Astat

http://lplive.net/shows/20130803.php - This was the first show in over 10 years (dating back to the start of the Meteora touring cycle) where Brad didn't use the red soldier PRS guitar at all. The nut on the guitar broke right before the show, so Brad had to use a backup guitar for all of the songs he'd normally have used the red soldier PRS on (the backup was also a red PRS, just without the soldier graphic).

When LP first introduced the rotating Set A/Set B/Set C format on PR '07, they had a different "note" for Bleed it Out on each setlist. One was "Mardi Gras Mix," one was "Party Mix," and one was "Keg Stand Remix." None of them actually meant anything in terms of the arrangement of the song, I think they were just having some fun with the setlists.

The remaining songs could very well just be instrumental stuff, especially if it's all for LP Recharge. The beta already had 5 or 6 short instrumental tracks in it, I'd imagine those will be in the full game as well. Working with Steve may just be a matter of churning out enough music to fit in the game, with A Light That Never Comes being the reward for finishing it.

Brad's probably the most hit-or-miss member of the band in terms of stage presence, except for maybe Joe. Chester and Mike always bring the energy, Phoenix is USUALLY pretty good about it, and Rob...well, he does what he can while sitting down, haha. Joe seems to go through phases where he's totally uninterested for a streak of multiple shows, then randomly gets his energy back. Brad is totally random from night to night though.

Haha, I remember when this song was going around as a fake LP track! This takes me back...this had to be around the same period My Reason by Spiritfall was all over the place labeled as an unreleased LP track (9-10 years ago, maybe even a little more). I remember finding out the name of the band/song many years ago, but I had totally forgotten this existed.

Yeah, if you did a straight swap of MTM songs, I'd take NMS over Given Up. I feel like that song sort of overstayed its welcome by the end of the ATS tour, but it was still a solid performance nearly every night (save for when Chester screwed up the ending, he randomly started doing that a lot on the ATS tour), and for a non-single, people really seemed to react positively to it. Great part of the light show too. But alas, Given Up was a single, so according to the band's (warped) logic, that automatically makes it a superior song to No More Sorrow, even if Given Up only charted at #99, was all but gone from rock radio within a couple months of its release, and hasn't been a particularly big crowd pleaser at shows for the last couple years...

I don't SPECIFICALLY miss The Catalyst, but I'm honestly VERY surprised at how quickly the band abandoned playing almost the entirety of A Thousand Suns live. At the very least, I figured The Catalyst/WFTE/Iridescent would all be setlist staples for years. They've also completely ditched two of their best live songs in WTCFM and Blackout. Also, for the love of what little is still right in the world, PLEASE ditch Given Up and Lies Greed Misery. The former is destroying Chester's voice more and more every night and sounds like shit these days, the latter is just an all-around terrible song that has no business being played live in favor of nearly every other song on Living Things that isn't currently in the set. Ditch those two and bring back In My Remains and WTCFM, and this is an excellent setlist.

