Note: a remixed version of this song is now available here.
Ah, sweet “Defiance.” I’ve gone through hundreds of variations and modifications of this theme, but still I love the original incarnation of this piece. Yeah, it’s repetitive; yeah, the layout is awfully simple; yeah, that’s a weird techno-ish sound in the middle of what should be a solid rock song. But somehow it works. I don’t know how, but this song still rocks (and I’ve heard it probably a thousand times).
Getting a solid distort guitar sound out of raw MIDI is tricky, but I think “Defiance” succeeds. My goal for the near future is to produce an mp3 remix of this using real guitars. I’m not sure where I got the idea for the swayed power chord that comprises the whole first half of the song; I think it most likely came from listening to too much Disturbed or Godsmack. The 2nd half – in case you haven’t already figured it out – is a straight adaptation of the bridge in Vertical Horizon’s “We Are.” On a random side note, Everything You Want was the first rock album I ever bought. Weird. Anyway, I love the riffs VH pulled out of that album, and “Defiance” borrows from them as a kind of twisted salute to a good band.
Rock on, 40-year-old dads.
"Defiance" by Tanner Helland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be obtained here.
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