Question on Instrumentals, Demos, etc.

Few questions for the crowd, in case anyone knows. I didn't follow the band closely until about 2 years ago, so I'm not familiar with the full process of what music they release and how time consuming it might be for them to finalize it. Also, I'm not expecting too much from the band since this is a tough time to go through, but figured I'd ask.

1) I wish there were separate versions of Over Again and Place to Start that don't have the "car alarm sound" and "door creaking open" at the beginning, and voicemail recordings at the end. As good as the songs are, it kinda makes it hard to listen to "over and over again" on repeat. Any chance they could release something like this? If not, is there a simple way that I can edit the songs that I already downloaded?

2) Any chance there will be "bonus songs" to One More Light, similar to what they had on A Thousand Suns and Minutes to Midnight? Each of those bonus songs were great. I recall them having much more than 10 songs on their list that they revealed in a picture before the album came out, so there must be leftovers that didn't make the cut. Maybe "Looking for an Answer" could be one of the bonus songs if they come out with a deluxe version.

3) Should we expect them to ever release the instrumentals to the One More Light album? I would really like to listen to those. I noticed they released instrumentals on the past 2 albums.

4) Speaking of instrumentals, I noticed a lot of the demos that are available via LPU are instrumentals. Were these songs designed to be instrumentals from the start? Or was it simply a matter of Linkin Park creating the instrumentals sounds first and they just never got around to creating lyrics that matched up well? It would be cool if someday they turned those into full songs with lyrics.

 

I can answer the 3rd question. While not officially released. All instrumentals of One More Light can be found on youtube. I listen to them quite often really..

 

I would put that in the "extremely unlikely" to "definitely not" category. Mike included those clips for a reason, to give more to the theme of those songs. His intention was to give a closer, more genuine look into what it was like going through what he was going through: being aggravated by car alarms amidst everything; getting phone calls from friends trying to check on him. If you want rid of those parts you can just download a simple audio editor like Audacity and the required extension to export to your preferred format, import the audio, and delete the portion in question.

But personally, I wouldn't do that. Just because I know Mike very intentionally wanted those parts in there.

I would say no. If there was a deluxe edition with bonus tracks planned for One More Light it'd probably already be out there, in my opinion at least. I also have a gut feeling that with the writing style of OML there probably weren't that many full songs completed by the end of writing. The bonus tracks to Minutes to Midnight were studio tracks that didn't make the final tracklist (No Roads Left and Across the Line, the latter which went through LPU also), which there were a lot of because the band wrote a ton of songs during that cycle. With A Thousand Suns, Blackbirds was literally just a song they had released through 8-Bit Rebellion already.

There's also just a sensitivity to the fact that as OML as it was released is the last album with Chester's involvement. Re-releasing it with a song written just by Mike after the fact or tracks from the studio that the band with Chester chose not to put on it doesn't seem right and I feel like the band feels that way as well, especially also considering that with LPU 17 they haven't released anything yet and may not plan to.

Those leaked a long time ago. They're certainly out there, just not officially.

The instrumentals released through LPU were unfinished songs most times, though there are definitely some that were written as instrumentals--the Pods come to mind. Some were actually earlier versions of songs that definitely got to the point of having lyrics--the band likely didn't like them with lyrics and released the instrumentals because they thought they were better. Up until One More Light, the band always wrote instrumentals and built on that. They'd build on a short riff, beat, or hook until they felt ready to add vocals on top of the instrumentation. LPU 12 and LPU 9 in particular show this, as you hear a lot of mono-syllabic placeholder gibberish just to establish a vocal rhythm or melody, or songs with verses but not choruses, unfinished lyrics, etc.

 

Agree, adding those clips to the sound give it more meaning. It just stinks for me because I can't really listen to it on repeat very easily (I'm the type of person that likes to pick one song and listen to it on repeat for hours while I'm working).

True, as much as I'd like them to release a never-before-heard song as a tribute to Chester, I suppose "One More Light" fits perfectly as his final song.

I listened to them on YouTube and they sound great. Unfortunately, I can't get that to work on YouTube since it won't play the music unless my phone is open (YouTube is blocked on our work computers, so phone is the only option).

Very interesting. Some of them definitely sounded like they were meant to have lyrics. I also really like the Pods. I actually first listened to quick samples of each song on Youtube before deciding which LPU albums to buy. I went with LPU X, 12, 15, and 16 since those had the most songs that weren't instrumentals. However, I think I'm gonna go back and buy some of the other albums like 11, XIII, and XIV that have a lot of instrumentals.

Thanks, this is very helpful.

 

Damn