Halo Reach - Tip of the Spear Guitar Cover

Here's my take on one of my favorite tunes from the Reach soundtrack. I love Bungie era Halo soundtracks, and I'm definitely planning to cover these games more often. I hope you dig this one.

Credits:
Composed by Martin O'Donnell & Michael Salvatori
Arranged, performed & mixed by Capt'n Shred

A couple of people have requested tabs, so I uploaded a partial transcription here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8qrtsf8dus...

About this cover:

Big, intense rock is the vibe I was going for. So, huge & open sounding drums, chunky rhythm guitars & bass (with as little gain as one can get away with) and soaring leads were a must.

There are some orchestral layers here and there, but it's done for texture - always keeping the "band" ensemble at the forefront. It's always fun doing an orchestral piece in a rock band format. You have to pick which voices and parts will be mapped to the band instruments, while keeping the track's essence. Of course, I took some liberties, such as adding guitar solos and skipping the somber intro (gotta get right into the action).

Among my favorite moments are 0:52-1:00 and 1:16-1:32. I came up with some triads that sounded good under the melody and played them with a stereo chorus-y clean tone. That dreamy clean guitar, plus the half time drums and orchestral layers really make those parts stand out from the more intense main sections.

The whole structure and arrangement practically worked itself out, but the production/sonics aspect was another story - I had to iterate a bit to get the sound I wanted (just to give an idea, I recorded the rhythm guitars three times using different tones), but in the end I'm satisfied with the result.