game not being note-perfect, and what they forget is that you are in a cover band in this game—it’s okay if you’re not identical to the original recording. The only part of the game that we are sticklers about is the guitar—the guitar has to be absolutely dead-on.
As far as the recording process goes, once the tracks for the game are selected—some of the tracks for Guitar Hero II that I picked were “YYZ” by Rush and “Miserlou” by Dick Dale—it goes over to WaveGroup Sound, where our composers, Scott Dugdale and Will Littlejohn, sit around and analyze the music. For my part they create a mix-minus for me—just MIDI drums and MIDI bass for me to track over. Sometimes there is no mix-minus for me, so I’ll have to go in and record directly over the master—with the master tracks coming out of the left side and my tracks coming out of the right side. But aside from all the intangibles, like figuring out the tuning on the song, we get straight into it—I select the right tube grid for the amp, grab the equipment, then go to work figuring out how to respectfully cover the song while still retaining all the little idiosyncrasies of the original players. Any given song can take two to four hours for us to record, but some can take up to two days. A song like Megadeth’s “Hangar 18” can take up to three days because of all the little variables and the tempo pushes and everything else going on. That’s something a lot of people don’t realize about this game—we don’t quantize anything. We recreate everything about each song—if there’s a huge, dramatic tempo push, we have to recreate that. If we didn’t, the songs we record would sound like crap—but they don’t. They breathe—they literally come to life, and that’s because we spend so much time working on them.
GW How do you go about mimicking tones?
HENDERSON Depends on the song and the band. There’s no one specific formula for anything I do. I have such a good ear that I can hear the original song and pick out production techniques and even the original gear used in the studio. One of the songs I worked on was “Laid to Rest” by Lamb of God, and what I did was freeze-frame their Killadelphia DVD right at the part that Willie Adler was talking about his rig, and I could see all of his settings written above his dials. So I zoomed in and wrote everything down, and called Mesa and asked them to send me a Mark IV, and I used that to record the song for the game. When I did Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box,” I needed to get that fuzz in the chorus, so I ended up using a ToadWorks John Bull British Overdrive pedal and a Boss DS-1 distortion, because Kurt Cobain used a DS-1. So sometimes I have to research what was in a guitarist’s pedalboard when he did the original song and then use that when I record it.
GW Which would you say were the most challenging songs to learn for the game?
HENDERSON Some of the ones that are more challenging are the ones you wouldn’t think would be challenging—like “Heart-Shaped Box” by Nirvana. I mean, it’s got three chords, why is it gonna be hard? But I’m so used to playing music by guys like Marty Friedman, music that requires this deep technique and this incredible concentration, that playing something like “Heart-Shaped Box” forces you to go into a different mode and play more by method—you have to think “grungy.” Sometimes I would have to do a deliberately missed note, which comes back to not over perfecting the music and keeping the vibe in tact. But every song is different—something like Audioslave can take 20 minutes, but other songs can take forever. And all these artists put so much into writing and recording these songs, and I have to redo it in like a day—so it all comes down to how much I prepare.
GW Do you transcribe the music yourself before going in to record it?
HENDERSON Yes, and no charts are ever given to me. One of the things I have to do is figure out the fingering and positions of the original players; every song is a roadmap, and I need to figure out where the player is going next and where he’s going to end up. There are so many different places to play things on the fretboard, and you have to figure out where things are being played so that you stay within the right positions on the neck. So I do it all by my own ear—except in the case of Pantera’s “Revolution Is My Name.” I knew I had to record the track, and I was in a music store in the Bay Area and I saw this Dimebag Darrell signature Washburn on the wall, and I decided to buy it. And as I’m paying for it, I see a copy of Guitar World with a transcription of ‘Revolution Is My Name’ [issue 2007] so I bought that too. We sat in the studio with the copy of the magazine and the Guitar World CD-ROM that had the video of lost Dimebag lesson, and we watched it for any reference to the song—any hints or tips we could use. And that’s what we used to guide us through our recording of that song.
GW While you and the other Guitar Hero musicians perform all the music in the game, Buckethead submitted his own song, “Jordan,” for Guitar Hero II. How did that come about?
HENDERSON Buckethead’s a friend of mine, so I just called him up. I knew he’d be perfect for the game—I mean, he’s a video game character in his own right. He’s not
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