Hey everybody,
What a week! Can you believe it's Friday already? Get ready for your weekly dose of Road Crew goodness.
In late August we announced the formation of the Rock Band Road Crew, a rewards program for our most dedicated and loyal rockers. After sifting through hundreds and hundreds of applications, we made our selections. Since its formation, the Rock Band Road Crew have been busy throwing events, live streaming the game, creating epic DIY Rock Band gear, and being generally awesome human beings.
Each week we'll be highlighting some interesting folks from the crew. If you'd like to nominate a roadie that you think deserves the spotlight, be sure to tweet your nomination to @RockBand.
Today's Spotlight goes out to Mr. Weff Jebster, uh Jeb Weffster, we mean Jeff Webster. Yeah.
Hey, I think I know you from twitter!
You do! I'm @weffjebster.
And we've seen you at a few Harmonix run Rock Band events too. Any memories you want to share?
Haha, oh man. This actually happened at The Brattle Theater for the last Rock Band Night up there before PAX East a couple years ago. It was my second time on stage that night because someone needed a vocalist for "Savior" by Rise Against. Editor's note, this is one of Alli's favorite songs.
Well, we got past the intro, and before the first verse even started, suddenly a really weird, off-beat and super loud clicking sound started coming through the speakers. I realized about halfway through the first verse what happened because my voice wasn't coming out of the speakers at all. So I was, like, jumping around and losing my mind on stage to this song (there was a mosh pit and everything that John Drake had to physically break up) and no one could hear me, and we didn't get it fixed until around halfway through the last chorus. The entire time Jeff Gerstmann was just staring at me with the most dead look on his face. It was nuts.
So, you're a vox-man, then?
When I'm by myself, guitar is probably my favorite instrument. In a party situation, it's vocals by a long shot.
What's your greatest Rock Band accomplishment?
Easily, easily it would be getting six of my own songs released as DLC through the Rock Band Network. Not only is that just inherently the coolest gosh darn thing in the whole dang planet, but I also met some really cool people through that community that I still hang out with on Skype to this very day! During the course of authoring and play testing and peer reviewing it just came to pass that we all started to collaborate on new music with each other and it was just really, really cool to make those kinds of connections while taking part in that platform. (You can check out Jeff's band here).
Do you remember the first time you played a music game?
I remember one of my friends having, like, a super-official DDR platform. I never really got into that afterwards (I was really bad and unwilling to put the effort in), but the idea behind it was really, really cool. I also had a run in with some drumming arcade game that was just way too hard for me at the time. We did have Guitar Hero 2 in one of the houses I lived in in college which really turned me on to the idea of a rock music performance game, which, as a musician, I will admit I scoffed at pretty hard before.
What's the coolest thing that's happened to you since joining the Road Crew?
So far my favorite road crew moment has been when I was doing an expert guitar requests stream and someone popped up out of nowhere in the chat telling me he came from the community of a puzzle website I used to run that has been left to its own devices for something along the lines of 8 or more years, but this guy had only discovered it within the last six or so months. We had a good talk on stream and he asked for some help on one of the puzzles and honestly it was just a super cool blast from the past.
Do you have anything in the works now that you're an official roadie?
As for plans for the future, there have been not one, not two, but three bar/arcades opening soon in Cincinnati. My great idea, since I have two band-in-a-box kits and some legacy instruments with the adapter, is that I wanna host Rock Band bar nights every so often. Also, the manager of the Gamestop I bought my Xbox One from learned about me being in the Rock Band Road Crew (I said I was there to buy my Rock Band machine) and offered to help me set up some in-store events, too, and I'm just waiting on the logistics to line up for stuff like that. Hopefully soon! Editor's note, again, if you live in the Ohio area and want to help Jeff out, hit him up on twitter!
What are your must-haves for a killer Rock Band night?
Alright, listen here. I've never met a soul who didn't like queso. You get some solid tortilla chips and a real good queso and I defy you to fail.
Also, make sure you have your console stocked up with party songs. Even if you don't like "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" (first off, who are you??) it's pivotal to have songs like that, or "Total Eclipse of the Heart," or "Love Shack," or "The Sweater Song"... Songs you can sing along to.
Finally, make sure you have plenty of headroom. If David Lee Roth can't jump up and do a split kick without bonking his head, you're gonna need a taller ceiling. Plan accordingly.
Before we wrap up, is there anything weird or unusual that you'd like to tell us?
This totally has nothing to do with Rock Band, but I have bones in my ankles that are fused together in a way that they shouldn't be. I broke my foot two times and the doctors didn't notice this in the x-ray. In fact, I was misdiagnosed with Sever's disease, which is when your achilles tendon doesn't grow as fast as the rest of your body. Years later I went in to complain about how my ankles hurt really bad when I walk around all day and the doctor tried to roll my ankle around to see if it hurt and noticed that, hey, my ankle just isn't bending that way! Anyway so I have a mutant power and my mutant power is that I'm incapable of rolling my ankles.
That's a pretty good power for those of us who are accident-prone.
Thanks for everything Jeff! We'll catch you on the internet!