I didn’t practice guitar at all in the middle of the week; I can’t quite remember why in retrospect, other than that I was a little busy and was spending some time practicing piano for the recital. Which is going okay; I still don’t like the arrangement of the Vivaldi pieces, but I’ll do a competent job at one of them and may get good enough to do a competent job at the other.

I did play a bunch of Rocksmith this weekend, though; my Japanese teacher had to cancel this week’s lesson, which freed up a noticeable amount of time. The game is still throwing an exclusive diet of DLC at me; I think that will change soon (it’s frequently asking me to get 90,000 points, which isn’t too out-of-line with where I was on the on-disc content), but I’ve been thinking that for a while, so who knows. Fortunately, I like all the DLC I got; I wish I weren’t seeing the same pieces quite so frequently, but I can deal with that. (And I’m on the edge of thinking it’s a bit of an overdose of Rush, but I can deal with that, too!)

Last week, I alleged that Rock Band 3 throws more chord variations at you during London Calling than Rocksmith does; I played through that song today, and I now no longer think that’s the case, I think it’s actually throwing the same chords at you, just on different strings. Interesting seeing the difference. (There’s definitely a difference in More Than a Feeling, though.)

I’ve played enough events now to unlock all the guitars, which prompted the game to give me a bit of a graduation speech. So I decided to look at the achievements; I had all the non-bass ones except for two that I can get any time I want and the ones for the games. I used that as an excuse to give most of the games a try; I got the achievements on the games for scales and chords, the other games will take more work. I’m still not a huge fan of the games, but they’re mostly teaching useful skills, so I’ll probably try to nibble away at those? (I seem to be in an achievement completionist mode these days: I’m working on getting all of the achievements in Mark of the Ninja, too.) I haven’t yet unlocked all of the pedals and tones; I assume the latter drives the former, and I’ll get the latter as I keep on progressing through the on-disc content.

A lot of guitar playing this week. I think I played Rocksmith two weekday evenings this week, and I played it either two or three days of the three-day weekend, and I got together with Joan to play guitar as well. And we sounded surprisingly non-horrible! She had me look up “12-bar blues”, so I watched a video about that (and then searched some more and got more confused, so I’m glad I started out with that one); that gave me something to work off of, and she played on top of that up at the twelfth fret. Which was a lot of fun, and something I’m not used to (my music background is classical, so improvisation is pretty foreign to me); good times.

As to Rocksmith, I’ve been going through DLC all week, both the songs I’d downloaded the previous week and the Clash three-pack that came out this week. (I hadn’t intentionally been focusing on DLC, but the game’s leveling up algorithm decided that that was what was appropriate to throw at me.) By now I’ve gone through all of those songs at least once, some of them twice, and I continue to think that they are a good, varied mix: e.g. this morning’s set was This Love, Tom Sawyer, Black Magic Woman, and Paris, and while I won’t claim that that’s the most coherent set of all time, I enjoyed playing each of the songs.

Some of the songs were ones I’d played on Rock Band 3 as well; interesting comparing the different versions. Rock Band 3 puts multiple parts together, and doesn’t expose string bending (or harmonics, as was noticeable in More Than a Feeling), but there are differences beyond that: Rocksmith uses two-note chords in More Than a Feeling while Rock Band 3 uses four-note chords, and some of the chord variants that Rock Band 3 has in London Calling aren’t there in Rocksmith. And I’m sure there are similar differences in the other direction, too. What’s a little more frustrating was finding the arpeggiation part in More Than a Feeling in Rocksmith: it’s there if you choose the appropriate guitar part, but when you’re playing at less than 100%, they don’t just remove notes, they change the timing. So that was pretty annoying: it was a part I knew how to play, yet the game was telling me I was doing the wrong thing when actually it was giving me the wrong notes! Eventually, though, I got good enough at what it was asking me to do to get those sections to 100% difficulty, at which point it gave me the correct notes.

(It would seem that I’m not the only person playing Rock Band less, because they just announced that they’ll stop releasing weekly DLC in a month and a half. No huge surprise—the Blitz rereleases mean that they effectively haven’t been releasing new DLC for much of the last month already—but a bit sad none the less.)

I had a string break today for the first time since I got the SG; I did buy an extra set of strings when I got the guitar, but the store didn’t have Gibson strings around, so they sold me some D’Addario strings instead. Which are fine, but my first reaction is that they’re a bit bright; I think I’ll try Gibson strings the next time I replace the new strings. Which raises the question of which type; I’ll start with the “Special Alloy Humbucker Guitar Strings”, but who knows what actually came on the guitar. (The web page for the guitar I have just says .010–.046, but it doesn’t specify the strings beyond that.)

The other thing I’ve been doing musically is practicing piano for the violin recital. Mostly pleasant enough, though I really am not thrilled with the arrangement for the Vivaldi pieces; I should probably go through those two most days between now and the recital, to at least try to get them sounding good.

