Are you ready for Lamb of God!?!?!

Greetings, metalheads!

For this installment of the Metal Menagerie, we turn to one of the very first LRRGs ever to grace this site. He is our Icelandic bass lord, Olralph. If one has been following this site since its inception, you may remember Olralph's performance of Iron Maiden's "Hallowed Be Thy Name", a fairly difficult tune to be sure. Well, now it is a couple of years later, and our hero from the Northern Atlantic has developed his skills far beyond your run-of-the-mill Maiden tune. Here is Olralph from a about a year ago playing Lamb of God's, "Laid to Rest", a very, very difficult tune.

Watch that left hand fly, and pay close attention to the fingering. This is a man who knows what he is doing behind a four-string. And yes, he plays with a pick on this tune, and does it very well. But we are not the only one who benefits from Olralph's bass noodlings. He also plays bass for a band, which I hope someday will become the premiere flavor of Icelandic death metal. I know it will have good bass.

Rock on Olralph!

SUB: Mymassivehead's Alter-Ego

(C) 1993 - 2009
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What's better than one mymassivehead? two mymassiveheads! The aforementioned LivingRoom Rock God whips out his guitars and his alter ego to show off a demo his band, Alter Ego, recorded back in 1993 called "Colors Of Autum." Sounds simple enough, but reading through his video description I discovered it's pretty much a technical marvel, since he had to do a lot to fix the original recording, which was on tape. Here's what he had to do to it:

"First thing I had to do was change the pitch on the thing, for some reason the original is about a quarter step out of proper tuning.
I recorded 2 acoustic guitars. Panned one hard left and one hard right. Decent speakers or headphones you can hear the separation fairly well. Recorded 1 distorted rhythm. Turned it up in the mix just enough to cover up the crappy sounding original distorted tin can sounding guitars.
Recorded 2 new leads. Turned them up to cover up as well as I could the original leads. You can still hear the originals, but not bad. Kind of an interesting effect. The new leads aren't great, but they are a lot better than the original.
Recorded a new final chord and edited out the originals out of tune final chord. You can hear where I punch it in, but I couldn't figure out how to completely fix that.

Then I mastered it. Ran it through a noise remover to remove the hum from the crappy mics I used to record the acoustics with. Added just a bit of reverb and then ran it through a compressor to level everything out a bit. Took me about a week to get it sounding alright... not world class studio, but it's not bad in my opinion. All this was done using Audacity. Amazing piece of software.

Hope you guys like it. If you could hear the original track you'd have a better understanding of what it took to make this. It was a challenge getting the tracks to mix properly, and there are still parts where the vocals are lower then I like. But it's about as good as I can get it. I'm fairly happy with it.

Of all the original work I did with this band and the other bands I was in, this is still my favorite song.

Hope you enjoy."

Phew! Talk about hard work, man. Kudos to you, our megaencephalonic friend. It's nice to know this one simply cannot be touched by those record label morons.

Got a video you'd like to submit? Send it over to LRRGods@gmail.com, or the LRRG YouTube Channel with the title "LRRG Submission" or something other to that effect!

OI!

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If you're a guitarist and slap the name "Vai" to your YouTube name, you better be good if you don't want to get harassed every 5 minutes by abusive comments by fanboys telling you how much you don't deserve to be bearing that name. I don't think Mexican LRRG brianvai would get many comments of the sort, however, considering he simply rocks, as clearly demonstrated in this rendition of John Petrucci's "Glasgow Kiss."After watching all 8 minutes of it, you'll have no choice but to stop on your tracks and say: "Caramba!"

BASS TUTORIAL: Laquerhead

If you're anything like me, when Les Claypool goes nuts on his songs (which happens often) you need some help to learn them; makibajo2 is the man to go to for complicated bass lines. Here, he breaks down Primus' "Lacquerhead" into three easy-to-follow videos explaining each part of the song:

Part 1

Main riff and solo

Part 2

Bridge

Part 3

Bridge 2 and chorus

SUB: Jackyl Or Pennywise?... Jackyl Or Pennywise?

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I have a bone to pick with sageguitar70: he usually sends more than one video per submission, which would be just fine... IF NOT EVERY SINGLE ONE KICKED ASS! which makes it nearly impossible to choose between one or the other. This time, literally, I was so torn, that I picked his rendition of Jackyl's "Down on Me" because I like the Les Paul better than the Ibanez he uses for the other video in his submission: Pennywise's "Western World." So, Mr. sageguitar70, I tip my hat to you for kicking ass.

Next Week: mymassivehead collaborates with himself: a 1993 original!

Got a video you'd like to submit? Send it over to LRRGods@gmail.com, or the LRRG YouTube Channel with the title "LRRG Submission" or something other to that effect!

A FANBOY WORST NIGHTMARE

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This one is a first for the LRRG blog: a U2 rendition on the congas. Canadian LivingRoom Rock God TomBeltrame gives a new feel to "Get On Your Boots" while showing off his skill for percussion instruments, making some U2 fanboys get all red in the face and white knuckles on their fisties, which is exactly what we like!

SUB: Sing On

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It's not every day someone sends a vocal cover submission, and not every day someone has the guts to attempt a song originally sung by Steven Tyler. LRRG mwhitm1 did both with Aerosmith's classic "Dream On."

This is one of those videos in which the video and the audio were recorded at different times, so he had to lip sync it, but it's him singing for sure... and doing a great job at it. I used to think singing to Aerosmith would be health hazardous; losing your voice at the end of one song, not to mention your consciousness and ability to carry on with life itself, but he seems fine at the end.

Inexplicably, this is mwhitm1's only video on his channel, so please rate it and comment on it, encouraging him to make more!

Got a video you'd like to submit? Send it over to LRRGods@gmail.com, or the LRRG YouTube Channel with the title "LRRG Submission" or something other to that effect!

POTW: Woof!

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I remember a few months ago I posted a video by Vanhalen1014 and the negative comments he got like "fake" and so forth, because he had recorded sound and video at different times, and ignorant douchebags saw this as a forgery. He really showed them with this rendition of Ozzy Osbourne's "Bark at the Moon" in which it is clear that's him playing and kicking ass. Not happy with just displaying his skills with covering the song, Vanhalen1014 went ahead and improvised a solo as well. I wish I could see the look on those morons' faces who called him a "fake" now.

Send your friend request to the LRRG YouTube channel so your videos can be considered in the "Pick Of The Week"!