Xite Labs honors Rush legend Neil Peart in XR

Given yesterday's Pink Floyd story, we might as well make this an Easter prog takeover with a quick look at how Xite Labs creative director, Greg Russell, created a virtual environment to honor legendary Rush drummer, Neil Peart.

Everyone has their own date for when the music died. In Don Mclean's America Pie it was  February 3, 1959, when rock 'n' roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson died in a plane crash in Iowa. More recently David Bowie's untimely death on January 10, 2016, has reverberated throughout the cultural zeitgeist. "Everything's been crap since Bowie died," is a well-worn meme that hits home because there's more than an element of truth in it. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Sandy Denny, John Lennon, Bon Scott, Bob Marley, Freddie Mercury... the list of those who were taken before their time is a long one.

But for me, and while Peter Gabriel remains in good health, the worst date in the calendar has to be January 7, 2020, when Rush drummer Neil Peart finally lost his three and a half year secret battle against glioblastoma, a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer.

As one of the greatest rock drummers of all time, Peart's loss is still keenly felt. His drums are both a sinuous and thundering rhythmic backbone and a lead instrument that weaves around Geddy Lee's cascading bass lines in Rush's complex, interwoven music. As a drummer of over four decades, I can attest Peart's parts are bloody hard to play, which is why Greg Russell, creative director at XR specialists Xite Labs gets a huge amount of kudos from me.

Alongside Russell's day job, he also plays drums in a Rush tribute band called Natural Science. And he does them rather well as his playing along to Tom Sawyer, including probably the most air-drummed fill of all-time, shows below.

But the reason we're talking about all this here is that having previously collaborated with Peart and Rush on concert visuals and scenic design, Russell wanted to put something together to show why bands should think of virtual production for new projects. It's an ad basically, it just happens to have a killer soundtrack. To create the environment, the Xite team drew inspiration from the cover of Rush’s Moving Pictures album and also referenced an iconic 1980s poster of Peart drumming on a raft in Quebec. Hence the water and all the arches. Into this they mapped a digitally animated version of Peart’s Time Machine drum riser with everything rendered out in StypeLand software.

Russell performed the music live in Xite Labs’ production studio with camera tracking courtesy of Stype's RedSpy, syncing the performance with the custom XR environment built in Unreal Engine. 

The video's labelled Part 1 and it will be interesting to see what Russell decides to do with Part 2. As Peart once told Modern Drummer magazine, "We experiment a lot with time signatures. We work in nearly every one of them that I know of that’s legitimate: all of the 5s, 7s, 9s, 11s, 13s, and combinations thereof. I don’t think you have to play in 4/4 to feel comfortable.”

tl;dr

• Xite Labs creative director Greg Russell created a virtual environment to honor Rush drummer Neil Peart, who passed away from glioblastoma on January 7, 2020.
• Peart is celebrated as one of the greatest rock drummers, known for his complex and challenging drum parts that contribute significantly to Rush's music.
• Russell, who plays drums in a Rush tribute band, drew inspiration from the cover of Rush’s Moving Pictures album and an iconic poster of Peart for the virtual environment design.
• The project features Russell performing live, synced with the custom XR environment built in Unreal Engine, and it showcases the potential of virtual production for music projects.