According to 104.9fm - XFM (UK) announced that Linkin Park's next single will be 'Given Up', it will be released some time in February. This has yet to be confirmed by the band themselves.

Labels: news

Rock Sound magazine will have an interview with Linkin Park in their upcoming issue and they want fans to send in their questions to the band. Send your questions to rsvp@rock-sound.net, include your name and where you're from. Closing date is Jan. 25th.

-source: lptimes

Labels: news

The Pulse of Radio reports: LINKIN PARK will sport a brand new stage set and production when the band heads out on its North American tour, which begins on February 12 in Omaha, Nebraska. During a teleconference with reporters on Friday (January 11), co-vocalist Mike Shinoda revealed that ticket demand in some cities has led the band to open up the entire arena and give the group a chance to play in the round. "A number of shows are being sold at 360 degrees," he said. "So that means that the stage is obviously set up for a 360 degree show, and a number of venues, such as Staples Center, Madison Square Garden, they sold out to 270 degrees, so now we opened it up to 360. So it's a great thing that the shows are selling out and we're able to open them up and play in the round."

The New York show at the Garden on February 21 and the Los Angeles show at the Staples Center on March 4 are the only confirmed 360-degree shows so far.

Labels: news

Send any pictures, graphics, news or anything else about Brad to our email address.

bdonline77@gmail.com

Labels: email

A cd called Rock Hits is now available for purchase featuring 19 recent rock favorites. The track list includes; What I’ve Done (Linkin Park), I Don’t Love You (My Chemical Romance), It’s Not Over (Daughtry), Starlight (Muse), 1973 (James Blunt), Keep Your Hands Off My Girl (Good Charlotte), Is it Any Wonder (Keane), When You’re Gone (Avril Lavigne) and Call Me When You’re Sober (Evanescence).

To get a copy for free, just name your favorite rock song from the compilation and tell why you like the tune.

All you need to do is e-mail your answer to ailing.quek@warnermusic.com between 7pm and 10pm today to win your copy. Ten copies are up for grabs.

-The Star Online

Labels: news

The offical message board for Brad Delson Online is now up and running. Join and talk to fellow Brad fans about our favorite guitarist.

http://delsononline.proboards62.com

Labels: message board

Questions & Answers on brad.linkinpark.com:

Q: What music are you listening to currently?

A: Sam Cooke, Editors, Yo-Yo Ma, Tokyo Police Club


Q: What are your favorite movies this year?

A: Once, Ratatouille, Eastern Promises, Stardust, 3:10 to Yuma


Q: How many guitars have you smashed? (If none, you should smash one now)

A: Fortunately, not too many. The guitars I play on stage are pretty special (and pretty expensive), so I try to treat them kindly! I have, however, destroyed a few in my time, some of which have been retired to various Hard Rock cafes.

Q: What type of guitar do have near your computer? (or near your tv/couch etc for sudden strokes of genius)

A: I keep an old-school hand-held recorder close for sudden bursts of inspiration. If I’m away from home, I’ll call myself and leave ideas on my voicemail.


Q: What is your favorite guitar?

A: My red PRS, custom 24, soldier with wings

Labels: lpn

Posted on brad.linkinpark.com:

November 20, 2007

Wow!!! We always say that this kind of recognition is icing on an already incredible cake (the opportunity to write, record, and perform our music). But the icing sure tastes good! Thank you so much for all your dedication and support—-without it, we know we wouldn’t be able to continue doing what we love.

Much respect,

BBB

Labels: blog post

Posted on brad.linkinpark.com:

November 16, 2007

As the waitress came to our table to take our drink order, I asked, “How ya goin?” She looked at me curiously. At that moment, I realized I wasn’t in Australia and that the waitress in this Los Angeles deli had no idea what I was talking about. Needless to say, the Aussie manner of speech had rubbed off on me over the last few weeks. If only I can maintain their affability and laid-back attitude here in the States, I will have taken home a truly unique gift from Down Under.

