It’s back, people. Apparently people still love RockBand (and hardcore partying & nail-biting competition), and that certainly includes yours truly. A year can’t shake that rockstar sheen. Atlantic City better be ready for round 2!
http://totalrocktotalrewards.com/
Dinner. Is. SERVED.
THE GURN KILLERS – ALMOST EASY from JONATHAN DORTCH on Vimeo.
Quick update… the Gurn Killers are making their first official appearance tonight at a private Pepsi/TechSet party to kick off Internet Week here in NYC.
The gig basically consists of going out to the venue, kicking off and hosting the Rock Band play area, making the game look fun (like that’s going to be hard), and get as many tech industry folks up on stage as possible.
If you’re attending tonight’s festivities, make sure you muster some liquid courage at the bar, then swing by the Rock Band stage at the Bubble Lounge tonight and say hi!
Hopefully we’re allowed to take photos and video at the party so we can share the good times with you.
GK Army 4 Life!
Ohai intarwebs… Miguel (aka Smeeguel aka GK bassist) here.
So, yesterday was a very special day for the Gurn Killers. We shot our first music video ever. But before I go into Epicness Saturday, let me back things up a little bit.
The Harrah’s tournament has been over for several weeks, and some of you are probably wondering what’s next for us. Are the Gurn Killers disbanding? Do we take our prize winnings, call it a day and go back to our regular lives?
Well, I’m glad to say the answer is a resounding ‘NO’. I guess that’s what happens when you bring four highly entrepreneurial types — who also happen to love the spotlight — together… they’re going to squeeze every millisecond possible out of their proverbial fifteen minutes of fame.
Following the events in Atlantic City, we have been very vocal with MTV, Harrah’s, and pretty much anyone else that will listen in expressing to them how The Gurn Killers would like to help keep promoting their product… I mean here we are, four regular dudes who met playing Rock Band, and now we’ve gone and achieved milestones that some REAL bands can only dream of (like opening for the B-52s). So yeah, we’re taking the whole “START A BAND, ROCK THE WORLD” slogan pretty seriously… even if we’re playing plastic instruments.
So… as soon as we heard that MTV and Pepsi were teaming up for the “Drink Up, Rock Out” promotion and heard what the stakes are (possible trip to E3 + VMA Award), the hamster wheels started turning almost immediately. We all want to go to E3. We all want to win a VMA (I mean, who doesn’t?). We HAVE TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN.
But how? Here’s our situation:
• In order to qualify for the trip to E3, the video has to be submitted by Tuesday evening.
• I was out of the country on business all last week and got back to NYC Friday night, so we literally had one day (Saturday) to get all the footage, and Sunday/Monday to edit it
• Even with only a few days’ notice, we wanted to put together a high quality video, cause… well… cause we’re the damn Gurn Killers and that’s just how we roll!
After some back and forth, and scrapping a few AWESOME ideas because we just wouldn’t have enough time to shoot all the scenes, we agree on a high concept and a song (not going to spoil it just yet).
Then Mr. Clutch himself (our drummer Luca) basically tells us “Hey guys, an old roommate of mine from NYU directs videos professionally and he’s willing to direct ours.” For FREE. Holy crap… a real director in charge of the shoot… are you kidding me? I guess it really helps to know people, huh?
So we finally congregate around 1PM Saturday (a bit behind schedule due to the fact that some of us are night owl types) at Luca’s, the GK Army also starts rolling in one by one, and in come the videographers, Mike and Jonathan. The second they showed up with their gear (HD camera, fancy lights, and a pair of roller skates for rolling camera pans), we could tell they meant business. Let me just stop here real quick and say that Jonathan and Mike were INCREDIBLE to work with… just two very down to earth guys who were happy to be helping us, blew us away with their creativity, and didn’t mind us getting overly excited and pitching our own ideas every 2 seconds.
The shoot itself was fun, but also INTENSE. We performed our song in full costume at least 20 times… and when you pick a fast song, that is a LOT of headbanging (and crouching in a bulldog bass stance in my case). My neck and thighs are ridiculously sore today. About 5 takes in — probably due to the excessive jumping around in a wig and black outfit — my body decided to overheat to the point where I almost threw up. Six glasses of water and a cold towel around my neck later, I was ready to rock again.
We took so much footage… but it’s better to have too much than not enough, that way the director has plenty of angles and styles to choose from when editing the video. After working with Mike and Jonathan, I am 100% confident that whatever they do in post-production (even in 48 hours) is going to blow our mindholes.
