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BISQ



Personal Information


Name: Brandon
Age: 33
Location: Gilbert, AZ (suburb of Phoenix)
Occupation: Test Engineer for an embedded computing group.

--I am married and have two sons J. J. (4) and Trey(2). Many of my PS3 friends have come to know Trey as I frequently have to abruptly exit late night sessions due to him waking up. Thankfully, he is FINALLY starting to sleep through the night and this is becoming less and less common. My wife Rachel is a part time yoga instructor.


Rockband/GH Stuff


Rock Band 1


I am the Vocalist for PS3 Expert Band AtomicToasterOven, currently in 3rd place on RB1 PS3 as of 10/5/08.

I bought rock band at the very end of 2007 and it was my first experience with rhythm games. The main reason I found out the game existed at all was due to the announcement that one of my all time favorite bands, The Grateful Dead, was set to appear in the game. I had just upgraded to a high def TV around this time and was set to buy a standalone blu-ray player before this announcement made me look into getting a PS3 instead. Although I had been a video game junky as a kid, I had played very few video games in the previous 10 years and hadn't thought much about getting one before. I have always been a huge music fan, however, so this seemed like an interesting new thing to get into.
Needless to say, after getting the game I made the discovery that a wide variety of songs were extremely fun to play, even songs by bands I would never have considered listening to outside of the game.

My other main reason for getting rockband was due to my lifelong desire to learn and play the drums. Due to a variety of back, finger, wrist, arm, ankle, foot, drum, and pedal injuries, as well as the surprising discovery that the other instruments were fun to play as well, my drum career never took off the way I wanted it to. I did, however, manage to piece together an 8.6 million career score on RB1 and have beat all disc songs on expert except for Don't Fear the Reaper and Run to the Hills. I'm also occasionally known as the second* best drummer at the local Rock Band night at the bar by my house. I got the ION kit as soon as it was available on PS3 and I hoped to progress enough to learn to play real drums at a competent level in the future. Sadly, I reaggrivated a wrist injury in January of '09 and have played seldomly since then. I still try to play once a week or so but my endurance has suffered since taking a 2 month break and it is kind of hard to get back in the groove. For this reason, I usually enjoy playing on Hard drums. Due to my decent level of skill and ability to squeeze coupled with my poor endurance and technique, hard seems like a good place for me although It is sometimes a little TOO easy.

As for guitar I always feel like I'm behind everyone else because I rarely played it for the first 3 months I owned the game and I had no other plastic guitar experience prior to rockband, although I did briefly play real guitar while in high school. Once I acquired a guitar that actually functioned correctly and wasn't a strat, I started making improvements in my playing going from a very poor medium player to playing expert on most songs. As of the launch of RB2 I have a 7.7 million career score although I still hadn't beat Green Grass and High Tides on expert. I've since beaten GG&HT on RB2.

I began doing vocals on a whim sometime around february/march of 2008 while my guitar and drums were both broken. Although I was extremely shy about singing, even with nobody around, I soon discovered I was able to do better on vocals then I could on the other instruments. I started my career on hard and although I can clearly remember failing 'Reptilla' on hard over and over again, I pretty much breezed through the rest of hard and expert. Soon I realized that I had some pretty high scores on PSN so I decided to join scorehero in order to track my scores and use the various resources to improve my techniques and paths.

As of the release of RB2 I have 10.8 million career score on expert vocals in RB1. I probably won't get much higher because I honestly hate singing songs over and over to improve scores. The longest I've spent on a song in one sitting was probably about 45 minutes which I spent gold-starring 'gimme shelter'. Honestly if it hadn't been a league song, I probably wouldn't have done it. I enjoy singing much more in multiplayer then in solo. Playing with my scorehero band as well as various other people on my friends list has kept me interested in vocals.

In 2009 I started working more on bass thanks to a rivalry I joined with shermanmeow on SH. I've since become fairly decent at bass and have learned to squeeze and select activate making me a decent competitor on the easy to mid level difficulty songs. I still have problems with the very hard songs but I can at least pass everything.

Rock Band 2


When RB2 was first released, I spent quite a bit of time playing rock band 2 with various people on my friends list, as well as my scorehero band. Because of my emphasis on group play, as well as my tendency to spread myself thin across all instruments, I didn't even complete any of the solo setlists for a long time. As of now (5/09), I've completed the entire vocals, bass, and guitar setlist (minus visions on guitar). You can see my scores below. Despite vocals being my best instrument, I haven't spent a lot of time resqueezing and I still haven't FCd one way or another despite a couple of epic chokes. Due to this fact, I'm actually ranked higher on SH for bass than vocals!

More recently I hooked up with some of my favorite people on SH to play with (meister, internetguy87, and Chil) to form a band for the unofficial scorehero season 11 league. Having recently learned to full band path, it was a lot of fun trying to come up with some good paths and then work with internetguy, one of if not THE best FB pather around, to perfect them.