Aww, thanks guys...after the weekend I just had (screwed up my debit card, found out Katie and I don't have a wedding officiant like we thought we did, car got broken into, got food poisoning, found out one old family friend is in a nursing home and another got t-boned by a drunk driver and is in a coma...oh, and I didn't make the top 10 on LPU Sessions), this is a nice surprise to come home to. Funny you post this when you did, because my "official" 10th anniversary as part of the Linkin Park community is in 4 days. I signed up for the old LP.com message board on 8/17/2003. Good timing! I never like...consciously tried to be "that guy who knows everything." I just joined the community at a time when Linkin Park was SO big, there was a lot of conflicting information going around. There were so many fans on the message boards, so many fansites, so many rumors going around, that it was hard to keep track of things. When I first joined the boards, I literally couldn't get a straight answer as to whether or not Breaking the Habit had ever been performed live. People thought that Xzibit coming out on Nobody's Listening was just some crazy rumor that couldn't possibly be true. The fact that Mike played guitar at all, let alone on 5-6 per show, was SHOCKING news to some people. For a band that was damn near the biggest band in the world at the time, their fans sure didn't seem to know much about them...and with the amount of activity on both LP.com and LPU, a lot of good information was quickly buried by things like "What's your favorite LP song v7.0" and "Is Mike hotter with his hat forwards or backwards?" I figured I'd just start sifting through as much information as I could, mentally cataloging anything that I felt was actually important (at some point, I realized my brain can't ACTUALLY hold that much information and recall it at will, so I started keeping notes. Several thousand Notepad files later, here I am!). In particular, the lack of input from actual musicians in the LP fanbase always bugged me. The few people who actually WERE musicians mostly seemed to hang around the message boards solely to mock the band (anybody else remember the old "Tabs" forum on LP.com, which was mainly inhabited by JOHNPETRUCCI, who liked to rant about how much Brad sucked for "just playing powerchords" on a daily basis? Basically a 2003 equivalent of Joe? Yeah, that guy!). As an aspiring guitar player who wanted to learn Linkin Park songs, this frustrated me, but what frustrated me even MORE was that nobody on the "mainstream" guitar websites seemed to acknowledge that Brad played Don't Stay on a black Ibanez, With You/Runaway on an orange Ibanez, Somewhere I Belong/A Place for My Head on the grey soldier PRS, and everything else on the red soldier PRS. I KNEW they were using different tunings, but every tab I could find seemed to assume that Db Ab Db Gb Bb Eb was Linkin Park's "standard tuning," and they NEVER deviated from it. So I just figured "screw these guys, they're all obviously wrong, I'm going to figure it out myself." That led to me constantly correcting people, which led to me transcribing tabs myself, which led to me posting Youtube videos...and somewhere along the line, I started collecting pictures of as many of Brad, Mike, and Chester's guitars as I could find. That led to the creation of the Guitars of Linkin Park website...which ultimately led to Sean Paden getting in touch with me and inviting me to help out with Green Guitar Project! Crazy how far things can go just because some idiot on Ultimate Guitar can't tell the difference between a 6-string and a 7-string. I'm getting older now and don't have nearly as much time to dedicate to the community as I once did, but I'd be shocked if I ever left completely. I've made too many friends and learned way too much. Hell, I'll probably still be yelling at people on Youtube in another 10 years.

It's funny because that was back in the pre-Twitter days, when we didn't have Summits, M&Gs were still done in "assembly line fashion," and band member chats were few and far between. That was when "HOLY SHIT MIKE ANSWERED MY QUESTION" was still such a big deal that you'd quote/screencap it and immortalize it in your signature for all eternity. Crazy how times change!

1. Grecian is in 6/8. QWERTY is in 4/4. Totally different song ideas. Rob confirmed that Grecian was the song they quit working on in favor of QWERTY. 2. QWERTY WAS in consideration for Minutes to Midnight at some point, Mike confirmed that in one of the LPU chats: http://lphahn.diandian.com/post/2008-04-01/40030476645 "mshinoda says to (19:21): we didn’t write QWERTY “for” japan…we were writing it for the album. i don’t know if we’ll ever debut another song live…maybe!" Also, I think the fact that they came back and recorded a proper studio version/re-worked the song arrangement AFTER Summer Sonic is enough circumstantial evidence to support that as well, even without Mike's confirmation. Also, LOL @ Mark saying QWERTY wasn't an MTM seed when the Mike quote I just posted was in response to a question he asked.

The game itself hasn't been available for play in quite a while. The beta was only up for a test period, when they closed registration for it they also took the entire beta down.

It absolutely IS the same song: "Linkin Park have already finished one song for their new album and they'll be releasing it soon, Bennington says. The track features a yet-unnamed special guest." The album isn't anywhere close to being done, they're not even done writing yet. We probably won't hear any new album music for at least 6 months. That isn't "soon" by any stretch of the imagination, and Linkin Park isn't known for doing collaborations on their "main" studio albums (or if they do, they're not the kind that get a lot of hype - Dust Brothers on With You, that guy who played the flute on Nobody's Listening, Owen Pallet on I'll Be Gone...). Linkin Park also doesn't finish one song for an album while the rest of it doesn't even have a sense of direction, they work on songs in batches of 5 or 6. Meanwhile, this song IS already finished, IS coming out soon, and DOES feature a special guest. The LP Recharge website was just updated within the last couple days, which is a pretty good sign that the game will be out within the next month or so. I've been saying since that article came out that AOL didn't know what they were talking about.

