Pro Guitar Status: April 24, 2011

This weekend was pretty busy, so I didn’t get to play Rock Band as much as I would have liked, but I did have time to make it through most of the Apprentice songs on Medium Pro Guitar. Which would have been awesome—Medium Pro Guitar continues to be fascinating—except that I had some quite annoying hardware problems.

It started on Saturday: Liesl decided to give Pro Guitar a try, and was getting (justifiably!) really frustrated because the game wasn’t picking up her strums. The high strings were a particular problem, and I’d had problems earlier with upstrums on those, so I looked up the instructions for adjusting the pickup to make that more sensitive. That helped, but not enough when she was plucking by hand; switching to the pick seems to have mostly fixed it, though.

Today, the game was acting funny for me, too, and Liesl suggested the batteries. I replaced those, and it started behaving better. In retrospect, then, that was probably much of the problem yesterday as well. (I probably accidentally left the guitar turned on last week: easy to forget that it needs to be turned off.) So most of the session today went well; but, towards the end of the session, I started getting really weird behavior, where the guitar would sporadically refuse to detect any strums or insist that a fret was held down when I wasn’t touching the fingerboard at all.

Eventually, the controller became almost completely unresponsive; also, the MIDI box was blinking in a strange way, which I didn’t remember seeing. Looking in the manual for the guitar, it looked like that was probably a sign that the guitar needed to be reset (I don’t remember if the box was actually blinking in an SOS pattern, but it might have been); I held down start and back on the guitar, and in the little bit of experimentation I did right then, it seemed to be behaving better. At the very least, it was no longer completely broken; I had to stop fairly soon anyways, and I was frustrated enough that it was hard to get back into the flow of things, so I didn’t test it out thoroughly.

I really hope that was the problem: if so, it’s annoying, but now I know what the signs are, and it’s easy to fix. I’m a little worried that I may have gotten the sensitivity wrong when fiddling around with it yesterday, and I’m also worried that the hardware may just not be working well at a more fundamental level; we’ll see what happens next week, I guess.