America - Ventura Highway (GH2 Custom)
14This is, without a doubt, my best custom. This took so much effort and came out so close to Harmonix-quality--it just FEELS right when I watch it. This isn't the first Volume 1 chart I've finished, but this is me officially saying: Volume 1 is in progress.
I could write a whole blog post on this one and how I put it together, but here's the short. I've had the Jammit stems lying around for ages, which conveniently came in drums/bass/guitar 1/guitar 2/vocals/backing vocals/other--not far off from how RB stems are sorted! I jumped on it. Everyone I know likes this song, and dammit, I do too. I consider this the "Crazy on You" of Volume 1, and "Crazy on You" is just top-tier GH2.
Lead/rhythm customs always take forever, but in this case, since DX has rhythm quickplay, I had to do...well, an extra chart and an extra four difficulties as a result. It has to do with the fact that DX's way of making rhythm quickplay work is to add the rhythm stem back into the singleplayer VGS--thus meaning the part's actually duplicated in the audio, and thus much louder than the singleplayer guitar part (since the singleplayer part is also partially playing rhythm, thus two rhythm guitars at once...)
I therefore had my singleplayer mixture chart playing some of the lead, some of the rhythm, and then a second mixture chart of what ISN'T played in that first chart as the rhythm chart, and then I set up two MIDIs, since GH2 can load an entirely different VGS and chart in co-op. The co-op MIDI is true lead/rhythm, the singleplayer MIDI is singleplayer, lead-heavy and singleplayer, rhythm-heavy, roughly speaking.
If that's all confusing, it's just a way to work around having two of the same guitar playing at the same time. It sounds cleaner and avoids any potential phase/mixing issues (like how we shipped "Mother" in DX 1.0--listen for the high end of the guitar in singleplayer, it's basically missing).
Aiming for a December release date for Volume 1. Probably earlier, but feeling Christmas-y.
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