Pro Guitar/Keys Status, July 10, 2011

Whenever new Rock Band DLC comes out, I give it a listen, and buy it if it looks like fun to play. The problem is that I don’t actually get around to playing it, so I had a bunch stacked up. So on Saturday night, Liesl and I went through that (on regular guitar/bass respectively); not much to report, though I am a bit embarrassed to report that the two songs that I got 100% on were Paparazzi and Tubthumping…

Today, I put in my Pro Guitar practice. I went through some of the harder training sections again: it’s no longer a surprise when I make it through those, but it’s not yet so routine that I’m not learning something. I may dip into the Expert lessons in an upcoming week: I’m sure that many of those are beyond me, but there might be some that are worth trying, and I would like to learn about alternate tunings.

After that I went through three songs. The main takeaway from Good Vibrations is that I can’t strum nearly fast enough: I could mostly keep up with that one, but I got the impression that Expert will be noticeably harder on that song, and it’s only Apprentice level!

Outer Space was rather interesting: like Yoshimi, it has a lot of chord strumming, with a bit less repetition of individual chords this time but with more variations in the chords themselves. In particular, G chords in the song had you playing the third fret on the B string, which I’m a little less used to but which makes for a pleasant transition coming out of a D chord, since you can leave your ring finger in the same place. Also, in the last of a sequence of G chords, they frequently dropped the bottom string down to an F#, which took a while to get used to but which sounded good once I got it right. (I appreciate the hint of polyphony instead of chords or single notes.) Eventually, I got to where I could get to a 4x multiplier on that song, which I was rather proud of; coming out of that chord success, I went back to try Yoshimi again, and I’m still not very good on that song, though.

The third song I went through was Break on Through (To the Other Side). That’s the first song with Hammer On / Pull Offs; I could play them reliably with the mute on, but when I plugged in the guitar, they were barely audible. So clearly I need to work on my technique there, to make them a lot crisper.

Playing through my DLC backlog reminded me that I had a bunch of Billy Joel DLC that I hadn’t gone through seriously on Pro Keys, so I decided to start chipping away on that instead of continuing with Pro Guitar. Which was a good idea: I’d forgotten how big his first DLC pack was, and I had 18 songs waiting for me!

Of which I made it through a grand total of two. In Captain Jack, I scored over 700,000 points, which wasn’t enough to put me in the top 1%; lots of chords in that song! I made enough mistakes that it looked like it’s possible to make over a million points on that song, which a look at the leaderboard confirms; the leaderboard also shows that I’m in 42nd place, I guess not that many people have played it. The other one I tried was I Go to Extremes, which was rather harder, I spent more than an hour on that song alone and there was still room for improvement at the end.

I don’t think my Pro Keys skills have slipped too much, at least, but I have another 16 Billy Joel songs to go, and there’s some non-Billy Joel DLC with keyboard parts that I should give a try on as well. So I’ll probably be trying to find time for both Pro Guitar and Pro Keys for the next month or two.