Astat

Yeah, this has to be something bizarre/unintended. BMI work numbers are sequential across all of the artists in the BMI database, based on the order in which they were filed with BMI. They currently have around 20 million songs in their database. The earliest entries in terms of LP-related songs are from Hybrid Theory. By Myself has a BMI number of 5,389,996 for example. In contrast, the most recent LP-related song on there is Darker Than Blood, which has a BMI number of 19,751,877. All of Curry's song entries have numbers that are still in the 7-digit range, rather than the 8-digit range, meaning they've been on file for quite a while already. This song's number is 9,734,762. To give an idea of when this song must have been filed with BMI, We Made It's BMI number is 9,721,085. So this song has been on file since sometime in 2008. It's obviously not a Linkin Park-related song, unless he sold it to LP and they're planning on covering it in the future (which I highly doubt). BMI does make mistakes from time to time. "Halo" from LPUX is incorrectly listed as "Hal" on there, for instance.

Why are people taking it as gospel that the Spotify playlist will be the setlist of the live show? I see MAYBE ten songs on there that Mike will actually play.

Hopefully the Welcome instrumental/acapella get a digital release of some kind too, getting a perfect vinyl rip is tough and with the way the vinyls are all unique, a lot of people probably won't want to open theirs up to rip them in the first place.

Ahh, yep. Didn't catch anything that sounded different in the first really low-quality video, but you can see Rob and Joe near the end of the one posted above. LP/band debut it is, then. Remember the Name is essentially the same arrangement as the portion typically played in Mike's solo medley (with the addition of an extra chorus repeat at the end), but it's played with the original tempo/key and lacks the additional samples found in the medley (the In My Remains synth, for instance). It's basically a shortened version of the original Fort Minor song now. RTN/Welcome is basically Mike's new solo spot in place of the medley. I feel like they may have just dropped Rebellion for time's sake. Just looking at the additions to this setlist, even without Rebellion, it feels significantly longer than the set for the last little run of shows.

Why is Welcome called a "full band debut?" Mike is performing it completely solo in the exact same fashion he did on Conan O'Brien. It should be listed as a Fort Minor performance during a Linkin Park set in the same way the DBS songs in the first encore of the LP set in 2009 were.

SO much better than the studio version...Mike actually sounds like himself.

...Well, looks like I've found what I'm doing this week.

I rarely agree with Castro, but I have to say, I'm not really feeling this song either. I do think it's got potential on the radio, it's very much in line with what's on the radio in terms of male-fronted rap these days. But holy crap, Mike's fake tough guy voice has GOT to go. It's embarrasing. Like, shuffle your feet, avoid eye contact, and lie about it when someone asks "Isn't that the dude from Linkin Park?" embarrasing. Mike's perfectly capable of writing good verses without slurring his speech like he just stepped off the streets of Chicago. He's a half Japanese, half white guy from a pretty well-to-do family in one of the nicer Los Angeles neighborhoods. Mike Shinoda is not gangsta, but he's good enough at what he does that he shouldn't have to pretend to be. The first Fort Minor record had a handful of good songs on it. This song is more cringeworthy than the worst song from that record, though.

No. All of the LP-related social media accounts are managed by the same people (in addition to the band members who post to them), and anything unauthorized would be dealt with in a matter of minutes. We already saw how swiftly they deal with this stuff when LP's Facebook was hacked a couple years ago.

Apparently. It has the original synth and some other stuff in it but the majority of it was re-recorded in a rather amateur fashion. This is the version on the CD, the guitar and synth solo were clearly re-recorded, some of the synth in the verses is missing/wrong/re-recorded, and it sounds like a lot of the rest of it was pieced together from the samples from that Burn it Down game that was on LP.com for a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S4h6N9oAZs

The Burn it Down instrumental on the Burn it Down Remixes CD is fake.

I want to say he actually ended up adding a download link to the Iridescent instrumental in that Youtube video description at some point before it was deleted. The file I have definitely isn't a Youtube stream rip, but I don't recall acquiring it from anywhere else either. I'm pretty sure it was linked in the description to that video. I'm on the fence about the BIO/WID/SOTD ones, it seems almost TOO coincidental that they're the same songs that were used in Guitar Hero/Rock Band, but the levels sound "right" compared to what you normally get when combining stems from those games, like Jonas said. Then again, maybe someone just spent a lot of time fixing volume levels and such to make them sound right. I'd basically consider that an official instrumental regardless, it's really just lacking the final mastering that would be done after all the tracks are combined. As far as track lengths go, I've noticed that the speeds of songs in Guitar Hero/Rock Band tend to vary VERY slightly from the actual album versions. I encountered this when I was recording my guitar cover for One Step Closer, I used the stems when I was doing the recording since I already had them on my computer, but when I went to mix my guitar track with the album version, I ended up like .2 seconds off-sync by the end of the track. Had to do some VERY careful time compression to get it to sound right without re-recording the whole thing! I'd share my raw guitar tracks, but doing so would make it a lot more obvious where I cheated and overdubbed stuff that I didn't play right in one continuous take I'd need a BIG premium cloud storage account of some type that could handle several hundred uncompressed .wav files and the ensuing bandwidth from downloads.

That's a synth that mimics Brad's tapping part (or a sample of the tapping part itself that's been run through some additional effects). It's there during the outro on the album, it's just really low in the mix. It's one of the samples included in the second LP StageLight pack.

