The Way It Ends

After remembering that you don't fail if you overstrum if the ratio of notes hit to overstrums is high enough, I facepalmed and realized that 3-starring The Way It Ends on Expert is retardedly easy. I've now done it twice, once in quickplay and again in career.

On the first star power phrase, you can get your SP gauge about 75% filled if you whammy the holds, so fire it off immediately after the phrase ends (even though at this point you have a maximum of a 4 note combo) and pick up the next two in the intro to get back up to half a gauge or just a bit over before the alt-strumming fun.

Get the alt-strumming speed correct and just keep strumming, only stopping on the star power phrases and resuming immediately after. Get some star power and keep it for if you start to fuck up too much. If you get into the red, fire that shit off. You'll get a lot more star power than you actually need to pass it in this manner, and the middle section is fairly easy compared to the burst strumming beginning and end, so you can spare a couple SP phrases to rack up some points.

If you have the alt-strumming speed right and don't mess up the middle, you can basically use SP whenever the hell you want to, as you'll hit many more notes than you'll have overstrums, resulting in your rock meter re-maxing after every overstrum. You can even exploit the timing window to get up to an x4 multiplier. Just strum a tad slower and you'll find that your strums will skip the pauses in the notes entirely. Only works for a little while before you end up either missing a note or overstrumming, but an x4 multiplier's an x4 multiplier.

You probably won't win any Pro Face-Offs unless you're facing someone that doesn't realize you can do this, but at least you can clear the song this way. Try it all you want, it won't work on Through The Fire and Flames. The ratio of notes hit to overstrums needs to be greater than 1. The exact ratio I'm unsure of, but TWIE greatly exceeds it, so there it doesn't matter.

Also, I got a random completely unexpected -1 run on Lay Down that should have been an FC but I strummed late on one of the chord changes in the solo.