?" -> "So everybody is different, everybody has got some stuff. Not as in depth as what I've got going here. Brad doesn't really have anything. Dave has some bass guitars and drums, but no mics or recording equipment really. He's got a laptop with some stuff on it just to throw a couple of things on it, but he doesn't do recording. He'll only do it if I'm asking him to or somebody's trying to send a thing. But he doesn't really mess with it. Joe has stuff, but it's usually in disarray. He gets excited about a thing, buy a piece of gear, play with it, and then move on really quickly. And there aren't that many units that he goes super deep on. He knows the sampler stuff really well and of course turntables and Serato and all of that. In terms of the individual keyboards, he usually relies on an engineer to go deep on those for him, which is normal. A lot of people are that way. A lot of people are that way if they have the means to have that gear. If you're in Joe's situation, it's not crazy. Rob probably has almost the setup I have or getting there. Some of the stuff is a little older, and he can use it. It's like, the focus is usually always on drums for his stuff. He's got some other stuff to play around with, but it's mostly all about drums. And even then, up until now, we've gotten better results at my place or in a professional studio. But I upgraded a bunch of my drum stuff in the last two years so I feel like I get awesome drum sounds now."

Mike isn't very interested in doing drive in concerts.

He isn't going to do a lyric writing session on a stream.

- "How was working with Darren King on Hold It Together? Darren absolutely rips?" -> "I agree. Go do yourself a favor and check out Darren's Instagram page because he puts a lot of his stuff up, his crazy, creative studio studio sessions. We didn't meet in person because he lives in not LA. He said, "Yeah I get a really good sound at my home in my home studio, so let me just send you tracks." And we did it that way and then I chopped those up and used them. I didn't just like, play the drums. I grabbed them and effected them and chose different sampled drum parts for the beat and verse and got to his part in the bridge. Darren's the reason the drum stuff on "Hold My Shit Together" off of the Post Traumatic record was so good. He's so great."

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/678532004

On July 12th, KROQ reaired Mike's Sound Space 2018 concert via Twitter broadcast and included a new interview that Mike did with Nicole Alvarez.

This show was one of the first Post Traumatic shows of Mike's world tour and featured six songs played to an intimate crowd.

Check it out here.

7 hours ago, Astat said:

He'd probably work some stuff in as mashup/song transition/show intro material, but I can't see him doing a full performance of anything other than Open Door. Maybe he'd use Booty Down as some funny exit music at the end of the set like LP used to do with the bluegrass version of Crawling.

Kind of off topic, but... 

Chester dancing to bluegrass OSC at DBS Amsterdam is hilarious.

What do you think?

Mike didn't play Brooding live for Post Traumatic,, he hasn't really played many instrumentals live over the course of his career honestly. Session and Cure For The Itch were both Joe-only tracks. Mike did do on the 2014-2015 world tour part of his solo medley instrumentally which he played.

When he inevitably plays solo again, since he's releasing at least 3 volumes of instrumentals, do you think he slips one in somewhere? Some of the volume 1 tracks are pretty good, he could fit one in to a setlist. But he already has trouble fitting everything in since he has so much material he can play.

Forbes has posted a new interview with Mike.

Baltin: At what point did this evolve into an album?

Shinoda: When people's tour schedules fell apart and they weren't allowed to continue on as planned I watched a number of artists panic because the things they planned to do they weren't getting to do. And also because the attention they were expecting to have from people was gonna go away. And all of a sudden they were scrambling to grab people's attention in other ways. All of a sudden every single music artist in the universe had to live stream concerts from their bedroom. And I was so bored by that. I don't know why I felt that way. I just didn't like it. And that's not a knock by the way.

Baltin: Were there any live streams you enjoyed?

Shinoda: Post Malone's Nirvana one was dope. That was one of my favorite ones. I've caught some of the stuff that Questlove and the Roots have done. Quest is always spinning records and stuff, talking about his experience in the studio or bits and pieces of trivia about the artists that he's playing. I love that. My favorite things have been random unknown singers on Instagram who sit down with a guitar and sing a thing. And Instagram's algorithm is so good that it knows now that's what I love. And it just shows me new singers with like 25,000 followers singing a song with a ukulele. That's half my feed (laughs).

Baltin: So could these discoveries ever lead to collaborations?

