Pro Keys Status, February 20, 2011

I finished off the moderate songs yesterday, and did the first three challenging songs. I didn’t manage to 100% any of the moderate songs; some of them I’m fairly confident that I could get 100% on if I tried hard enough, but on many of them that’s not the case. In general, I’m finding songs at this level to be a lot of fun to play and learn: it’s hitting the sweet spot of being complex enough that I enjoy the music and enjoy the learning process while not overwhelming me.

I'm at rank 77 with 8,282,866 points

I’m up to rank 77 now, with a little over 8 million points; that’s up 19 positions and about 550,000 points compared to last week. That’s an average improvement of almost 70,000 points per song; if I can keep that up, I’ll end up somewhere in the mid 30’s. Which isn’t completely crazy—I’m in that area for a fair number of individual songs—but of course other people are improving as well. Still, hitting 50th place doesn’t seem as unachievable as it once did. If things go well, I could even conceivably get a score of ten million; we’ll see how close I end up, and if the answer is “very close” I’ll probably go for it.

When we were playing through London Calling a week and a half ago, Jonathan asked if I’d been paying attention to my fan count. I hadn’t been paying attention too closely at the time, but I quickly figured out why he was asking; Jonathan, I’m paying attention to my fan count now:

malvasia bianca 281,323,808; Academy of Dr X 277,149,520

My apologies for the crappy screenshot: I don’t see a way to get that leaderboard on the Rock Band website. Which is too bad, because that screen shot is out of date: I’m actually at 289,672,432 fans now. Though I imagine that Jonathan will pass me again soon: the main reason for my recent climb is that Liesl and I finished off the road challenges over the last two weekends (we still have gold medals to earn on some of them, but at least now we’ve completed everything), and that’s given me a nice bump. It looks like he’s going through songs on guitar and keys now; that should give him a convincing lead over me.