Rock Band Status: February 20, 2012

I was getting over a cold this weekend, so even though it was a three-day weekend I didn’t play as much Rock Band as I normally do (and didn’t play piano at all); but I did eventually get in five songs on the guitar. Specifically:

• Sister Christian: Fun power chords, combined with some nice flips and other variants. (Training mode didn’t warn me about that, but I was pleased to discover I could sight read them.) The solo was a bit beyond me, but will be good to return to when I’m better. And I was shocked to be ranked at #74 on the leaderboard, no idea what was going on there.
• The Con: It had you strumming odd subsets of the strings, and I’m fairly sure it was using an alternate tuning. The result was that I didn’t feel like I was actually playing the song, just a gamified variant of it; I didn’t even try to see what it would sound like plugged in.
• False Alarm: In general, I’m not much of a punk fan, but it was fun to play (albeit noticeably faster than I would have liked). In particular, it changed up the power chords, moving around a bit on the lowest string of the chord, which made it more interesting than it would have been otherwise.
• Don’t Bury Me … I’m Still Not Dead: I was worried about the chords where you only play the A and G but not the D string, but they sounded fine when plugged in. It was a bit faster than I’d like, but not too bad, and was fairly power chord heavy. I used a medium pick on this, which I’m noticing myself doing more often: songs with fast chords but also with single note runs.
• Living on a Prayer: Honestly, in some sense I think this is the perfect Rock Band song. Total rock anthem, guitar part with a pleasant mixture of power chords, bassy bits (maybe a bit too many bassy bits, to be honest), a solo that doesn’t overstay its welcome, in the middle of the difficulty spectrum, over the top chorus, reflexive lyrics containing a euphemism for a guitar, ridiculous key change. So glad they redid this for Rock Band 3—not really so much my style of music, but it’s archetypal purity in the context of the game more than makes up for that.

The other thing that happened this week was that I broke a string for the first time. I didn’t have any spare strings (whoops! Normally I’m better about advance planning than that), but fortunately I have a whole spare guitar, so I could keep on going.