I also want to give a quick shout-out to everyone who showed up at Luca’s on Saturday. Jess, Tren (sp?), Mo, Sneezy, Pockets, Matt, Kyle, Cary, Fernando: You all kick ass and we certainly couldn’t have gotten through the day without your support.
I’m not going to spoil any details on the video, but here’s some behind the scenes photos from Saturday’s shoot… the video itself should be up on Pepsi’s site by the Tuesday deadline. I’m sure we’ll also post it here as soon as we upload it. The dailies blew away our expectations and personally I can’t wait to see the final cut. We’ve done our part… now if the stars align properly we might be seeing some of you at E3 this year!
Enjoy!
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SO guys, here’s the wrap up on the official rockband.com website… Our in depth personal recount of the finals & beyond is forthcoming. Keep on eye out for BIG things from The Gurn Killers in the coming months! Also email army@thegurnkillers.com to request a T-shirt!
http://www.rockband.com/zine/harrahs_finale
http://www.harrahs.com/rockband/
Round #1 (random) – CHERUB ROCK
Round #2 (choice) – KIDS IN AMERICA
Winners Announced!!
May 7th, 2009, Afternoon: The Gurn Killers arrive at the Harrah’s hotel in Atlantic City, NJ.
Awesomeness is in the air.
Our Gurn Killers prepare for the competition in their luxurious hotel room. There, they unpack their costumes, props, and rockness.
At 5:00 PM, they descend upon the stage for sound checks, interviews, and band meetings. There they meet some great competition. Mario Speedwagon and The Strippers for Stephen Hawking just to name two. Mario Speedwagon hailing from Portland and S4SH hailing from the good ‘ol Village Pourhouse crowd. Awesomeness drips out of every pore of these two bands.
Before we get on stage, let’s quickly review the rules of the Regionals. Each band will play two songs, the first song is a random song (one of these six songs: Ramblin’ Man, Flirtin’ With Disaster, Bodhistattva, Cherub Rock, Battery, or Down With the Sickness) and the second song is one of the band’s choosing from a predetermined list. Each round is scored independently from each other and is scored as follows: 50% Rock Band score, 25% Style, and 25% Performance. Whoever has the most “points” after two songs wins!
So, our plan for the first song is to come out with a base outfit (which we call the “Metal Outfit”). Then, depending on which song we get, we will alter the costume appropriately. For instance, if Ramblin’ Man comes on, we have cowboy hats, flannel shirts, etc.
We get up on stage and draw Flirtin’ With Disaster. Not a bad song to get at all. We quickly get our Flirtin’ props and get ready to rock. And we did:
After a very epic and button-popping performance, we were treated with very un-epic scores. Distraught from our low style and performance scores, we head up to the hotel room to change for our second song.
After a quick pep talk, we are ready to go on and perform our next song, Ballroom Blitz.
We get to the stage to find out that we are almost disqualified! Luckily, we make it there on time.
The whole crowd is flabbergasted by our amazing drag-esc costumes. We get up on the stage and kick it up a notch with this most epic performance:
Now that’s what I’m talking about! Great style and performance scores! But wait! Why is our Rock Band score so low? We were doing really good! Oh no! Luca’s drum pedal broke in the middle of the performance! That’s not cool!
After a conference with the MTV staff, they informed us that we could redo the song, but we would be judged again on style and performance. After finding out that we were tied for first in the first round and with our really great style and performance scores, we decided to stick it out and take our second round scores.
A nail-biter ensues. We wait in breathless anticipation for the announcement of the winner:
And by one point, your band of destiny, The Gurn Killers take the Atlantic City regionals.
On to tomorrow, where we face the best of the best for national glory…
The Property Finals @ Showboat, AC
The winners are announced! Of course by the lovely Maria…
This was an absolutely amazing night of pure score whoring & defying odds. We (Luca, Miguel, Joel & myself) went into this round of the competition with some huge obstacles to overcome. Going up against MoB (which included Wulfe, IceMage, Supermario & Azuritereaction) all of whom are masters of Rockband & sponsored by legitimate gaming organization. These guys wrecked Tangled Up in Blue with 2.597 Million points, a nearly unbeatable run. Fortunately for us, and the 1st time the thread of destiny shone it’s glimmering strands, the vocalist, Icemage got a couple of “strongs” and broke the 8x multiplier thereby allowing us the “chance” to beat their score. (If they had hit 2.71 or so mil, it would have been impossible to beat them).