The two Meteora ones were definitely never confirmed, those could be any track on the album, or songs that didn't even make the album. I've heard "Nocturnal" attributed to like 3 different songs over the years! Pretty sure Cloverleaf is not Castle of Glass. When Brad plays a few seconds of Cloverleaf on Inside Living Things, the acoustic guitar that follows is in a different key than Castle of Glass (A minor, specifically. Castle of Glass has a bunch of A MAJOR chords in it, because the song is in the key of C# minor). PLUS, while that part is playing, Chester asks "Which one is this one?" and Brad responds with MSDFCB. I don't think "Cloverleaf" is even heard on the DVD. Primo, I'm not sure about. We know that one was in the mix during both the A Thousand Suns and Living Things sessions, and I'll Be Gone sounds like something that would've worked on either album. I don't recall that title being specifically mentioned alongside I'll Be Gone anywhere though (it's not on Inside Living Things).

I don't believe this was ever confirmed. It's mentioned in the "Chester's Lullaby" LPTV episode where they're trying to come up with lyric/title ideas, but it doesn't sound like that was anything more than an idea they tossed out. I can write a song, come up with a dozen potential titles for it, spend 5 minutes deciding which one I want to use, and throw the other 11 out. That doesn't mean the other 11 titles were "working titles" for the song.

Just like nearly everything released with Stagelight (Bruiser/Space Station/Complementary excluded), they aren't full multitracks but just random samples from certain songs. There are various samples of the shaker/bell noises from the Roads Untraveled intro, a sample of a clicking noise from Pale, a bunch of effected cymbals/drum machine samples from Lies Greed Misery, etc...each sample is like, a second long, if that.

I pretty much guarantee if this song is the "exciting stuff within the next month" Mike was referring to (I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be), it WON'T be on the next album, despite what the article says. They wouldn't be releasing something intended for an album if the album wasn't finished, or at least VERY close to finished.

There are so many non-album songs that I love, I honestly don't know if I could really make a list like this. BUT if I were to just limit it to 2 songs from each of the 5 "main" albums... (In no particular order) A Place for My Head Forgotten Figure.09 From the Inside No More Sorrow The Little Things Give You Away Burning in the Skies When They Come For Me In My Remains Roads Untraveled

SIB from Nottingham circulated for YEARS mislabled as "Live at the Wiltern," so I'm guessing this is where it originated from.

You don't remember this? Pretty sure you were the one who informed me about it like, 4 years ago.

Band rarely takes rehearsals seriously, by their own admission. They were probably just fucking around with it somehow.

More subdued guitar sound on certain songs was a request directly from the band starting with the ATS era, if I recall correctly.

I think the single biggest thing that hurt the DSP sales was when they stopped advertising them AT THE SHOWS. Remember when they first launched in 2007 and promoted the hell out of them with the video screens? They literally SOLD OUT of them at some of those early shows (they were doing a limited number of them with the blank CD/redeem code method). People who buy things at a concert merch booth tend to do so after making a spur-of-the-moment decision. VERY few people who go to a concert have any idea what kind of merchandise is going to be available ahead of time. Likewise, very few people who go to a concert are going to bother to check if any of the same concert merchandise is available anywhere after the fact (how often do we end up seeing surplus tour merch show up at discounted prices on the LP.com web store months or even YEARS after the tour concludes? They still have some of the limited edition PR07 posters available for crying out loud!). If you're selling something that pertains to a specific concert, then you need to promote it AT THAT CONCERT. Otherwise, you literally lose 95% or more of your potential customers. That's just common sense. Sure, there's a lot that can be said about other factors like LP's dwindling online community (we'd all be lying out of our asses if we didn't say LPL, LPA, LP.com, LPU, etc. are far less busy than they used to be), but the band is still playing to audiences as large as when they started the DSP project, so we can't solely (or even largely) blame this on the band's general decline in sales/fanbase/media attention/whatever.

No more DSPs? Hey, gives them an excuse to start using live tracks on LPU CDs again...

Random observation: I've never seen someone complain about a Linkin Park setlist and then turn around and post a "setlist they should have played" that would actually stand a chance of happening in a million years. It seems like there's a certain group of fans who honestly think a "good" LP setlist would see the band dropping all of their non-Hybrid Theory singles and replacing everything else with songs like Figure.09, Blackout, and QWERTY.

Or maybe LITE will be moved down to open the encore, I guess that could happen too, haha. I'm going to bed.