Labels: blog post

Labels: interviews, media

Minutes To Midnight is the highly anticipated third studio outing by multi-platinum selling act Linkin Park. The band spent close to a year and a half crafting their latest opus. Co-produced by the band’s Mike Shinoda and famed legendary producer Rick Rubin, it marks a change in the band’s musical direction and approach.


As Rubin stated recently when asked about the new record: "They [Linkin Park] really are reinventing themselves, it doesn't sound like rap-rock. There's very strong songwriting. It's very melodic...a progressive record." On the eve of the album release and just days before the band headed out on their current tour, Joe Matera spoke to Linkin Park guitarist Brad Delson about the new album, vintage gear and haunted houses.

Ultimate-Guitar: The band’s third studio album, Minutes to Midnight sees Linkin Park moving away from their sound of old. It is more of a redefined sound for the band, was it a conscious decision or the result of a natural progression?

Brad Delson: Minutes to Midnight is really a huge departure for us. We decided when we began writing this record that we really wanted to take the sound that we had established with Hybrid Theory and developed further with Meteora and kind of put it aside and really, almost, start from scratch in a sense with what the sound of the band could become. And through a lot of hard work and really smart guidance by our producer Rick Rubin, we were able to achieve what ultimately became this record.

You spent 14 months working on the album and in that period amassed around 150 song ideas?

Yeah but I would say it was more about a 17 month period. We started it about November of 2005 and then we worked on it and didn’t finish the record until the end of last month [March]. There were definitely a lot of songs there that we had to work with. Some of them were good enough to be on the record but there were also a lot of stuff that you know, hopefully no one will ever hear because they were awful. There definitely is a lot of stuff that didn’t make the record that may come out at some point in the future.

Was there pressure on you with the success of the first two albums, to try and replicate that success with the new album?

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves creatively to try and not rely on existing methods or formulas on how to write a song. We really wanted to, with this album, do something totally fresh and new and it took a long time and a lot of experimentation to find out to how we would achieve that.

Speaking of experimentation, the band has utilized a lot of different instruments this time on the recording. There is everything from acoustic guitars to banjos to marimbas?

In the past if you read the liner notes to the albums it would say Brad Delson – guitar, Mike Shinoda – keyboards etc. But this time when it came time to address the liner notes we really simply wrote, “Linkin Park is” because all six of us played really anything and everything instrument wise on this record. There were no boundaries in terms of what some one could contribute or how they could contribute to the creation of these songs. It was really a product of collaboration by all six of us.


Rick Rubin co-produced the album with Mike Shinoda, what did Rick bring to the recording process?

He brought in a lot of perspective and a kind of a really great way of being able to guide us through a really challenging process and to do so while simultaneously creating a really positive and open atmosphere. Rick is really a big picture guy. You know, he’ll get immersed in the details when he needs to but in terms of basic tracking he usually relies on his engineers to kind of oversee that part of the process. So when it came to tracking guitars, I worked a lot with our engineer Andrew Scheps.

You’ve never really been happy with the whole “nu-metal” tag, are you hoping with this album that it will finally free you from any of sort of labelling by critics?

We definitely were in the past categorized in certain ways yet we never felt like we belonged to any clubs…any musical clubs. Nor did we ever aspire to belong to any one genre too. The idea of our band when we started it was to try to really define any sort of classification. But we understand that kind of a lot of different bands grew out of this kind of particular of genre. A lot of groups incorporated a certain sound into their music, some of whom you know, may have been influenced by some of the records we had made. With this new record though we really wanted to totally move the playing field and really kind of let go in a way stylistically of where we were coming from. And that was definitely risking in the sense that we had a lot of success making songs with a definitive sound and style and so to really start over and to do something totally new and unproven was a huge risk for the band. And with great risk can also come great reward so our hope is that when people listen to this album that they can connect with as much as all six of us - really all seven of us when you include Rick - connect with each of the songs that we chose.

Turning to the topic of gear, when it came to the recording process did you still use your famed Paul Reed Smith guitars?

