Rock Band Status: January 22, 2012

I was busy on Saturday, so I didn’t get to play Rock Band; I did at least get to chat with Dan Apczynski a bit, and he told me that, when playing power chords, it’s generally best to only downstrum. So I’ll go back to that on I Wanna Be Sedated.

And today I was a little worried that I’d be pretty busy today with grocery shopping and watching the football game, but I actually ended up with a rather nice practice session. I went once through a few older songs (as is generally my habit these days), and then started in on the Apprentice level songs.

And it turns out that I’m fine with Apprentice level, too: I went through six of them. Good Vibrations made me glad that I’d practice alternating strumming; and, actually, it was the first song I can remember where I scored higher unmuted, because in that context the controller picking up extra string vibrations helped instead of hurting. Rock the Casbah didn’t have much to do on the guitar part, but what there was to do was fun.

Outer Space confirmed my opinion from Yoshimi that strummy songs are now an active plus for me instead of an active minus: nice shifting between chords, and I liked the way it added an extra high note on some of the D chords and dropped the note on the bottom string when transitioning from G to E. I’ll probably add that sequence into my midweek guitar practice, it’s fun and good for me.

Break on Through (To the Other Side) half sounded like a bass part and half was full of scales; the scales were also good hopo practice. Whip It had fun single note sequences that I did surprisingly bad on; I don’t really understand that.

Rock Lobster was the only one I didn’t like. The first half was overloaded with alternating strumming, the second half was overloaded with fast two-string chords. And it was using some sort of alternate tuning that I’m not familiar with (both the bottom two strings were lower, but there was more going on than that), I disliked the piece enough that I didn’t spend the time to figure it out.