Pro Guitar/Keys Status, July 24, 2011
On Saturday, I mostly played through Pro Keys stuff: going through the keyboard parts of a bunch of random DLC (of which the highlight was Take On Me) and several Billy Joel songs. I’m playing each of the latter songs a few times (including going through training mode on them), but I’m not treating them nearly as seriously as the on-disc content, so in particular I have quite a lot of room for improvement on The Entertainer. Still, fun stuff, and (unsurprisingly) Piano Man is great.
I also did a bit of Pro Guitar training: going through a few of the most complex Hard lessons again (I got 100% on the hardest barre chord lesson the first time through!), and doing the Expert lesson on seventh chords for the first time. Which I’m glad I did, even though seventh chords aren’t showing up in game for me yet, I expect I’ll try out more of the Expert lessons.
Today, I went through four songs on Pro Guitar. (All Hard Apprentice.) I would have done more, but I’m not feeling so great, and playing guitar requires a fair amount of concentration. Also, one of the ways in which I’m not feeling great is that I wrenched my back earlier this week; the down side of playing guitar is that I need to sit upright, which makes it hard to keep the heating pad against it, but the up side is that it means that I have to sit in a good posture, which is useful!
Fun stuff, generally. I enjoyed playing Whip It, and did a good job on it. Rock Lobster had way too many fast notes for me to do well on it: clearly that’s something I need to work on. It doesn’t help that I’m still very bad at upstrumming; now that my playing of barre chords isn’t a complete disaster, maybe I should spend time out-of-game working on alternating picking?
Fly Like an Eagle was interesting because it had some hammer-ons in it and, unlike last time, they sounded great! Well, at least some of them did, but any progress is welcome. And I enjoyed playing Walking on the Sun with the mute on, but when I unmuted and plugged it in, it sounded awful, I’m pretty sure Hard is leaving out some important notes.
Not as much progress as I would have liked; then again, given how I’m feeling this weekend, I’m glad I managed to practice at all.
[…] Last time, it became clear that I needed to work on my alternating strumming; I’d put in a bit of time on that with the guitar unplugged, and it started going better almost immediately. I wanted to find out how much of an effect that had had in game, so I went back through Rock Lobster; before, I’d only managed to successfully finish one of the training segments, but this time I managed to finish all but one of them! So clearly my practice had had an effect; I still don’t feel particularly comfortable with alternating strumming, but I’m at least capable of doing it not completely incompetently, and I’m sure I’ll get better as I keep going. (Especially if I continue to practice it outside of game; incidentally, the string mute really does interfere with alternating strumming, I think.) […]