Shinoda: When I hear people I think are really dope I reach out. That's how I ended up doing a remix with Ren For Short. I heard her on a playlist and I was like, "What's this girl all about?" She had like no followers. I put it on my playlist, I posted it on Instagram, she DM'ed me, we started talking and then I made a remix for her and we debuted it on my stream on Twitch.

Baltin: One of the interesting things about this time is seeing how people evolve and show different sides of themselves. I doubt you would have made an all-instrumental album at another time.

Shinoda: I fell into it. These albums, Dropped Frames is gonna be the first of at least three. I've got the second one done and the third one is in progress. And I say in progress, basically it's just tightening up and mixing stuff that I made on the stream. But certainly it's a thing I wouldn't have done unless I was in this situation that I'm in right now. It's also funny cause it's clearly not for everybody. Instrumental music is not your way to the Billboard top five (laughs).  But anybody who knows my discography knows I've done instrumentals often, on every record, every couple of records there [are] instrumental tracks. A few different instrumental pieces that have gone to film and TV as well. I feel like there is a poetry to the instrumental that it leaves an openness to interpretation in terms of the content that is a lot of fun. And I haven't ever done that before on a full-length album.

Check out the full interview here.

On 7/10/2020 at 9:57 AM, erichoholic2k1 said:

I know the expectations of the LPL Community are high for a "Hybrid Theory" anniversary release, but after reading Mike's quote ("I don't want to hear his voice"), I wouldn't be surprised if it's almost like a "Best of LPU" compilation. Meaning we get the original album "remastered", and then a bunch of demos that have appeared on LPU albums, along with the B-sides from that era (High Voltage, My December). Nothing "new", at least to us, but to the masses, this is the first time the "In the End" demo, for example, is on streaming services.

 

I also seem to remember the listening party for "One More Light Live", and Mike not being able to listen to the whole album. Wouldn't be surprised if he or the band just let the label or someone else on the LP "team" select, edit and mix the tracks that made the cut. Same thing could easily happen here, where the only real involvement we get from LP is a generic letter from Brad or something as part of the "deluxe 20th anniversary release".

Mike's leak says this is not the case. We'll see what happens. It's leaning towards it being something epic that the band is involved in pretty heavily.

They are just show intros and outros. First one from 2004 could be some type of demo made by Mike and/or Joe. Who knows. No one has ever commented on them.

Listening parties have become a "thing" with Mike, dating back to the LIVING THINGS album in 2012. Ever since then, Mike has fully embraced and participated in listening parties with fans online.

So you didn't think he'd skip out on this one, did you?

Join Mike on Twitch on July 10th at 10am PST for "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1" listening party as he talks about the songs. He will also be debuting the new music video for "Open Door", created by Ana Ginter, on the stream. See you there!

"In My Eyes is a series of lectures through the eyes of brand founders who turned their passionate creative lifestyle into a business. Filmed on location at the University of Southern California Marshall Business School’s Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies by Professor Mike West"

Q&A time from the day before "Dropped Frames" is released!
 

- "Did Chester teach you screaming techniques?" -> "Chester could never have taught anybody to scream how he screams. In fact, I'm of the belief that you either have that or you don't. Coming in the band, he hadn't really SCREAMED screamed on records before. He had sung heavy, he had yelled, he had done things like that that had indicated to me, "Oh he can do these things", but we wanted like, full on metal screams, which he had not really done. He had definitely not done, at least I had not heard it on anything. He said that, he told me he had never done it. So once we started doing it, he was like, "Oh, I can really do this" so there was this unlocking of "How many versions of this can we do?" I can't do it, and there's no amount of practice that's going to make my voice do that. My voice does not do that."

- "I was wondering if you'll continue the streams after quarantine." -> "Yeah that's the plan!"

