Sweersa

Can you hear Axl's vocals more clearly?

There's absolutely no excuse for this. Do these people even look at the wave form before submitting the mixes? That is trash, absolute trash. It's bad enough we don't get to hear a lot of Bucket and Robin on these songs. I miss CD-era Axl. He wouldn't have put up with all of this shit associated with the NITL lineup. I get making piles of money, but at the very least, give the music room to be music.

It means the wave form (what you see posted here from Audacity) is increased (made louder) to a point where it jumps out of the listenable spectrum, in other words, dynamics lost, it's all loud as fuck and so loud you can't hear whatever bits jump out of the listenable spectrum.

A lot of the issues would be resolved if they used mixes from the CD-era.

I wish Axl realized that before having Slash re-record Robin and Bucket's parts

That explains a lot! Could it somehow be the click track for Frank's live performances that got added accidentally to the mix?

I'm in the US, Michigan and the Guns store in my area ships out of Michigan and I have not gotten a shipment notice yet. I ordered 3 vinyls though, so it probably will take them longer to gather and package it.

That makes sense. However, didn't Slash at one point describe Hard Skool as being historic, or going way back? He may have lumped Absurd and Perhaps in that too. I can't recall the details but he was implying the more "epic" songs as not being as old as the earlier NITL CD re-works.

TB probably thinks CDs can’t fit three songs if a vinyl that’s physically larger can’t.

The Buckethead/Robin version of any song is going to be better.

I never thought to check the waveform of the song. The 1999 Oh My God is loud too from that standpoint, but I don't know if it suffered from clipping. Reminds me of Metallica's Death Magnetic clipping issues, where the band said it was intentional.

Maybe we will hear Bucket and/or Robin better in the official mix.

Thanks! I wonder if it's there, but hidden?

Do we know if the Japanese CD for Perhaps/The General will contain Monsters?

Maybe it's the same mix, but the quality of the leak is horrendous. Whether intentional or not by the source of the leak. If the final product sounds as bad as it, it's embarrassing.

I unfortunately cannot tell much of a difference. The louder or higher Axl sings in that song, the harder it is to understand in the leak we got. Monsters suffers from this too. I sure hope the quality is better in the official version. Even the vocal effects in Oh My God and the bit in Perhaps are at least intelligible.

Probably, Absurd and Perhaps were, but not Hard Skool. The best for Hard Skool was CD quality, maybe that was intentional because of how awful it was produced.

These lyrics from The General are from the perspective of the vinyl test runs refusing to cooperate with the engineers: Daddy, don't I swear I won't I'll be good from now on And I'm awful sorry Daddy don't The hell I won't I won't be good anymore And you'll all be sorry

I'm surprised people were aggressive towards Bumblefoot for that show. He was the least concern from a performance standpoint. I remember watching it streaming, the stream quality was awful, cutting in and out and Axl sounded bad, and Pitman's duck call singing during Jungle made it even worse.

Chinese Democracy also dominated all other artist's albums at the time, even Kayne's on the Torrent sites. That's telling.

My buddy said it best, that when CD dropped as the first single, the release was doomed. Better being the best, most catchy song on the album and radio friendly, and also my favorite. The leak got me into the band.

SoD was a single, though not pushed much, and difficult to find.

It was a Phase II clone trooper helmet. (Revenge of the Sith)

I think he has one or more Universal contact as well. He seems to be or was a player in the industry at one point, seeing how they even bother to respond to him.

I wonder if "historic older material was possible" is a reference to songs that currently have no indication of a NITL re-work, like Berlin, Seven, Zodiac 13, etc.? But those of course are CD-era. I doubt they are going to scrap the half or more of CD2 that they have not released as reworked songs in favor of actual new material. Maybe the next album will be a hybrid. I'd love that, release the best of the CD vault with however many new songs they can write.