I did use my Paul Reed Smith guitars because they’re so versatile. But I also supplemented them by relying on a lot of vintage gear. Stuff like a 1950s Stratocaster, a vintage Les Paul, a fender Jaguar, a Fender Telecaster and I completely abandoned the amps I was using. There really is no Dual Rectifier or any new Marshall on this record. I mainly used a vintage Soldano, a vintage Hi-Watt, a Sears amp and an AC-30 for my clean tones. I also had this really rare piece of gear which we called the “Bo Diddley” amp named after Bo Diddley himself who had this signature series of amps, I think he only had about 40 of them as he probably destroyed half of them. . It also had an analogue tape delay built into the back of the amp. Anyway our engineer had only seen this amp in a magazine before. He had never seen one in person and we were able to find one and rent it for the recording sessions. And it had this incredible clean tone.

Did using the vintage gear play a major part in inspiring you toa different approach when it came to your guitar playing?

Completely, especially when it came to guitar solos. With a lot of the textures in the past I didn’t have really have any solos as I thought that they just sounded somewhat clichéd in rock songs. And I felt that, at least in my tastes, popular alternative music has clearly come around full circle today and that in the case of this record some of the solos on the record really I think, made the song that so much more special.

Did you experiment with trying out different combinations of amplifiers and then blending the sounds you liked to make one tone?

Yeah, I found and got a lot of cool combinations between amps. I used a Soldano and Hi-Watt in combination and sometimes, I’d mix in like an old JCM800 amp where it created a really unique heavy tone. I wanted to do things differently with each song, so we weren’t married to one particular setup. It was like whatever sounded the best.

When it comes to touring the album how will you go about recreating the sounds you got on the album in the live environment?

That is a great question. The problem is using all these kinds of different amps, a lot of them are rare and old and so they’re delicate. And because we have multiple rigs, we also have to have back-ups. It is really impossible to incorporate these amps into our live rig. So I was thinking ‘how are we going to do this? It could be so expensive and it could be unreliable’. And I found this incredible solution. Randall is making this new guitar tube emulator. It is an amp emulator that has actual tubes inbuilt into it, 6” inches wide and about an inch tall. And I basically fill a rack with these different types of Randall tube emulators and what I’ve been able to do is dial in all the sounds. So I’ve got basically the Soldano, the Hi-Watt and the JCM800, all the amps that I used in the studio, I’ve got those tones down in my rack via these tube emulators. And I can switch between them in my pedal board during different songs.


Will Randall be making a signature Brad Delson emulator model?

It is looking that way where I’ll be having a signature guitar emulator with Randall. I’ve already done some new modifications on this brand new piece of gear and hopefully we’ll be able to make available the exact tones that I made use of on this record. But also with the ability for the player who purchases these emulators to dial them in as however they seem fit.

Do you get many song ideas when you’re out on the road?

In the past especially with Meteora, we started a lot of the ideas on the road. But for this record because we had some time off after the Meteora touring cycle had ended, we wrote and recorded this new entire album in Los Angeles. It was recorded at the Laurel Canyon mansion, which is one of Rick’s homes that is actually situated across the street from the Harry Houdini house.

It’s been noted by other artists who have recorded there that the house is haunted. Did you experience any supernatural happenings whilst there?

I think security that had worked in that house before on the System of a Down record told us that they had experienced some sort of paranormal activity. I personally didn’t see any of that nature as I made it a point to keep the lights on!

You’re about to announce the return of Projekt Revolution this summer?

Yes that is correct. We will be doing Projekt Revolution this summer for what I think is now the fourth time. It is going to be a huge summer tour going around the States and we will be announcing the final line-up probably in the next couple of weeks.

Are you looking forward to hitting the road again to tour behind the new album?

Absolutely and we will literally be starting the tour this week, which will lead us up to Projekt Revolution this summer. I can see us easily being on the road until the following year when we may do Projekt Revolution again. We will also be coming down to Australia at some point in time, hopefully either at the end of this year or the beginning of next year.

