Pro Guitar Status: May 1, 2011

Last week, I started running into some very annoying controller problems. I thought the issue was at least partly due to battery problems, but the guitar flaked out again a few songs later. Right as I was giving up in frustration, I noticed the MIDI reset command, so I tried that, but I was too frazzled to see what effect it had had.

And when I started playing this week, the guitar worked great! I finished off the Apprentice-level songs at Medium difficulty; I’m sure you’re tired of hearing this, but this mode in this game is the most fascinating thing I’ve ever played. My main accomplishment this week is that my right hand seems to have gotten a lot better at selecting the correct strings: a couple of the songs had be alternating between strings that were two apart, and that went quite well, and even when there were less regular patterns, my right hand was doing surprisingly well at jumping to the correct string, even for the middle strings.

Unfortunately, when I started on the Solid songs, the guitar started flaking out again. It would claim frets were perpetually held down, or it wouldn’t register frets that I was pressing down, or it would refuse to register any strums at all. The MIDI adapter was flashing an SOS pattern, so clearly it was also pretty confused as to what was going on, but doing a MIDI reset on the guitar didn’t work.

So I’m pretty frustrated. Up until now, I’d been really impressed by the Squier: what it’s doing seems to me to be quite complicated, but it works amazingly well. And much of the time this weekend, it was also working amazingly well! But when it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work.

I had been assuming this meant that my guitar is a lemon. And that may well be the case; a few forum posts suggest that I might have a bad MIDI cable, however. (Which does seem consistent with my symptoms.) Fortunately, I have a spare one of those around, so I’ll try that next weekend. If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll have to figure out where my nearest Fender repair center is? Which I’m not looking forward to, because of the intermittent nature of the problem: that kind of thing can easily lead to multiple rounds of guitars being returned as allegedly fixed with the problem continuing to crop up at home…