Chronicling my growing up while learning electric guitar: Middle School 2003

0:00 - Engel by Rammstein
0:40 - Adam’s Song by blink-182
1:18 - Holding On by Pillar
2:08 - Crawling in the Dark by Hoobastank
3:19 - Faint by Linkin Park

Sentimental: Love live nu-metal! Japanese songs I discovered on my lonesome, but Western rock music was shared with me by friends!

Just kidding. I listened to these songs by myself too, coupled with anime music videos. But s'ok, I’ll share the songs I got from friends once I made them later on, but for now we’re still in middle school. I still get an excited feeling listening to these songs, because I see them in my mind backing all sorts of sakuga-level anime scenes. I only know this blink-182 song from a pretty well-done Kenshin music video on shonenanime.com, with the site itself being my fundamental source of music discovery.

TBH the Pillar song was introduced by a friend! Ben C was nice enough to invite me to a LAN party, and there I listened to Andrew H’s CD which happened to have this song. I must have listened to it 100 times that night, it was so catchy.

And Linkin Park songs still carried over long after middle school for me, because of the different remixes that exist for breakbeats used in bboying that I started in high school.

Technical: This is the first time I failed to complete the assignment. The fast rhythmic palm mutes in Rammstein are deceptively hard. I recorded an earlier version with them, but it neither sounded nor looked good, so I figured what’s the point. And for Hoobastank, it’s just gonna be bar chords for me, dawg. I wonder how professionals have that level of speed and precision.

In general, drop C tuning just makes everything sound seriously fun. It was very hard to make the Pillar song sound bad. For Hoobastank, I didn’t bother trying to get the tone of the echo delay guitar; there’ll be plenty of time for that doing Ling Tosite songs. Just having a swell time with the song’s bridge in the meanwhile.