Through the Fire and Flames

Hello!

As I plug away at The Oral History of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the Music Game Boom (slowly but surely! But also slowly!) I’ve had the chance to ask developers about loads of behind-the-scenes details from the various games. I’ll tell you now: you should fully expect a Guitar Hero: Metallica chapter. 

But if there’s one song that defines this whole era and genre (and in fact one song that’s been featured in both the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series), it’s DragonForce’s epic “Through The Fire and Flames”, first featured in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. 

I recently chatted with former Neversoft Note Tracker Chris Vance about discovering that song and tracking the note track so many of us broke our fingers trying to play. Below is a largely uncut excerpt from our chat: 

That song and I have a history that goes back [to] before me working there. On the Score Hero community, somebody had note tracked that song. I modded it onto my PS2 and I was playing it. It wasn’t that it was a great note track or that it was tempo-mapped properly. It was actually a mess and it was everywhere. But for the time in our modding community, it was great. It was a higher-quality one. And this song was just, like, “What the fuck is this fantasy metal video game sounding shit going on right here?” So, I fell in love with it. 

When I went to Neversoft, they asked me in my first week, “If there was any one song that you could have in the game, what would it be?”

I said, “It’s ‘Through The Fire and Flames’ by DragonForce.” 

Lo and behold, a month and a half later, something like that, I’m note-tracking it into the game.

[...]

It was the longest note track I ever did, that’s for sure. It took me two weeks to do the initial guitar and bass track. [Typically it’d take] three to five days at most to do the whole song. I think it was two weeks just to get the Expert done. Because I just kept really noodling on it. I ’d jump to sections, play, play, play, play. Redo, redo, redo. Because I was really passionate about the song – and we knew it was going to be the hardest song in the game. So I knew I had the hardest song, right? Turns out the hardest song would literally become [the calling card] for the entire franchise [laughs].

But it was really painstaking, and it was really painstaking in a nice, artsy-fartsy way, I guess. I started on it – if I remember correctly – with the MP3, which didn’t help. But then we got the actual split stems a couple days later, which made it a lot easier. 

I was really passionate about splitting [guitarists] Sam and Herman accurately and making sure that Sam’s parts were all on the co-op guitar side and Herman’s were on the main side. Not because I thought one was greater than the other necessarily, but it was like, “I gotta choose one for each side.” It was just like, “Player 1 is Herman, Player 2 is Sam,” and just making sure I really separated those out. I did the research to make sure I’m giving the right guitarist the right guitar line. That probably took up a decent amount of the time. 

We ran into a lot of issues because the BPM [beats-per-minute] and the notes-per-minute that I was putting in, we hadn’t done before. There were a lot of question marks and uncertainties whether or not any of that would work. 

I guess I can bring up the controversial [makes high pitch mocking voice] “He tracked the piano intro.” I don ’t know what got into the community’s ass in 2007 about that, but everyone was bitching about the piano part being tracked in the intro. 

It ’s a Spanish guitar! It’s not even a fucking piano!

As always, thank you for your support.

Blake Hester
twitter.com/metallicaisrad