Jude and I are going over final mix candidates now and trying to polish the track to a lustrous shine, but yes — since “Halo” just came out in March, there will be two PSwap tracks in as many months. We did not make you wait a year for our next song. Can you believe it? We cannot. It is unbelievable.
This new song will have a few things that are new for us. First, it’s technically part of someone else’s larger project, but even out of that context, it stands as its own song. (That said, if they are not ready, we are holding the release of our song until their project goes live. We are big fans and we are proud to support their special project.) And second, we will have one of those single-slide videos on YouTube the day we release the song. When we saw Weird Al do a one-frame video for his last song (his very awesome parody of T.I.’s “Whatever You Like”), we realized there’s no shame in it. “Halo” showed us that if we don’t do this ourselves, other people will get into a pissing match over who heard the song first, and they may even try to take credit for it. So, yeah, we’ll do that, thanks. After all, iMovie ain’t that hard to figure out.
I have been dropping hints about the next song on Twitter but I do not want to ruin the surprise of the larger project. But for the record:
– It’s a parody of a hit song from the 80s (and this is the first 80s song we’ve parodied, even though we met in an 80s cover band).
– The original band lost its lead singer due to health issues (and probably a few other factors too). He later healed and went on to a career as an in-demand jingle singer. You have heard him since and didn’t know it.
– My Variax guitar settings were Lester bridge, but I believe the original guitarist used an Explorer.
– 18 tracks in our recording, run time of 4m22s. I could not get all 18 tracks onto the screen at once but it looks something like this:
Stay tuned. ETA (with an accent on the E) is late Friday.
A few weeks ago, Charlie over at SilverAge suggested we create some ringtones and post them, too. This had honestly not occurred to me — why would anybody but our immediate families even want to hear us on their phones?
But hey, if people would find that useful, we could do that. I guess if you wanted to you could just edit the MP3s down to your liking, but I do still have the master tracks from all our recordings — even if they are spread over, like, three different recording apps — and now that we’re doing things in GarageBand, we can make iPhone ringtones easily too. Would you want that?
I hate to tease like this, but we should have a new song ready pretty soon — and that’s “pretty soon” in real-world time, not Palette-Swap Ninja time, which we all know takes three times longer than real-world time. Jude’s parts are done and I’m working on the remainder this weekend; I did a guitar part but I need to redo it, and I have to do the rather loud, high vocal. It’s not a Van Halen song, but I think I may look to Sammy Hagar for inspiration, in more ways than one.
We like to keep our songs secret until they are released, so I won’t tease too much. I can say that it will not be the epic that “Halo ((All I Play Oh))” was; it’s definitely a smaller affair. But it is a new song nonetheless, about something we haven’t tackled before, and it ties into something bigger, which is one of the other reasons we need to keep it secret. Check back next week for the full scoop.
Jude and I have learned an important lesson over the last five songs, and “Halo” really typifies it: In 2009, a song does not exist until it exists on YouTube. I’m happy to say that usethefork’s fantastic video caught the eye of Owen at Kotaku and he posted some love for it. Kotaku commenters are…unrestrained in their dislike for things that they dislike, so seeing so many positive responses and compliments on what we made and what usethefork took even further really means a lot.
When we did the lyrics, we were sweating details. We realized they had to be realstic — for instance, there are no Carney Holes on Desolation, but there are on Isolation. I knew if we didn’t get stuff like that right, we’d get busted by the fans. So I hereby apologize for this one, which xmywreckingballx pointed out:
xmywreckingballx: at 3:40 he says “losing in valhalla to a guy duel wielding maulers.” Guess what buddy??? Forge forbids you from using maulers on Valhalla!!! I’ve tried it! nice one.
Doh. I admit, I haven’t played with Forge enough to know that. But as I was looking for lyric fodder, I couldn’t resist the internal near-rhyme of “Valhalla” and “Mauler” so I rolled the dice. And lost. But this kind of stuff does matter to me. Song parodies are funnier when they’re true.
HandsomeCarl: WHAAAT?! I thought if you installed Halo 3 onto your 360 it would load slower?? Why would he do that? Unless they fixed that and I didn’t know about it.
No, as Bungie has clearly stated, for best performance, you should not install Halo 3 to your 360’s hard drive. But the song wasn’t intended an instruction manual or technical advice. It was just a rhyme.
I was a little concerned about people “getting it.” Like, will people take it literally, as some uber-endorsement of Halo? Will someone really assume that because Dan works at OXM, he is dissing these other games? Of course not. I mean, come on — we give gamers more credit than that! Who would take it that far?
TrueEnglishGent: Though saying Halo 3 is better then COD4 is madness to me.
Kia: Hilarious, but the guys need throttled for calling Fallout 3 contrived and then singing an ode to -Halo- of all things. Jesus.
Okay, we stand corrected. For the record, “Halo” isn’t editorial advice, either; we both happen to like both COD and Fallout 3. I guess people didn’t get that the singer of the song is a character who is closed-minded about all games but his favorite game, and the irony at the end is that he’s not good at it. It’s a story from a stereotype. The song is not a review.
It’s just games, and it’s a just a joke. Please enjoy it on that level.
Awesome, fan art — from a real artist and everything! Charlie Gavin, the mind behind the daily superhero webcomic Silver Age, created some caricatures of us and made us some custom wallpapers. We like them! You will too! You have to, because it’s like our little cartoon eyes bore right into your very soul. There’s a hypnotic effect that you cannot deny. Download the size of your choice:
Major thanks to Charlie! Go read Silver Age from the beginning! And now that we’re animated, can the Palette-Swap Ninja Saturday morning cartoon be far behind?
Well…this has been a very exciting week for us. First, all twelve of our fans heard the song and sent in kind emails and Twitters and comments. Then the top Halo fansite halo.bungie.org heard the song and liked it (well, if you want to get technical, they called it “awesome”) and passed on the word to all the Halo fans. Then Bungie themselves heard the song and liked it (“pretty sweet…pretty entertaining”) and passed on the word again. The result was over 5000 plays of the song from our site alone, not counting Bungie’s mirror.
All we can say is thank you. We do these songs because we love making music and we love gaming. It feels great to have the love returned.
Also — and we were really hoping this would happen — avid Halo player Aven Pheonix has already put together a video, which is mostly footage of him being way better at Halo than we are:
Can you do better? Please do. We’d love to see more videos — all we ask is that you throw our URL in there somewhere so people know where the song came from. Even as we were writing the lyrics, we thought “oh, this would make so much sense to see played out.”
Speaking of which, you can find the full lyrics after the break. (more…)
