Astat

Title could just be "Painted Me." The "To both DBX's" obviously refers to something being sent to a pair of DBX rackmount processors (probably one of their compressors/limiters/gates that are found in basically every studio everywhere). 2.7 is probably some kind of numbering system for what is actually being sent to the rack units. Track 2, take 7 is a possibility, or 2.7 could also be a specific setting for one of the parameters on the DBX unit. The presence of the Post-It note on the monitor seems to indicate some kind of reminder/correction that needs to be addressed, so "wrong" could easily just be an indicator of "Hey, fix this." "Painted Me - Wrong 2.7 to both DBX's" is how I would read that.

I intend to be around forever as well, so this works out nicely.

A lot of my info is/will be on there, and I'm helping with the Linkinpedia Facebook page. I just haven't (as of yet) written any of the actual wiki articles.

If there's an earlier tape (which I doubt exists, at least in a publicly-available manner), it's probably just the same recordings on the tape we have, minus Rhinestone. Mike's said in the past that the early demos were primarily just him and Mark (probably with Brad supplying some guitar/bass work too), and once he started shopping demos around looking for a publishing deal, he was told that he really should put an actual band together. We don't really know for sure who all actually played on the Xero recordings anyway.

Good question...I actually don't think I've ever seen an image of the back side of the insert on the first version!

Aww, thanks for the kind words guys. I remember nearly everything you talked about in here, haha.

1. [...] Symphony 2. [...] Light 3. Heavy 4. Friendly Fire 5. Invisible 6. [...] Goodbye 7. [...] Right (maybe "Halfway Right" ?) 8. Out of Reach

From an engineering standpoint, there's no reason to "protect" a mix from something like this on an album, as you claim. The reason this probably works more reliably on early demos is because of the simple fact that they were much simpler mixes. Let's break down a likely tracking sheet for In the End (Hybrid Theory album version) for example: *NOTE: PURE SPECULATION BASED ON MY (limited) STUDIO ENGINEERING EXPERIENCE - I HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE ACTUAL MIXING PROCESS FOR THIS SONG* DRUMS 1. Kick in 2. Kick out 3. Snare top 4. Snare bottom 5. Tom 1 6. Tom 2 7. Floor tom 8. Hi-hat 9. Ride 10. Overhead L 11. Overhead R 12. Room L 13. Room R MAIN GUITARS 14. Dist. Guitar 1a 15. Dist. Guitar 1b 16. Dist. Guitar 1 room mic 17. Dist. Guitar 2a 18. Dist. Guitar 2b 19. Dist. Guitar 2 room mic 20. Dist. Guitar 3a 21. Dist. Guitar 3b 22. Dist. Guitar 3 room mic 23. Dist. Guitar 4a 24. Dist. Guitar 4b 25. Dist. Guitar 4 room mic ADDITIONAL GUITARS 26. Dist. Guitar 5a (harmonics) 27. Dist. Guitar 5b (harmonics) 28. Dist. Guitar 5c (harmonics) - room mic 29. Dist. Guitar 6a (feedback 1) 30. Dist. Guitar 6b (feedback 1) 31. Dist. Guitar 6c (feedback 1) - room mic 32. Dist. Guitar 7a (feedback 2) 33. Dist. Guitar 7b (feedback 2) 34. Dist. Guitar 7c (feedback 2) - room mic 35. Clean Guitar 1a (verse harmonics) 36. Clean Guitar 1b (verse harmonics) 37. Clean Guitar 1c (verse harmonics) 38. Clean Guitar aux track (delay + reverb) BASS 39. Bass (Mic A) 40. Bass (Mic 41. Bass (D.I.) 42. Bass aux track (blend of D.I. and mic'd tracks) KEYS + STRINGS 43. Piano loop (dry) 44. Piano loop aux track (added reverb) 45. Piano outro (dry) 46. Piano outro aux track (added reverb) 47. Strings 1 48. Strings 2 SAMPLES 49. Samples 1 (scratch-y loop 1) 50. Samples 2 (scratch-y loop 2) 51. Samples 3 (beeping noises in verses) 52. Sampled kick 53. Sampled snare 54. Sampled hi-hat closed 55. Sampled hi-hat open VOCALS 56. Mike main vocal 57. Mike vocal doubles 58. Mike vocal glitch effects 59. Mike vocal other effects (delay + reverb) 60. Chester main vocal 61. Chester vocal doubles 62. Chester vocal effects (delay + reverb + pitch correction, etc.) ...And this is honestly a VERY conservatve estimate. There are probably way more tracks for the sampled percussion parts, each portion of a vocal that was comped together from multiple takes will likely exist on a different track, I didn't include any aux tracks for the distorted guitars/bass/drums, all of the guitar/bass/drum tracks assume that those parts were recorded in a single take which almost never happens...there are realistically probably 80 to 100 tracks of audio in that song. I doubt very much that there's an instance where ANYTHING will invert perfectly over itself in two different parts of the song just based on how much information is being crammed into two channels of audio. Compare that to the demo version, where you're probably dealing with a bunch of stuff that's been combined down to a 24 or 32-track mix based on limited studio resources, plus the fact that the demos are never brickwalled the way the album mixes are, and suddenly each element of the song has a lot more room to stand out on its own. If something's copy-pasted in a different section of the song, you have a much higher chance of being able to cancel it out via inversion because there's not nearly as much stuff taking up space in the mix. There's also a lot less reverb and such on the demos so you're working with much dryer signals on individual tracks, so they're easier to isolate without access to stems. TL;DR - The fewer tracks in a mix, the higher likelihood of your technique for isolating elements of said mix working.