The Boardwalk Boys performing Tangled Up In Blue
Vocals – Icemage | Guitars – Wulfe | Bass – Sup3rMario | Drums – Azuritereaction
We went second and absolutely crushed Down With the Sickness with 2.61 Million 5 Gold Stars.
Owned. Miguel's on Bass (1st 100% ever for him, overstrum to be accurate), Luca on Drums (-3 notes), Joel on Vox (misses one phrase), Chris on Guitar (-1 note)
As you can see by our (and the audience’s reaction) when the score clicked over to 2.61 and we realized we had beaten 4 of America’s BEST rockband players, we did not take the matter lightly.
It wasn’t over by a long shot. Next up were the insurmountable wall of full combo-ing & pathing rock band gods (not unlike the 1st band), all of whose videos I’d quite often watch on youtube for tips & general rockband awesomeness, Don’t Call me Shirley (nice Airplane! reference, p43nut xP). These guys are not just fantastic rockband gods, but also good friends from the village pourhouse crew and online.
Guitar – Crazed | Bass – P34nut | Vox – dogfoodnyc
Drums – Gurnkiller (YES, this is the REAL gurnkiller…. We were coming up with band names in the bus on our 1st trip to qualify for these property finals and we knew Leigh (Gurnkiller would have to be defeated eventually if we did qualify), so we named it The Gurn Killers almost as a joke. Little did we know.
Doing Down With the Sickness as well, they are headed towards a narrow victory over our 2.61mil…
Basically at 4:20 in this video, Crazed the guitarist over-strums during an 8x multiplier and it’s OVER. They come in at 2.599 Million and we basically go apeshit. Statistically it was pretty unlikely that a band that had only once before hit over 2.6 million would OUT score not one, but 2 bands, both of which were scoring in the high 2.67 + range on their songs, RELIABLY. Not to mention do it under pressure & with slightly iffy game calibration & instruments. We felt like we had won the whole tournament right there…. reality didn’t settle in til later.
Honestly no disrespect to any of the bands that played afterwards, but this was it for us… we knew that we, mob & gurn’s band were the 3 top scoring bands and as soon as we knew that they were out, we knew we had basically just advanced to the regionals…
A mjor drinking binge ensues & ego trips were not lost on asking random people to let us use their guitar!
An unbelievable high note in this epic journey.
The Gurn Killers Win it!!
Hey everyone! The Gurn Killers here with our first blog post!
And we think the perfect way to start this blog off is to thank everyone who made this possible!
- Harrah’s, MTV, Harmonix: Thank you for organizing this tournament and for bringing so many awesome people from around the country together. Despite all the logistical and technical hurdles you had to deal with, it was an amazing first effort at this sort of competition and we hope to be part of any such events in the future.
- The judges: Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to perform what’s basically a thankless job. We hope you had a good time being entertained by all of us.
- The B-52s: Thank your for agreeing to be part of the promotion and for helping fulfill the rock star fantasies of four video game geeks from New York.
- The Gurn Killer Army: Thank you for being such an incredible source of support through our entire journey. We seriously couldn’t have done it without you. It still blows our minds to look at photos with 20-30 people wearing GK t-shirts. Just… unreal!
- Our competition: Thank you for not just putting up a hell of a fight, but for being such awesome folks. We had a blast meeting all sorts of cool new people through every step of the competition, including some who have become very close friends in the past few weeks. It was an honor to have some of our regional opponents join the GK Army going into the national finals.
Special mention goes to MoB, Don’t Call Me Shirley, Strippers for Stephen Hawking, Mario Speedwagon (BEST. BAND NAME. EVER) and last but certainly not least FA/KE. Every single one of you made this competition tough as ****, from literally a one-note victory in the property finals to a 1-point victory in the regionals to taking the national championship with a scant 3-point victory over the band who unanimously gave the best single-song performance in the entire tournament. We hope we haven’t seen the last of any of you.
- All the family and friends that we’ve lost contact with over the last month as we busted our butts to bring home the bacon. Thank you for being so understanding… we hope we’ve made you proud (cross-dressing aside).
- Thanks to TJ and crew for the tournament coverage.
Expect a lot more from The Gurn Killers in the upcoming weeks.