-Ultimate Guitar

Labels: interviews

RC: Rock Circus has come down to Metropol, we're with
the members of Linkin Park. This is Rob.
Rob: Hello
RC: You're the bassist?
Rob: Drummer
RC: Phoenix, the odest and newest member of the band I'm
told, bass player.
Phoenix: That is correct.
RC: And we got Chester over here.
Chester: Hi
RC: And Todd
Brad: I'm Brad, but you can call me Todd.
RC: I'm sorry, my bust, so tell me a little bit...
(Mike who is sitting behind Gigz waves to the camera)
Mike: I'm not in the band.
RC: Mike, I'm sorry, I didn't even see you behind me.
Mike: I'm here for moral support and to sit over-top
of everybody.
RC: My bad, hey they're being very nice to us we forgot
the tape and luckily I live very close and I was
able to get back and weasel an interview in. Thanks
guys for being so nice to us.
Band: No problem.
RC: So you guys are from Southern California, what part?
Chester: Los Angeles, California.
RC: You guys look relatively young, did you hook up in
highschool?
Mike: Yeah, we're still in highschool, none of us have
our driver's liscences yet.
RC: Nah, you look a little older than that man.
Mike: No I'm thirteen.
RC: I got a fourteen year old daughter you can hook up
with.
Chester: Alright!
RC: No I didn't say that, I got church people that watch
my show. Now you guys got two vocalists, Chester
and Mike.
Brad: And Todd.
RC: And Todd, Brad over there, I'm sorry my bad. That's
what you get when you try to pull one out your ass.
But anyway is there any problems between egos?
Mike: Yeah, a lot, we hate eachother!
RC: I would doubt that.
Chester: That's what makes it so diverse and dynamic
when you write lyrics cause it's about how much we
hate eachother.
RC: Is that what sells?
Chester: Yeah
RC: And then you throw Todd's guitar work in over there,
I'm sorry Brad I'm busting your balls.
Mike: Big Bad Todd.
RC: How did you hook up with these guys?
Mike: Tough Tall Todd.
Brad: You can call me tough tall, Mike and I actually
met in junior high, I went to college with Dave,
Rob played with me in a band in highschool.
Phoenix: Who's Dave?
Brad: Oh, sorry, Phoenix... phonics... and Chester was
the last piece of our beautiful little puzzle.
Chester: They found me in a dumpster.
Mike: I went to school with Joe. Mr Hahn's to busy
working out to hang out with us but I knew Joe from
college, so that we don't leave him out of the
puzzle there. He told us to screw off I think.
RC: (laughing)Now your CD title is Hybrid Theory, the
title originally was the name of the band, what
transpired there?
Mike: It was basically a legal issue that we changed the
name. We chose the name Linkin Park for one reason,
the spelling L I N K I N. We've always been
interested in the internet and a lot of our first
fans and street-team members were from the internet
so we wanted to choose a name that we could get the
band name .COM. Basically we just wanted the
website, that's it, that's the only reason.
Chester: We're pretty boring.
RC: No you guys aren't boring, you guys were flying all
around here before we started.
(Joe walks up from behind the back of the bus to join
the crowd)
Chester: He's pumped up, check him out dude, look at the
size of that guy!
Mike: He's so pumped. (in an Arnold Schwartzenager voice)
(Joe makes a blow me jester to the group)
RC: How much can you bench?
Joe: Uhh... I bench like 120 pounds.
RC: No, come on.
Joe: Sixty pounds on each side.
RC: What do you do like sets of ten with that?
Joe: No, like three.
RC: Do you run the turn-tables or drums?
Joe: Yeah, I rent turn-tables every night, scratch.
RC: Does that help your abilities there?
Joe: I actually started off petting dogs.
RC: Well, that would be a great catalyst to that.
Joe: Then I moved on to cats.
RC: Then you could move on to spanking the monkey.
Joe: No, I've been doing that for years.
RC: See, you had a head start before petting dogs.
Joe: Yeah monkeys, we go way back.
RC: Or turtles?
Joe: No just turtle heads.
RC: Cat heads, whatever it takes.
(Chester is bent over with laughter on the other side
of the couch)
Mike: Chester's gonna bust his gut here.
Chester: Sometimes I get posessed by the laughing
demons.
RC: How long are you guys gonna be out on the road? A
good while, through the end of the year?
Mike: We'll be on tour with HedPe and POD and Project 86
through the rest of this month, November, and then
in December we'll be hooking up with Papa Roach.
RC: Good friend of RC, he's a cool dude. But hey I'll
wrap this up, I know you guys have things to do,
thanks.

