Uploaded February 2009 | Updated September 2026, 2 days ago

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This video posted by request from YouTube user ANOTHERFAN.

100% Gold Star Expert Vocals performance on Battery by Metallica, as it appears in Rock Band 2 for PlayStation 3.

This song is dead simple to sing - I seriously doubt anyone needs much help on actually scoring the pitches in this song (but if you do, here they are).

What I find interesting about Battery (and the reason I agreed to do this video) is that it's one of the very few songs that showcases all three types of vocal overdrive squeezing (explained below). If you're interested in climbing the leaderboards on vocals in Rock Band, these three tricks are the reason why other people have higher scores than you do, even though you're using overdrive in "all the right places" and scoring 100%. Follow along as I explain how to score the most possible points on this song - and the techniques used to make that happen.

SQUEEZING:
A lot of people don't understand what squeezing is - it's the art of getting the most points possible in a rhythm game. For vocals in Rock Band, the way to get more points is to use the make the best possible use of your available Overdrive (which doubles your points while it's active).

There are three tricks to squeezing, and the best (optimal) overdrive path for Battery just so happens to use all three, presented in exactly the right order for teaching.

Normal squeeze:
The gold activation window can be activated pretty much at any time while the scoring line is inside the window (aside from some pesky songs where the window is mysteriously unresponsive toward the end), so a normal squeeze activation is simply to activate overdrive as late as possible so that your overdrive lasts just a split second longer. Of course you want to sing accurately as your overdrive is running out so that you accumulate as many bonus points as possible. The first and fourth activations in Battery are normal squeezes.

Activation squeeze (abbreviated "AS"):
An activation squeeze is like a normal squeeze - you still activate as late as possible, but it's even more important to activate late without missing the window. In some cases, you can make the overdrive last long enough so that you can complete another overdrive phrase right before it stops - this is called an activation squeeze. Activation squeezes allow you to extend the overdrive activation (the extra overdrive is added to your bar and continues your overdrive burn), and is often a desirable result when your overdrive is otherwise going to end in a section with lots of lyrics. The second activation in Battery is an activation squeeze.

Reverse squeeze (abbreviated as "RS" or "FRS"):
Also called a Finesse Reverse Squeeze - the two terms mean the same thing. A reverse squeeze does the exact opposite of what an activation squeeze does. You want to activate EARLY so that you AVOID picking up an extra overdrive bar. This is the rarest type of overdrive trick, but it's used when you've got overdrive bars at the end of sections of lyrics where there's few to no lyrics behind. This lets you save that overdrive you just avoided for another section later where it can yield more points. The third overdrive activation in Battery is a reverse squeeze.

I will add some annotations to this video after it's posted to help illustrate how all three of these squeezing methods function.

NOTE: This is not a video where I'm trying to sound especially good. I've degraded the audio quality on instrumental sections to avoid having YouTube cough up a hairball on the upload. This is strictly a teaching tutorial, and if you're going to post something asinine about how I don't sound like James Hetfield or how the audio quality sucks, please don't bother.