Amberian Dawn - Fate Of The Maiden - Hard Guitar - Rock Band Network

Amberian Dawn are a Finnish metal band with excellent female vocals. While the obvious comparison is to Nightwish, I find that AD's music is a little more old-school power/speed metal, as opposed to Nightwish's more showtunes-meet-prog-metal wizardry.

This is a cool song, but one of Amberian Dawn's hardest yet. It is listed as 5 dots in the RB3 music store, but is really 5 devil horns, as I confirmed with the track author at RockGamer studios. It starts off with a riff that will reappear many times in the song. It is a mixture of double chords and single notes that use the entire fretboard. The timing is a little odd. It seems like they left out a few notes, in an effort to make Hard easier than Expert, but I do not know if that was necessary. The tempo is not really frenetic enough to warrant it. What you end up with is parts where it seems like it is in 4/4 time, but only the 1st, 3rd, and 4th beats are charted. If every beat was charted or every other beat, I think it would have made more sense. You can't really get in time with the drums and have to pay a little too much attention to the timing of the chart, rather than getting into a groove and only needing to worry about what note/chord to play.

Next comes a stream of largely blue notes, with the occasional orange thrown in as an accent. The stream is not consistent. Sometimes you will play one blue per beat, sometimes two blue per beat, but it fits the actual guitar line and works well. This ends with a sweep up the fretboard that is not all that tricky. It repeats a couple times.

The first, hard part then repeat a few times. If you can get the timing right, now is a great time to use overdrive if you have it because this main riff is the most points per measure of any part of the song.

Next comes the stream of largely blue notes again.

The first, hard part then repeat a few times. If you can get the timing right, now is a really great time to use overdrive because a unison phrase/double overdrive is in here so you can keep overdrive going for a while and rack up some serious points. Don't kick in overdrive too late. You do not want it to still be active when an overdrive section appears after this part ends. You'll need that overdrive for later.

Next comes the guitar solo. The overdrive I mentioned before comes right prior to the solo and has a sustain so you can whammy your way to about 1/3 full. The solo starts pretty easy and there is another overdrive section at the end of the easy part. You should now have enough overdrive to activate. Wait a few seconds. There is a sweep down the keyboard, a crazy alt-strummed sequence of orange notes and now ... all hell breaks loose. Activate your overdrive. A crazy wall of HOPO's with little ryhme or reason now hits you. It is so crazy, I have occasionally failed out even with overdrive going. Yikes.

Assuming you survive the solo, you are now back to a long outro that is the main, tricky riff from earlier. You will be out of overdrive, but a unison phrase/double overdrive section is in here. So you can kick in OD one last time. Again, if you can get the tricky timing, this is a great place to rack up points.

I am not sure if I can give this an unqualified thumbs up because I have some issues with the charting. However, it is a real challenge and I have probably played it more than any other song I have downloaded lately. Despite its difficulty, I keep coming back to it. That has to say something for it.

This is one of my few 5 star runs. Far from perfect, but it'll have to do.

This continues my project of posting RBN songs on Hard difficulty for those of us who love the game but are not Expert level players. There are usually plenty of vids available of Expert difficulty, but no vids of the charts on Hard difficulty. This will allow you to see the entire chart ahead of time and, hopefully, aid you in deciding if you want to buy the song.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Rock Band
• Rock Band Network
• Rock
• Band
• Network
• Amberian Dawn
• Amberian
• Dawn
• Fate Of The Maiden
• Fate
• Of
• The
• Maiden
• Hard
• Guitar
• RBN
• DLC