Currently our band 'Graveyard Shift' (so named because we usually play about 1AM eastern) is in the finals against fellow PS3 band 'Prostitute Bestseller'.

Beatles Rock Band


Since I'm a big Beatles fan I'm really looking forward to this game. Not much else to say yet but I hope to play all 4 instruments extensively once it comes out.

Guitar Hero Games


I bought a ps2 and GH1, GH2, and GH80s while my ps3 was getting fixed last summer. I occasionally play them, particularly GH2, when I feel like doing something different or if I just have a small amount of time. I started these on hard and was able to beat all the games on hard without failing, with the exception of 'play with me' which I failed one time. On expert, I've beaten GH1, GH2 minus freebird (haven't done six and jordan either), and GH80s minus play with me. I haven't played these games in a while so I should probably try to finish those up.

Although I own GH3, GHA, and GHWT I rarely play them. I play GHA a little more now that I got it for PS2, so I can play it with my SG on my lagless TV.


*except for the time carungi and professor joe showed up



Scores


Rock Band (Vocals, PS3)
Expert
Total Score10,800,524
Passed58/58
2*58/58
3*58/58
4*58/58
5*58/58
6*45/58
100%36/58
Rank22nd
Rock Band 2 (Vocals, PS3)
Expert
Total Score17,260,893
Passed84/84
2*84/84
3*84/84
4*84/84
5*84/84
6*84/84
100%84/84
Rank16th
Rock Band 2 (Bass, PS3)
Expert
Total Score12,656,436
Passed84/84
2*84/84
3*84/84
4*83/84
5*83/84
6*77/84
100%72/84
Rank18th

















Other Stuff


Video Games


I loved going to arcades as a kid and still enjoy playing classic games from the 80s. My favorite game of all time is wonderboy which I would look forward to going to the arcade to play every friday night. I got pretty good at the game and I used to be able to play more than a half hour on one quarter. I don't remember what my high score was back then but I tried it on mame after having not played it in 15 years and was able to get well over 600,000 without much trouble.

Another favorite was Dragonslayer which was quite the fad back in the early 80s. At one time I was able to beat the game without dying a single time. Of course I loved Pacman and used to be able to get to the 5th key or so using patterns I figured out myself (although I've since forgotten the crucial apple pattern I always used, argh!). Other favorites of mine from back in the day include Galaxian (> Galaga imo), Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Pole Position (and basically every major racing game that came after), Arkanoid, Asteroids, Berzerk, Centipede, Joust, Defender, Mr. Do, Gauntlet, Qix, Missle Command, Q Bert, Robotron 2084, Sinistar, Space Invaders, Tempest, Zaxxon, etc, etc....

My first home console was a Colecovision...yes I made all my friends with Atari 2600s very jealous :).

Music


I'm a big music fan, particularly live music. I don't really know how many live shows I've seen but I'm guessing it's probably over 500. The single band I've seen the most is Phish whom I've seen 50 times. My favorite show that I've personally attended was probablly 12/31/99 where Phish played for 2+ hours at night, then came back for a second set at midnight and finished sometime after 7am (Real Life Endless Setlist!!!)...Unfortunately with 2 kids I don't get to go to nearly as many concerts these days but I still try to get out a couple times a month.

I guess the other thing that would be noteworthy is my obsessively large music collection. I'm guessing I probably have over 5000 concert recordings in my collection, as well as collection of albums in many formats close to 1000 strong as well , maybe more I honestly don't know. My music collection is spread out over a bunch of different mediums including Vinyl, cd, analog cassette, flac, shn, mp3, DVD, SACD, and DAT. I don't ever buy single tracks as I prefer complete albums.

It's hard to pick a favorite studio album but if I had to it would probably be The Beatles 'Sgt. Peppers lonely hearts club band'. My top 10 would probably include at least 3 other beatles albums as well. Some other favorites include 'Layla' by Derek and the Dominoes, 'Electric Ladyland' by Jimi Hendrix, 'Bitches Brew' by Miles Davis, 'Eat a Peach' by The Allman Brothers Band, 'Music From Big Pink' by the Band, 'Highway 61 Revisted' by Bob Dylan, etc. I'll probably do a more thought out list later when I have my albums in front of me.

I'll probably go through and list some of my favorite concert recordings as well when I get the chance. A couple that spring to mind immediately are the Allman Brothers Band 'At Fillmore East' and The Greatful Dead's 'Dick's Picks Vol.4' which includes a good portion of one of the best dead shows ever from 2/13/70. Some of my favorite bands I've seen live include Phish, The Grateful Dead, The Disco Biscuits, Umphrey's McGee, and Widespread Panic.

I'm usually open to copying any of my live recordings for people assuming it is a band that allows free distribution of their shows and it is not a commercial release.
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