On Saturday morning at 9am, 22-year-old Sean Feica in Ontario, Canada started up Rock Band and drummed through "29 Fingers" by The Konks on the expert difficulty level. It was the beginning of what he called The Drum Day From Hell. Then he did a Blur song, then a couple Weezer songs, then "Eminence Front" by The Who. He five-starred them easily and was even getting the occasional 100% as he worked his way through all 235 Rock Band songs, from the easiest to the hardest. That's right: all 235 songs. And he was broadcasting himself live as he did it.

Between songs, he looked over the list of upcoming tracks with comments like, "Oh, god. That hour's gonna suuuuck….". He talked to folks typing chat on the live stream, giving himself the appearance of a good-natured but slightly crazed fellow having a one-way conversation that included tidbits like: "Blisters? You have no idea" and "The zone isn't even the word for it". He cautioned against trying this with vocals in Rock Band: "You will probably cause permanent damage to your vocal chords. Don't do it." After "Green Grass and High Tides", he blurted out, "I was getting such serious amounts of tunnel visions. I was tripping right out." "I am not taking off my shirt," he reprimands someone online.

He finished on Sunday morning, completing "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who shortly after 11:30am. He let his sticks drop haphazardly. Someone walked into the room – a roommate? – obscured by the inset image of the Rock Band screen.

"Twenty six and a half hours," he told whoever walked into the room. "Done." They high five each other.

"You going to bed?"

"Oh my god, yes."

But first he did an encore of "Still Alive".

You can see the broadcast of the Feica playing the last three songs here. His scores are posted here. You can read my interview with him after the jump. And you can catch the act again, only twice as long, probably some time this December.

Tom Chick: What inspired this?

Sean Feica: I just wanted to see if I could do it. Well, actually, about four years ago, I was training to do something similar for Dance Dance Revolution.

TC: [Laughs]

SF: Yeah. I actually had permission from the Guinness Book of World Records, and medical permission, and I was going to try to do a world's record for 60 hours straight. The current record was about 38, but I figured, eh, sixty is a good round number. So…

TC: And did that happen?

SF: No, about three weeks prior to the scheduled date, I blew out both my knees at work. Since then, I haven't been able to actually play DDR.

TC: Oh, man, so you must have been like a pretty hardcore DDR player?

SF: Very much so. I've been a big part of the community for about six or seven years now. Like, any rhythm gaming around Canada and such.

TC: With your knees, have you moved on to Rock Band? Is DDR something you'll go back to?

SF: I'd like to go back to DDR, or In the Groove as well, or any of the dancing games. But I'm not able to go for scores because my knees just can't handle it for long periods of time.

TC: And for you to do the sixty hours, you mentioned medical permission. There's a rigmarole like that you went through?

SF: Yes, I had to get a full physical three months prior and then one month prior.

TC: That would have been something to see. I'm sorry that didn't happen. But this. This was awesome. I have to ask, because it certainly looked like it, but you're a real drummer, right?

SF: A percussionist, actually. I've never been very good at the full drum kit, although I could probably, in retrospect, go back now and play a real drum kit. But I started playing percussion for school probably about ten years ago and in a couple years started playing professionally doing tours in a concert band in my city. We traveled around Ontario. And [I played] pretty much anything in percussion except for drums. Any mallets, including xylophones, marimba, African hand percussion, and auxiliary percussion, things like that.

TC: No disrespect intended, but does this mean you're kind of like a band geek?

SF: Very much so. Throughout the years I've probably learned like fifteen different instruments. My best ones being percussion and classical guitar.

TC: Now what you did with Rock Band, I know some people have done the Eternal Set List and they've rotated band members, but do you know if anybody has done what you have done, playing through all the songs on one instrument in basically one sitting?

SF: On one instrument, no. But a week and a half ago, there were eight people who went through as a full band doing all of the songs at the time, which was 230. They were swapping out the members the entire time.

TC: So you're first one?

SF: Yeah. As far as I know.

TC: So let me ask you about the actual experience. I know when I do an all-nighter, I can recall when I'm at my lowest and then there's that second wind. Do you remember any specifics about last night about when you were the most tired, the closest to just saying 'forget this, I'm going to bed'?

SF: There were a couple points. Let me pull up the set list. It's easier to know exactly where.

TC: It was specific songs?

SF: The ones that stuck in my head. You know, my first original estimate was the entire thing would take 17 or 18 hours. Once we hit the 50th song or so, it started to sink in that this was going to go slightly longer. I was originally going to start at noon, but I moved it back three hours because I actually had a practice scheduled for [the next] evening with my professional band. So it was probably two or three in the afternoon yesterday that I'd realized that. And then ups and downs as I was starting to get really hungry to go make some food or grab a whole bunch of fruit, keep myself going that way.