-Rock Circus

Labels: interviews

"I always tell people this, and my band mates think I’m lying," said Linkin Park guitarist Brad Delson, "but when I first started playing in 11th grade, all I wanted to do was play a show. Everything after that is just extra."

What a great big pile of extra it is, though. It’s one that would probably turn more ambitiously minded rockers 40 shades of green. Seemingly with little effort at all, Linkin Park has piled up achievements at a remarkable rate: after its first show, the band scored a publishing deal; soon a word-of-mouth buzz would spread the band’s name through rock circles faster than the heroin craze could burn itself out. It wouldn’t be too long before a major-label deal turned up.

Anyone who hasn’t had a chance to partake of the band’s live show, or pick up on one of the radio stations already broadcasting its debut, Hybrid Theory (2000, Warner Bros.), is probably left wondering if the hype is justified. Probably so, considering the band’s take on the quickly deteriorating rock/rap formula. The act mixes Delson’s six-string talents with those of drummer Rob Bourdon and DJ Joseph Hahn, along with a pair of vocalists—Chester Bennington and Mike Shinoda—to create a style that one-ups most other rock-rap combos.

"I don’t want it to sound like ‘Here’s the rap part, now here comes the huge rock choruses,’" Delson explained. "I wanted it all to fit together, so there wasn’t one part that sounds like rap and another like rock. It all sounds like Linkin Park."

Such is the theory the band sticks to on its debut. With Delson’s heavy-handed guitar work that alludes to slick proto-industrial metal flying over a slick combination of beats and a slew of samples that give it a crisp, urban feel, Hybrid Theory flaunts a beefed-up sense of flash than the trailer-park offerings coming from the Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit camps.

More of an allusion back to the days when Pop Will Eat Itself and Big Audio Dynamite flustered the boundaries between urban sounds, guitar-driven post-punk and dance tracks than a romp through nookie-land, Linkin Park’s songs don’t smack of the contrived, genre-crossing rock/rap fusion of the late ‘90s. Where many rock-rappers thrive on the juxtaposition of metal riffs and hip-hop beats, Linkin Park favors a style that blends the two into an amalgam that’s more than the simple sum of its parts.

"It’s all one thing," Delson said, explaining the mix of styles in his band’s sound. "We have a lot of influences, like Aphex Twin and the Deftones and the Roots. I want to be so anyone who hears us can be into it. I want the Deftones fans to like us, and the kid who has only listened to hip hop to like it too."

While Linkin Park only traces its history back to mid-1997, it’s enough to predate the explosion of rock-rap bands that made it big following the success of Korn and Limp Bizkit’s radio rampage of ’98, and more importantly, the deluge of acts jumping on the bandwagon as the genre began to heat up. In fact, the association most between its members stretches much farther back, albeit on a non-musical level. Shindoa, Delson and Bourdon originally met up while in high school, and Shinoda quickly met Hahn after moving on to art college. With Bennington, imported from the deserts of Arizona, the band was set to take its sound to the masses.

"We were doing it way before it got popular," Delson said, citing his band’s history as one of the biggest differentiations between his act and the rest of the rock/rap bands. "They’re doing something different; we do our own thing. It’s cool, but just different."

In fact, the band always envisioned its style to be a different take on the usual attempts to fuse styles of music. With aims more unconventional than the hopes of grafting the Crue’s guitars to Dre’s beats, Linkin Park always planned to do more to blur the lines of the style. Originally naming themselves Hybrid Theory, showing its hope to make a style that didn’t just combine genres, but meshed them together seamlessly. While the young band makes its efforts look easy, its efforts to mix things up didn’t always run as seamlessly as things do now.

"It wasn’t easy at first," Delson admitted. "If you heard our first demos, it wasn’t as much as now. There’d be rock sections and rap sections."

