Impulse - An Endless Sporadic - percussion cover - GH3 Guitar Hero III

This piece was recorded March 2008 at Denton High School in Denton, TX, while I was the percussion instructor there. This song is just plain flat-out awesomeness. If anybody has known me for the past 2 years, they know I'm an obsessive Guitar Hero player, and that's how I discovered this piece, Impulse, by two badass musicians who call themselves An Endless Sporadic. You can check them out on MySpace, but they haven't been signed or released an official album yet. One of them works for Neversoft, the drummer Andy, and he got their song in the game Guitar Hero 3 as a bonus song. Once I heard it, I knew I had to arrange it someday. It was a challenge to get the marimbas and vibes to work in the original key, since some of the guitar parts are so low, but I don't like changing keys in my arrangements, so luckily we had two 5 octave marimbas and some mics to help on the low end. I gave my best shot at playing the crazy drumset part with a single bass drum pedal, but the real key was hiring the amazing Chris McQueen to play the guitar part. He plays with Oso Closo and Snarky Puppy (from Denton) and you should check them out too, they will rock your face off. This piece was fun to do as a percussion ensemble because in the original they used ProTools and had already added all of the small percussion instruments you'll hear, so I didn't need to add anything. I did cut out an entire chunk of the piece in the middle, because it would have been impossible to recreate all the crazy distorted guitar effects with percussion in that section, and I also extended one part to allow Chris McQueen to take an improvised guitar solo. Otherwise, like most of my arrangements, I tried to recreate the original piece as faithfully as possible in a percussion ensemble form, so I hope you like it! I think this is my best arrangement to date in terms of fun and excitement factor, because the source material was just so mind-blowing. From Left to Right: Joanna Ceja -(marimba) Manuel Ortiz -(bells/percussion) Charlie Tucker -(chimes/percussion) Bobby Jacobs - (marimba) Brandon Arthur -(electric bass) Sean Redman -(me on drumset) Chris McQueen -(guest artist on electric guitar) Cody Goble -(marimba) Christina Burch -(vibes) Austin Ford -(vibes) Charles Crouch -(vibes) Ryan Klinck -(vibes)