TC: What happened that it took substantially longer than your estimate? Was it the down time between songs or did you mis-estimate the actual song lengths?

SF: A little bit of both. I did an average of four and a half to five minutes a song, but I stupidly forgot to calculate the time between songs in there. I gave maybe twenty seconds between songs, and I forgot that I had to enter in the stats, take the picture [of the final score], change the audio inputs, except later on I said 'screw it, I'll just do it through the microphone', as well as scroll to the next song. Well, when you have 235 songs and no way to build that as a set list, it takes a lot longer. So, yeah, there were times it was like three or four minutes, where I'd be staring at the monitor, thinking 'Wait, what was I about to do?' I'd blank out for about twenty seconds and someone would beep me on the chat, like, 'Yo, wake up'.

TC: Let me ask about the set up. Just coming into it, without any idea of what to expect, there was almost this sense that you were a crazy guy talking to himself, because the viewers could only see one part of the conversation. You were obviously on IRC or some kind of chat that you could see offscreen. Explain to me how it was set up and who you were talking to.

SF: Any of the people in the [Ustream.tv] chat. One of the things I wish I was able to do was to actually embed the chat in the pages I'd written to keep track of all my scores and stuff, but I was only able to get the video there.

TC: That was where you could see the tally of the number of viewers?

SF: Yeah, with the streaming panel, it gives you a preview panel and it gives you a number that shows how many people are watching from any different source.

TC: So when you first started, when you sat down at 9 o'clock yesterday morning, how many viewers did you have?

SF: Well, I started the stream at about 8 in the morning, shortly after I woke up and probably by 8:30, I had 45 viewers.

TC: And at what point did you have the most viewers and what was that number?

SF: Right at the end. I got posted on Kotaku.com and almost instantaneously, my viewers jumped up to about 2500. I was playing "Run to the Hills". For most of the night, I was hovering between four and six hundred people, which blew my mind because I've never had more than 12 people watching my steam before. So I started "Run to the Hills" and there were like 450 viewers. I finished "Run to the Hills" and there were 2000. It was in a matter of four minutes.

TC: I also wanted to ask you at what point during the evening were you the most re-energized. Was that the point?

SF: Any of the really strenuous songs, I'd kind of force myself to just go and that's when you could see me really start to rock out trying to build up my adrenaline. But towards the end, once I'd gotten all those viewers, when I hit like "Ride the Lightning" and "Screaming for Vengeance", like the last fifteen songs, once I hit that point I was like, 'Okay, the end is here, I've just gotta get through this, this is going to be like another hour, hour and a half' and I just went crazy.

TC: I heard you mention a few times because I imagine it was a fairly common question, but is it true that you had no caffeine the whole time?

SF: That's completely correct.

TC: Do you just not drink coffee or something? How does that happen?

SF: It's very weird for me, because until very recently I was a severe caffeine addict. You know the Monster energy drinks?

TC: Yeah.

SF: I would drink about five or six large cans on a daily basis and not feel anything from it. So about three weeks ago, I just said, 'You know what, no more caffeine' and I just stopped dead and I was bedridden for three days, because my body going 'What the hell are you doing to me?'

TC: De-tox.

SF: Yeah. So [for last night] I said I'm going to keep lots of water, and orange juice and fruit, just proper types of energy so I don't crash. Because if I was to come down from a caffeine high, it would be over. I wouldn't be able to come back.

TC: So did you ever stop for a full meal? I know you took a few snack breaks and I saw the plum moment and certainly there was plenty of orange juice onscreen. But was there ever a full meal?

SF: No, I'm on a bit of a specific diet right now to help me get back in shape and it happened to be my full fruits and one deli sandwich day. So there was a lot of fruit.

TC: So what was up with the wooden dining room chair? Why didn't you have something more comfortable?

SF: It's the only chair that's high enough. I'm six foot one and I have really long legs. It's the only chair in my entire house that's high enough for me to sit comfortably without my leg getting sore. My butt, on the other hand certainly takes a beating.

TC: Now that was a real drum kit there. I think at one point you mentioned you had a $1500 set up. Let me ask a dumb question: Is that modded in or does Rock Band support real drum kits?

SF: It does not support real drum kits. I actually had to rip apart one of the stock kits and rig up a MIDI-decoding chip. With the set up I have, it's four Roland PDA double-trigger rubber pads going through a TMC-6 percussion brain. It doesn't take care of any sounds, it just has a mini-out. And I have that going into the MIDI-decoder chip which sends out five-volt pulses to the four buttons on the Xbox controller.

TC: How did you know how to make that? Is that online somewhere?