Pictures from the January 2013 VGHVI Minecraft session; we’ve been doing this for more than two years now!

First, some pictures taken while flying around the world looking at things:

A pig inside the fire temple

A duck in front of the nether portal

A snowy island with duck and pig

Including chunk edge glitches, which always fascinate me:

Crevasse with mine

The view of that crevasse from the other direction, showing the abrupt edge against the water

A cliff at the edge of the water

A crevasse with pigs on the side and water along the bottom

Further down the crevasse, as the grass on the side gives way to trees

Strange water behavior in a crevasse

Some of our constructions had changed since the last time I looked at them:

Somebody added pictures to Miranda’s CST protest sign

There had been an explosion in the nether library

Roger was continuing his work on the foundation of his church; that’s going to be a big project!

Working on the church foundation

The church foundation is starting to fill out

And when I teleported to Dan, at first I couldn’t tell what he was doing, but it turns out that he was working on an enormous tower:

Dan working inside the base of the tower

Looking up through the darkness

Looking up in the daytime

The outside of the tower

Looking down the middle of the tower

A cloud passes through the tower

Miranda worked some on a building (that I think she’d started before, though I could be wrong), and then built an enormous tree next to the building:

Miranda examines the building

Books and a bed

The roof of the building

Starting work on the tree

A view of the tree and the building from above

Looking out upon snowy hills

Adding scaffolding and greenery to the tree

The bottom of the tree stairs

Climbing up the stairs

Looking out from the stairs

The top of the tree

For the third weekend in a row, I haven’t played Rock Band 3; I still might get back to vocals, but I’m busy enough that I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon. So I’m declaring victory on Rock Band; it’s been a great few years, but I’m focusing on Rocksmith these days.

Which I played a couple of times during weekday evenings this week, actually. Once, I was in the mood to try out bass, so I gave that a run through; fun, though the bass emulation for guitar players sounds a bit odd. I’m not planning to dive into it more now, but if I do, I’ll probably end up buying a bass fairly soon after that.

I went through a couple more guitar events on Friday, and I was pleased with the results; I’m reaching 90,000 points regularly on most songs, and I was surprised at how well I did on Jules (one of the bonus songs without vocals); I’m still not up for the sorts of solos that Rock Band 3 is fond of (and that Rocksmith mercifully isn’t), but I’m getting better.

Even with that, I still have a ways to go with the on-disc songs, and there are more parts for the songs. (I’d assumed for a while that the game would eventually start throwing other parts at me on a regular basis, but by now it’s clear that it has one favored part for each song.) I am worried about getting stuck with Master mode with too many songs if things continue at this rate; what I decided to do was to enlarge the range of available songs.

So I spent Friday evening looking through the available DLC, and ended up getting 18 songs. A bunch of one-offs, except for Rush five-pack. And once I finished the last event that was in queue, the game promptly presented me with an event containing seven of the new songs. (Red Barchetta, My Girl, Message in a Bottle, Pumped up Kicks, This Love, Smoke on the Water, and More than a Feeling.)

And they were all great! Well, Message in a Bottle wasn’t entirely to my taste, and Red Barchetta was a bit tricky, but I think I’ll end up liking both of those eventually. Also, to my surprise, three of the songs involved harmonics, and Red Barchetta had a section full of them (that was the tricky bit); I’m not sure there are three songs involving harmonics on the disc, and certainly it’s something I could use practice on.

It was odd playing through More than a Feeling—I’ve played through that song a lot on Rock Band 3, but the part you play version in that game is a composite of multiple parts. Whereas in the part that Rocksmith gave me, I didn’t have to play the arpeggio part; but the flip side was that Rocksmith asked me to play techniques (harmonics and string bends) that Rock Band 3 didn’t model. I’ll have to go find the arpeggio part in Rocksmith; and, for that matter, I’ll have to see where in Rocksmith I can find the fuller chords that Rock Band 3 puts in its part.

Good times; I think I’m going to try to play Rocksmith more often during weekday evenings. Though I’ll be practicing more outside of game, too—I’m playing guitar with Joan next weekend, and she suggested I learn “12 bar blues”, so I’ll be spending some time on that first.

A busy weekend: I had my first Japanese lesson on Saturday, and we went to a friend’s house for board games on Sunday. Despite which I managed to fit in a decent amount of guitar practice, I think, on the weekend? I might have even practiced one weekday evening; a pity that I’ve taken so long to actually write things up.

I did hit Mastery Mode on one more song, We Share the Same Skies. It’s one of the songs I’d been working on with Brad, and I’m glad I had—the riff is a combination of switching strings and switching fingers that is reachable for me (clearly!) and that I enjoy but that took some amount of time to get solid on. I’m still not completely solid on the details and variations of the riff, so I’ll certainly want to practice it more, but a nice accomplishment.