- "When Dave left Xero to fulfill it commitment to the Snax? If not, how did Phoenix's return come about? Had Kyle left the band before his return?" -> "This sounds like a soap opera. For those who you don't know, which is probably very few of you, in the beginning of the band, Dave Farrell, Phoenix, was in our band. And then he was also in another band and he promised them that if they ever went on tour that he'd go. So that happened and we started getting ready to record, to do our Hybrid Theory album recording sessions. Dave was gone and so we played his bass parts, me, Brad, our producer Don at one point was putting them in. We were just like... I didn't want Don playing bass on the record, it was our record. He's a good bass player but it's just the premise of it. We tried out of a couple of other people at the time. You mentioned Kyle Christener, he was in the band and we played with for a while. Scott Koziol was in the band for a while, we actually toured with Scott for a little bit. And there was another kid who played... he just like played on a couple of tracks but he wasn't a great fit. Neither of the other two guys played on the record, Kyle and Scott.... Kyle was before, we played a couple of shows with Kyle, but it was like local shows-ish like Arizona and LA. And then Scott we actually went on the road with. And then Dave came back. And I kind of felt like, I wasn't one hundred percent sure Dave was going to come back. But all of us were basically like, let's keep bothering Dave, let's never let up, like giving him reminders him that the door is open and he should come play bass with us again. Because the dynamic changed too much. The other guys were sweet guys but the dynamic felt right when Dave was in the band and we knew the difference, right? So it was like, Dave's not married to The Snax, he's not going to do that forever."

- "Iridescent is my favorite LP song, can you tell us the origin and the writing process?" -> "Iridescent just started with that piano bit. It was kind of like when we've done the acapella or piano and vocal versions. It kind of was that. I wrote it just piano and vocal and then built everything on top of the piano and vocal version. So not anything crazy there, it was just a very traditional writing process."

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/674672335

This is reairing on July 12th. 

The in ear monitors. He said he cannot perform certain songs without Chester in his IEMs because that is the way he has played them for absolute ages. The first song that comes to mind is Papercut. He probably has it for other songs, maybe Castle Of Glass, etc too.

They had them at the Hollywood Bowl show with Chester too. Either Gavin Rossdale or Daron talked about it in an interview afterward.

Alt Press posted a new interview with Mike today, right as "Dropped Frames, Vol. 1" is being released globally.

So I know you had some issues with “Open Door” between you and management, and you didn’t know if you were going to include it on this album at all. How did you reach the decision to go for it and find those six or seven vocalists included on it, too? 

"I felt like including it was only natural because it was the impetus for this whole thing, right? Streaming the making of that song was the thing that led to the creation of the channel and writing music on that channel. So in the beginning, I was just trying to break up the monotony of quarantine, and “Open Door” was like a key to that. The process of making that made me realize the fans were such an important part of that equation. And not just because like, “If no one’s watching, what’s the point of doing the channel?” It’s more than that. On my channel, it’s not just about, “Hey, look at me! I’m worth watching!” I have a skill set and things I can do, so I take those, and you guys, as a group of viewers, tell me how to use those things in ways that are going to either entertain all of us or challenge me and make me excited to make something that’s going to entertain you."

He elaborates with a huge answer about when he brought up Chester on the stream the other day, with at least a three+ paragraph response. Check that out.

Check out the full interview here.

Chester is in his IEMs on the PT Tour, FYI.

Album is being released globally today!

Let us know what your favorite songs are!

52 minutes ago, kiq fLP said:

I found weird the story behind "Debris". I mean, the song has gang vocals on it. The way as Mike said, gave me the impression that we wroted the whole demo by himself.

Debris doesn't have any gang vocals, Mike is the only one on vocals on that song. He did write the entire demo by himself.

On Mike's stream today, he mentioned that while volume one of "Dropped Frames" is not even out yet, he has already mixed volume two and submitted it. He's now working on putting volume three together, with an estimated release time of about four weeks between albums. Finally, he confirmed that volume two will have a different cover as well.

Mike said about volume one, "I'll tell you the tracklisting, but a lot of it won't make sense to you. Just for those of you who haven't already seen it. The tracklisting is Open Door, Super Galaxtica, which is already out on your streaming services, Duckbot is the one that is kind of started with an electronic..., Cupcake Cake which is also known as the Bollywood Jam, El Rey Domonio which was the Mariachi Jam, Doodle Buzz, Channeling that has Dan Mayo.. this is actually Channeling part 1 because I made two things with Dan Mayo, Osiris which is also out right now, Babble Bobble, Session McSessionface, Neon Crickets, and the final track is gonna be Booty Down."

He added, "Very happy about putting that out. I have already mixed and delivered volume 2, so that will be out in a month or so. It will have 12 more songs, no vocals this time on volume 2, so in a month from now. And it will have a new cover, which you haven't seen. And you won't see until it gets released, or leaked, or whatever."