SF: A bunch of people on the official RockBand.com forums, probably thirty or forty people were trying to figure out how to hook up a real electronic kit. One person found a site called Highly Liquid where they sell MIDI-decoders. One of the people contacted some of the engineers there and they actually modified their product to work specifically for Rock Band.

TC: Being a percussionist you naturally play drums in Rock Band. But during Behind Blue Eyes you sang for a while when there were no drums playing. Do you actually sing, bass, and guitar in Rock Band as well?

SF: I started back with Guitar Hero with Guitar Hero 1, but through my musical training, I've had four or five years of professional vocal training. I've done opera, full choral, broadway solos, things like that. So I absolutely love singing. And it was also helping me stay awake.

TC: Since these were all at expert, were any of these played blind?

SF: Being one of the top drummers, you have to really keep on top of the songs. The new DLC [downloadable content], I usually play within one or two days of the new tracks coming out. Every Tuesday there are new tracks coming out, usually three to five songs on average. Now the five tracks that were released this week I actually played quickly Friday night. I wasn't planning on doing any drumming Friday, but I'd heard some of the Nine Inch Nails tracks are pretty crazy, so I didn't want to do that [blind] when I'd been awake for twenty hours. I didn't want to go into those not knowing what to expect.

TC: It looks like you were never in danger of this happening, but what was the closest you came to failing?

SF: "Young Man Blues", which is one of the live tracks from the recent The Who collaboration. The very start has the most ridiculous intro. All of the top drummers, we feel this song is never going to be full combo'ed [hitting 100% of the notes]. It's got like ten-second rolls that go all over the kit that are like 18 notes a second. Which is really really fast.

TC: Was there any question as to whether you'd be able to get through those?

SF: If my percussion module crashes, which it does on occasion during really really fast input, I have a chance of failing. I've never actually failed that track, but I've always come very close. I'm always in the flashing red during the intro.

TC: I think at one point you said that was your only set of drumsticks. Is that correct?

SF: Yep.

TC: What would have happened if those had broken?

SF: Well, okay, it's my only set that I like to use. I use a very specific type. I like fairly light jazz sticks specifically for Rock Band. Any of the stock kits you can't get any type of bounce. So I force myself using the lighter sticks to do single sticking. My kit actually had a considerable amount of rebound being metal pads with a rubber covering. They bound like crazy. But using the lighter sticks forces me to single-stick everything, so that on the off chance that I'm at an event and I'm not allowed my kit, then I'm prepared to handle anything without having to change my technique.

TC: You mention events. That's part of the Scorehero.com site? You're a moderator there, is that right?

SF: Yep. I've been a senior staff member on the site since just before Guitar Hero II came out, which is coming up on two years now. And early on, it was just to help out with some of the leaderboards and the forums, but over the years it's really exploded. At that time, we had 4000 members. Now we're just about to break 270,000.

TC: Is that your day job?

SF: It's kind of my day job. Right now I do a lot of contract work as a web designer, but a large portion of my time is spent on Score Hero.

TC: I also noticed on the stream, there was a logo for H2O Clan. What is that?

SF: It's the professional clan I've been assigned to since January. It's an all-male clan geared to get females into gaming. We're a brother clan to PMS Clan, or Pandora's Mighty Soldiers, which is an all-female clan. They want to get females more competitive and to be comfortable with gaming in general. We have though PMS/H2O the sponsored band Moody Water, which I'm the drummer for. We have two PMS and two H2O members who are part of that.

TC: That's a Rock Band band, right? You're in the rankings?

SF: Yep. We're, I believe, nineteenth overall. We just started to really improve some of the scores.

TC: Finally, as I'm sure you know, Rock Band 2 is coming out in September. Harmonix has said by the end of the year, there will be over 500 songs playable. Does this mean the end of your career doing all-song marathons?

SF: No, actually, this was a bit of a test for myself, to see if I could handle it and to see how I'd feel coming out of it. The original plan was for doing this whenever the 500th song is released. And I'm still planning on doing that. I physically feel fine. I'm a little bit sore. But when we do have 500 songs on the platform, I'll be doing this again, but I'm going to have help with people entering all the information between songs. And the interface for browsing between songs is much improved in Rock Band 2, so there's going to be a lot less down time between tracks to help cut down the length of time.

TC: Do you have any sense for when this will be?

SF: It's going to be towards the end of the year. I'm not really sure what Harmonix's DLC release schedule is like. It'll probably be within a few weeks of when they announce their 500th song.

TC: Will this be under a Drum Day from Hell moniker?

SF: I've been kind of mulling over that. Some people have suggested The Drum Weekend from Hell.

TC: That's right. This will be no one day.

SF: Yeah, it'll take probably 48 hours to do it.