Guitar Status: December 9, 2012

Dec 10 2012

On Friday evening, Liesl and I went through all the Rock Band 3 DLC that we’d bought over the last couple of months that we hadn’t yet played. (On fake guitar/bass.) Nothing particularly striking to report there, other than that Nugget Man’s lyrics are quite something.

I played Rocksmith on Saturday; two events, maybe 10 songs? I was going to stop after the first event, but then the second one looked short, and for the first time the game suggested ‘Riff Repeater’ mode to me. And that turned out to be something that I’d hoped was there but hadn’t yet gone looking for, namely Rocksmith‘s version of Rock Band 3‘s trainer mode: a way to focus on snippets of a song. Done in a typically Rocksmith-ey fashion, with the game either speeding up the snippet for you automatically or increasing the difficulty level automatically. And, with the help of that, I mastered my first song in the game, Next Girl. (Mastered = got over 100,000 points on a song with all sections at max difficulty; it unlocks a mastery mode for the song where you get double points but don’t get told what notes to play, I haven’t tried that yet.)

That may have been my first Rocksmith session where I never felt frustrated by the game: it seemed to be reliably detecting what I was trying to do, which was great. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration—sometimes it felt like it didn’t pick up on my bends, though admittedly my guitar makes that harder. And trying to do as well as it wanted on Space Ostrich was slightly frustrating, but that was mostly frustration with myself rather than the game. Still: I’m pretty sucked into the game. Which raises the question of how I should best use it; I’d been thinking I’d go through what it recommends until I feel like I’ve probably seen every song in the game, and then pick a subset of the songs to try for mastery on. (Using it in the same way I’m using Rock Band 3 now, basically.) And I may indeed do that, but seeing it throw the Riff Repeater mode at me makes it think that I’ll be able to stick with its suggestions longer than I expected? Who knows, no need to decide right now.

On Sunday, I played Rock Band 3. Not a lot—we wanted to clean the upstairs carpets and do some yard work—so I didn’t go through my full practice routine. I decided to go through most of the harder songs, including training on Me Enamorata; I still have a ways to go on that song. And I went through three or four new songs; I think I’ll put I Can See for Miles and King George into my practice routine, and I think I’ll need to spend a fair amount of time in training mode to do well on King George.

I expect to be playing a lot more guitar for the near future: I left my job on Friday, and I decided to take December off instead of applying immediately for another job. Honestly, part of me wants to spend all day playing guitar; I definitely won’t do that, but I may try to go through one Rocksmith event per day? And I’m actually tempted to spend some time working on singing, too. Who knows if I’ll end up doing that, we’ll see. But I will be somewhat restrained: I have programming to do, blog posts to write, and various loose ends to get in order.

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