Rock Band Status: January 8, 2012

Not a lot of Rock Band last weekend. I was thinking I should try out different picks, so I went to a local music store; after realizing that the picks cost fifty cents each, I ended up buying one of about half of the models that they had. When I got around to trying the different picks, I was kind of regretting it for a while—I guess I liked a few of them more than the pick I’d been using, but I didn’t see a huge improvement? But then I found one that I rather liked: a little thicker and more textured than I’d been using and with a similar slightly rounded tip. So: success! At some point I’d like to try significantly different guitar picks—e.g. at work there’s a triangular much thicker one that I found surprisingly interesting—but it’s definitely a start.

On Saturday evening, Liesl and I finished the songs from Lego Rock Band. Which I don’t regret buying, because the game is quite cheap these days, but on average I don’t like the songs from it nearly as much those in other games. And we went through a couple of pieces of DLC; I’ve forgotten what they were (it’s been a busy week), but they were pleasant. (And I’m way behind on DLC, I really need to catch up on listening to them to see what I want.)

And then I tried out three songs on Pro Guitar. Rehab was okay; it felt more like a bass part, and a not-all-that-interesting bass part at that, but wasn’t unpleasant. Get Up, Stand Up was not very interesting noodling around on one chord.

The third song was Take On Me. I’m used to DLC songs being harder compared to on-disc songs with the same rating, and this was no exception. Though the interesting thing was that its main difficulty was that it required me to play a barred C chord—I don’t think I’d really had to do that yet, or was even aware that that was much of a thing? There was also one annoying segment that asked me to play a bunch of muted notes slightly faster than I would have liked; I probably would have enjoyed that if the notes weren’t muted so I’d had to think about the fingers, but as is I just didn’t like it.

Ah well: it’s a piece that I bought because of the keyboard part, and ended up quite enjoying the vocals on it; it’s okay for me not to love the guitar part. And it’s given me something new to practice, which is always a bonus. So I’ll work on barred C chords offline, and then come back to the piece in a few weeks when I can hit them more reliably. (Or: fail them less completely reliably.)