It is. The source of it is completely unknown though, literally just popped up on a random Youtube channel a few years back (and has long since been deleted). Post I made about it on LPA: http://www.lpassociation.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41458&p=1346599&viewfull=1#post1346599

The audio from 3:24 onwards isn't from Rock in Rio, the transition is very obvious. It's presumably the audio from rehearsals.

Some of those mid-tempo songs are among the hardest for Chester to sing (Burn it Down, New Divide, Breaking the Habit).

Drop Ballad Medley, Runaway, and the Darker Than Blood intro to BID, and add Final Masquerade and APFMH. BOOM. Instant improvement. Move WFTE somewhere higher up in the set too and have APFMH between Faint and WID. This set is SO CLOSE to being good, lol.

Band gets older, band's fans get older, people are generally opposed to change/new things and start to either universally criticize or outright ignore new material the band puts out. Band's newer albums don't sell as well as their old ones did, band's newer singles don't perform as well as their old ones did, and the new songs the band does add to the live set don't get nearly the reception their "classics" do. When the general opinion of the average fan at a Linkin Park show is "Everything after Minutes to Midnight sucks, I'm hoping they play In the End, Numb, and What I've Done...what, they have a new album out? I had no idea," why the hell WOULD they go to the trouble of playing as much of their new material as possible? The people who DON'T spend time on Linkin Park fan forums like we do either don't like most of the new material or don't even know it exists. There were people IN THE FRONT ROW with me at Carnivores last year who were saying things like "The only good song on the new album is that You Don't Know What You've Got Until It's Gone song," and when I called them on their bullshit and asked them to even name another song title from the new album, they couldn't come up with one. These aren't just the "average fans" anymore, these are the people dropping almost a hundred bucks a ticket on a show and waiting outside the venue for hours to be up front. People on sites like this don't realize that they are in a TINY minority segment of the band's overall fanbase. Unless Linkin Park randomly pulls another crossover top 10 hit single (as in pop chart success, not the rock charts) out of their ass at some point, they're firmly cemented in "heritage act" territory by now. I think that's been the case ever since they started playing the majority of Hybrid Theory again at the start of the Living Things cycle.

I don't think the White Noise thing is really true, the single version just sounds like it wasn't as brickwalled as the final master.

The Chester and Rob signatures look similar to other signed items I have from them, the Joe one is kind of passable...the other 3 aren't even close IMO. The term "authentic sheet music" is relative. There are "official" sheet music books of LP music that are licensed by the band/WBR, but they aren't actually transcribed by them so they're just as prone to errors as any non-official transcription (they basically just paid an employee of one of the big sheet music publishers like Hal Leonard to transcribe the stuff for them). Same goes for guitar tab books, or even the lyrics printed in the album booklets in some cases. I don't think any members of LP actually do any kind of sheet music scoring with their material unless its necessary, like when they're putting together string arrangements. I know at least a couple of them (Mike and Rob from their piano background, and probably Phoenix due to his experience with stringed instruments) CAN read and transcribe sheet music, but they rarely do.

Also, the intro to Mike's solo medley sounded completely normal to me.

That's 100% NOT Fallout under the DTB intro...why does every synth thing automatically have to be from another song, you guys? Christ, he's just playing the normal DTB chord progression using a generic synth patch. The progression in Fallout is COMPLETELY different...

They sing over the top of the album gang vocals. Lots of live songs from the ATS/LT era used pre-recorded backing vocals to some extent. Iridescent/Waiting for the End are the only two left in the set these days.

Benjamin doesn't play everything perfectly, he played the verse part of Breaking the Habit on the G string instead of the D string so it sounded unusually twangy, and he plays parts of Rebellion completely wrong (this was the case in Brazil too - Brad still plays parts of Rebellion totally different from Daron though so Benjamin doesn't have the best example to follow). He also didn't play the guitar part at the end of COG Experience (not that it's terribly important to the song anyway). He nailed ALITS though, and he seemed to know FTI. Pretty impressed. Mixing on the TV broadcast was still pretty awful, although the guitar was certainly audible at a normal level most of the time (the solo at the end of ALITS was really low in the mix for some reason, that could just be a volume discrepancy in the wah effect Benjamin uses though). I'm amazed at how well he seems to have learned the material though, I can only think of MAYBE one person not named Brad who could do it better...

My prediction for the full set: 01. Papercut 02. Given Up 03. From the Inside 04. One Step Closer 05. A Line in the Sand 06. Runaway (shortened) 07. Wastelands 08. Castle of Glass Experience 09. Ballad Medley 10. Robot Boy (short instrumental) 11. Joe Solo 12. Burn It Down 13. New Divide 14. Final Masquerade 15. Mike Solo 16. Numb 17. In the End 18. A Place for My Head 19. Faint Encore: 20. Guilty All the Same 21. Waiting for the End 22. What I've Done 23. Bleed It Out I hate BID/New Divide being right next to each other, and WFTE in the encore is really weird. Based on the popularity of New Divide, I feel like it makes way more sense to put it in the encore and put WFTE after BID, but I doubt they played the Rock in Rio set the way they did if they were just planning on swapping those two songs later, unfortunately. I think GATS, Final Masquerade, FTI, and APFMH will all return. I don't see UIG/Rebellion being resurrected at this point.