Out of curiosity, what version of Audition do you use? I pretty much know everything there is to know about 3.0 and earlier (as well as the program's predecessor Cool Edit Pro). I'm assuming it's something in the Channel Mixer function but if you're using a later version they may have expanded the capabilities of it. Definitely not something I currently know how to do in Pro Tools either but I'm limited by what plugins they have on the campus computers at McNally Smith right now since I don't have Pro Tools at home yet.

I seem to recall one HTEP track (And One?) having the left and right channels swapped between the original and LPU versions. The mixes are otherwise the same though, LPU version is just more brickwalled. In the End demo on LPU 11 is a bit different than the demo CD version. Only LPU demo that's completely identical to the demo CD is Forgotten.

I've never heard any "DIY effect" that can completely mute a guitar or bass track from a mix without touching anything else like what's in that By Myself clip. It's essentially impossible to do from a standard stereo mix unless you have something weird going on where those parts are the only things in the mix that are either completely mono or hard panned 100% to one side of the mix (which isn't a trait of the early demos). The fact that his previous DIY stuff was done in Adobe Audition, a program I've used for years and know all the ins and outs of, makes me confident that it's not something he could do with that setup. In fact, I don't think it's something I could do with this setup (which is what I've been working with lately).

... http://lplive.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=12321&page=2&do=findComment&comment=266033 http://lplive.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=12321&page=3&do=findComment&comment=266044 http://lplive.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=12321&page=3&do=findComment&comment=266056 http://lplive.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=12321&page=3&do=findComment&comment=266066 http://lplive.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=12321&page=3&do=findComment&comment=266090

That's the keytar seen in the Making of What I've Done video. They always kept it somewhere on stage as a joke during the Minutes to Midnight era.

...This is truly one of the most interesting things I've ever heard in my time in the LP community. It sounds like a board mix from a studio session where the engineer was randomly muting/soloing various tracks during playback to check on levels and the overall quality of individual performances. I'm working on a minor in music production alongside my guitar degree right now, and this literally sounds exactly like what I do at the board while playing back mixes before making decisions on whether to re-record anything or not. There are no currently circulating stems for these demos, and quite frankly, I can't imagine any reason something like this would exist...but there's no way FOR anything like this to exist without someone having access to the stems in the first place either.

