I didn’t have a lot of time this week to play Rock Band, but I did manage to finish off the last six Challenging songs. Which, it turns out, was enough to give me a nice boost: I’m rank 65 now.

I'm at rank 65 with 8,818,345 points

That’s an improvement of 535,479 points compared to last week, or almost 90,000 per song. Which is particularly surprising since there was one song (Break on Through (To the Other Side)) that I actually didn’t improve my score on at all: for whatever reason, my fingers really weren’t feeling it during the last part of that song today. Actually, there were several songs where I was worried about my performance, but on most of them things clicked eventually and I managed to do a decent job. Still, we’re far past where I can come close to hitting 100% of the notes; in fact, I didn’t get gold stars on any of the songs today, and didn’t manage five stars on all of them. (I am not alone in this; I’m still happy with my per-song ranks, and I managed to hit 23rd place on Portions for Foxes today.)

Right now, 50th place is 9,259,776 points; even allowing for other people improving, I should be at the very least close to hitting that rank at my next session, and may pass it. (Assuming I don’t take time off after GDC craziness.) I have 18 songs left; if I can average 90,000 point improvements on the remaining ones, then that will put me at about 10.4 million points. Which may be a bit optimistic, but probably not too much so: as the songs get harder, they generally contain more points, so there’s more room for improvement, and that seems to be making up for me missing more of the notes. (And it’s not like I did a spectacular job on my first run through the songs, either, the counterexample mentioned above aside: most of them I’ve played through successfully once on hard and once on expert.) So even if today was a bit of an exception, hitting 10 million points looks very doable now.

Though not everything is going well for me in the Rock Band leaderboard watch: Jonathan is now 18,088,640 fans ahead of me. And that gap will get wider before it gets smaller: working on my pro keys skills is great, but it doesn’t actually end up netting me any in-game goals. So my fan count will stay close to where it is until I get done with my current project and start working on another instrument, and who knows how many fans he’ll have by then.