Rock Band Status: May 6, 2012

Not a lot of practice this week, but I did go through my standard practice list (throwing Subdivisions onto it), and do a couple of new tier 4 songs. Specifically, on Saturday, I did Something Bigger, Something Brighter; most of that piece is fast triplets that I’m nowhere near accurate enough on. Which was frustrating at first, but actually I enjoy the way the triplets sound when I play them unmuted and when I don’t have to keep up with the actual song, so now I’m converting that into a practice bit for outside of game, and am hoping to get better at it. Which is good, because I have a long way to go: I was convinced for a while that it was going to be my first non-three-star song, but when playing it unmuted I actually managed three stars through a combination of being able to hear the triplets a little better and having the game being a little more forgiving on the non-triplet sections. (Normally, playing unmuted is bad for your score, because it falsely claims you’re strumming in pauses just from string vibrations, but on fast runs, that actually sometimes fills in glitches in your playing, so I got up to 4x multipliers in places where I probably didn’t deserve it.)

I also broke my A string on Saturday; this time, rather than replacing all the strings, I just replaced that one. Here’s the video I used this time, worked well, and I’m managing to get the string wound more neatly.

On Sunday, I learned Lasso. Which turned out to be quite good for my level: the chords are a bit unusual for me and a bit fast for me, but in both cases they’re definitely within reach. The only bit I can’t get is the solo, which basically is playing something fairly straightforward on the G string combined with accents on the high E string—it’ll be a while before I can do that, but at least now that I’m thinking about it that way I can do the G string part and sound good and have a framework for thinking about it if I want to try both parts.

My D string broke while I was in the middle of today’s practice; not sure if that’s a coincidence or if strings generally have similar lifetimes or if combining new strings with old strings puts extra stress on the old strings somehow? At least I’m good at replacing strings now; and at least I have a backup guitar, so I can just swap guitars until I’m done practicing.