Same

I didn't realize that Chester saying two-word phrases while Mike raps the rest of the verses as usual and Mike singing a harmony part on the chorus that was already present on the album constituted "switching parts," lmao.

Theremin wasn't used on New Divide - Mike had a theremin that functioned as a hands-free MIDI controller for performances during the ATS era so he could control filter/oscillation synth parameters without having to manually twist knobs mid-song (he used this on When They Come for Me at the time, as well), but it wasn't for stuff that originated on a theremin. The majority of those demo titles were deciphered months ago: http://lplive.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=12128&page=6&do=findComment&comment=264035

inb4 someone inevitably says No Doubt covered One Step Closer or Amy Lee covered Numb...

It's fake and originates from the period when Bruiser was known to exist but nobody had it yet because it was only available by buying one of the ridiculously expensive Dell Linkin Park Edition computers that came bundled with Open Labs software (this predated the release of Stagelight). There were a bunch of fake Bruiser tracks going around and this was one of them.

Every other Meteora demo to this point (that's had a date put on it) was consistently labeled as 2002 though. It's one thing to be consistently wrong about 1998 vs. 1999 with Hybrid Theory demos, but it'd be odd for them to switch at this point. LP was definitely recording on tour during the Meteora period: http://www.mtv.com/news/1490099/linkin-park-cook-up-collaborations-new-album-on-tour/ Mike also goes off on a tangent about songs not making the cut and being revisited later on in the track-by-track video for this song...yeah, the song may have had attempts at vocal treatments, but that doesn't mean they necessarily happened in 2003. We admittedly know VERY little about LP's writing/recording output between the release of Meteora and the start of the MTM sessions in 2006. Also keep in mind that this could easily be a Mike Shinoda solo demo that they arbitrarily decided to release under the Linkin Park name years later, like Universe.

Huh, that quiet guitar part that comes in way in the background about halfway through Issho Ni really does sound like it may have been sampled from this track. Hard to say that with certainty, though. Even if it is sampled, I wouldn't really call this a demo of Issho Ni based on that because every other aspect of the two songs is different. That'd be like saying High Voltage is a demo of Nobody's Listening.

I think when Mike says that the song sounds like it came from a "later batch," he's specifically referring to it not sounding like a typical Meteora song. The guitar in particular sounds more like a Minutes to Midnight era thing. Entirely possible that the 2003 date is correct and that this isn't even a Meteora demo, if it was a home studio thing Mike could've thrown this together while at home between tours. Keep in mind they were off for two months from late April until late June because of Chester's medical problems.

Yes. The soundcheck process is split into two parts, soundchecking the PA system and soundchecking the stage. The crew soundchecks the instruments on stage in typical fashion (example HERE), but the PA system is checked with existing recordings because it eliminates all of the variables you deal with in a real live situation. This is why all of the live shows are still being recorded even though the DSP program was discontinued. LP has been soundchecking the PA system in this manner ever since Pooch became their FOH engineer in 2007. Look up "Behind the Live Sound of Linkin Park’s Hunting Party Tour" on Youtube, the way Pooch and Tater go through multitracks of recordings from rehearsals and live shows throughout that series is exactly the same thing they do when they soundcheck the PA.

The song with Billy GIbbons was La Grange...a.k.a. probably ZZ Top's most famous song of their career...

Fully digital? Start of the Hunting Party tour in 2014 when they switched to the Axe-FX II setup (which was originally designed and supposed to be integrated during the Living Things tours, but it didn't come together in time). They've been using amp modeling to some extent since 2007 though, which was when they started using the Randall MTS preamps as a means of covering the Mesa/Marshall tones from Hybrid Theory and Meteora as well as the Soldano, Hiwatt, and other various amp sounds introduced on Minutes to Midnight.