Once Hybrid Theory is popped in, however, there’s no doubt the band finally made it to its lofty aims. From the gut-wrenching riffage of "One Step Closer," to the Armageddon groove of "Cure for the Itch," the band leaves little space for anything that isn’t going to further its cause. It’s such tight songwriting—the longest track on Hybrid Theory clocks in at a mere 3:36—that makes Linkin Park’s songs play out so well. It also, however, makes the process of songwriting a bit more complicated than the average jam session that underlies many bands’ songwriting process.

"It just comes from really working on the songs," Delson said. "We go over the songs and make sure everything fits. Everything has to work together."

Though the band scored a major-label contract, it isn’t about to let its successes go to its head. Riding the wave of an industry buzz, Delson knows it’s going to take a lot of work to make the industry hype and the street-level prerelease buzz pay off. Though Hybrid Theory will get the benefits of a major’s marketing push and distribution, the band plans to work it as if it were an indie release, choosing to put its efforts in grassroots touring and building up a fan base.

"Right now we’ve got an industry buzz," Delson said. "That doesn’t mean we’ve made it. We’re going to have to work even harder."

-Aversion.com

Labels: interviews

Birthdate: December 1, 1977

Bradford Phillip Delson, is a musician, who is currently the lead guitarist for Linkin Park. He is also the A&R for Machine Shop Recordings.

Delson graduated from Agoura High School in 1995 and formed Xero with Mike Shinoda whom he knew since the seventh grade, which would later become Linkin Park. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in communications, but decided to forget law school to pursue a career with Linkin Park.

While in college, (he shared a college room with Dave Farrell) Delson had to intern with a member of the music industry as a part of his career. He ended up working for Jeff Blue, an A&R representative at Warner Bros. Records. He told Blue about his band and in return for giving him demos to listen to he was offered constructive criticism. Blue is the man who found Linkin Park's current lead vocalist, Chester Bennington.

He also used to work as a bouncer at the Roxy, as confirmed by the breakfast with Linkin Park hosted by Kevin and Bean, which can be heard KROQ.com.

Before forming Xero with Mark Wakefield, Delson's first instrument was the trumpet. His first band was called the Pricks, and he later played in a band called Relative Degree with his fellow Linkin Park bandmate Rob Bourdon. He met and roomed with bandmate Dave Farrell, better known as Phoenix, at UCLA.


Delson can usually be seen wearing a very large pair of headphones on stage. The headphones are designed by Shinoda and himself and change with every Linkin Park release. Delson has alluded to an exact reason for them, but he has admitted it channels him into his own personal "matrix" while performing. He won't divulge to what this "matrix" is in detail. Delson usually does not give a serious answer as to why he wears the headphones, with answers such as "If I tell you, I'll have to kill you." In a recent interview, Mike Shinoda said that Brad wears shooting range headphones for hearing protection. Then he gives them to Mike who then makes sticker designs which go on them.

Delson has been known for his anti-social behavior on occasions. In high school, he used to dye his hair a variety of colors and in earlier days of the band he generally kept it shaved. In recent years, Delson has been seen sporting an afro, which is also seen on the front cover for Minutes to Midnight.


Equipment:
* PRS guitars
* Randall amplification
* D’addario strings
* Dimarzio pickups
* Dunlop picks and accessories
* MXR effects pedals
* TC electronics
* Voodoo Lab ground controls
* GCX audio loop switches
* Audio technica wireless systems

Facts
Name: Bradford Phillip Delson
Nicknames: Brad, Big Bad Brad
Birthday: December 1, 1977
Religon: Jewish
Siblings: 2 brothers, Greg and Jeff
Marital Status: Married to Elisa since September 16, 2003

Brad graduated from Agoura High School then went to UCLA majoring in Communications but didn't go on to law school to pursue a career in the band.

While attending college Brad was roomates with Phoenix.

Brad's first instrument was the trumpet.

Brad's first band was called The Pricks.

In high school, Brad used to dye his hair different colors.

Brad's musical role model is Chester.

more to come...

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