Almost nothing to report this week; sadly, no guitar practice on Saturday (we were talking to people about kitchen renovation and having lunch with friends), but on Sunday, I did practice, going through the standard single event plus some of my favorite songs. Which was pleasant, but it doesn’t make for much of a blog post! I suspect that busy weekends will be the norm coming up; maybe I’ll batch a few weeks up into a single post going forward.

I didn’t play Rocksmith yesterday: we were dropping Miranda off at summer camp, so I spent more time doing stuff with her. I did spend a couple of hours playing today, though; Rocksmith threw two dropped-D songs at me, which would normally be annoying, but actually I turn out to kind of like Unnatural Selection. The only song that gave me trouble this time was Cult of Personality; I’m getting better, though, it has the sort of quickish picking that I’ve been practicing recently.

On which note: I’ve been practicing the arpeggios from Something Bigger, Something Brighter outside of game, and I think I’m getting faster at that? I doubt I’m up to the actual speed of the song, but still: progress is good. And on the arpeggio section of Tom Sawyer that I’ve been going through in Rocksmith, I finally managed to have the game declare I’m doing it right at full speed. That’s with only 93% of the notes, so now I’ll have to get to the same speed at 100% of the notes. The extra notes are actually a little weird: it throws in two- or (in a few spots) three-string chords, except that two of the strings are actually playing in unison. (Fourth fret on G and open B.) I don’t really understand what’s going on there, but I’ll do what the game tells me…

No guitar practice last weekend: we had a guest in town. Though on Friday I did accompany a violin recital on piano; my favorite selection of music of any of the recitals so far, lots of Bach and no bad Vivaldi arrangements. I was thinking I’d practice guitar on Tuesday evening, when everybody else was out at the opera (I really can’t stand the seats at the S.F. Opera House), but I was too tired to concentrate that evening. (It’s been an interesting week.)

I got back on track this week, though. Nothing huge to report; the same Rocksmith stuff as always. A string broke, so I switched strings, going back to the the Gibson ones; I think they’re a little clearer, for better or for worse, though not a huge difference? I also ran across a nice guitar arrangement of Itsumo Nando Demo (from Spirited Away); I don’t think I’ll spend time on it right now, but good to have it around.

Our May 2013 VGHVI Minecraft session had rather more going on than normal, with three large construction projects (and two literary projects!) going on at once.

First, Miranda finished off the library that we’d started work on last time, starting with the floor:

Starting work on the library floor

Most of the floor is completed

Breaking through to the outside

A view of the completed floor from the outside

Once the floor was done, she added bookshelves:

Bookshelves are in place

Miranda, the bookshelves, and a sunrise

Finally, she added a central seating area, along with some final touches.

Central seating

The door, windows, and artworks

While she was doing this, I poked around the outside and noticed a fairly large cavern underneath the house. So I tried building stairs down to the cavern; if I’m remembering correctly, the stairs actually exited in a different cavern? (A much much larger one, which Jonathan had started exploring years back?) I’ll take another look this month.

A cavern under the house

Stairs down to the cavern

The bottom of the stairs

While Miranda worked on the library, Roger was continuing the work on his church:

A side view of the front edge of the church

Filling out the foundation

Partway through filling out the foundation, Roger ran into a glitch which meant that, for a while, he had gold but not stone; he took advantage of that.

The gold front

Gold pillars and floor

The view from above

Dan, meanwhile, was busy extending a tower he’d worked on a few months back, in both directions:

That is a very tall tower

But after completing that he moved on to building a platform in the middle of an inlet:

Building a platform

Pillar with decoration

The view of the bay from above

I poked around the bay a bit, and noticed a cave on the left; it forked, and the left side was standard but pleasant, while the right side was a little more interesting:

A spooky cave on the left side of the bay

Zombies in the cave

Zombies approaching the platform

Dan was unfazed by this, and instead spent his time building fishtanks around the platform. He did, however, memorialize the zombies’ presence in prose.

The zombies watch Dan build a fishtank

Filling the tank with water

A record of a glorious victory

More fishtanks

If I’m remembering correctly, Miranda was actually the first person who suggested adding books; she (naturally enough) put one in the library. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure book, with many more branches to come:

There’s a storage area next to the library seating

GOLD! I need gold!

The new piece this week was Call Me. Fun to play; at first, the game said I wasn’t doing very well, though. This sometimes happens with power chords, and I think the problem here was exacerbated by the fact that the chord wasn’t repeated, giving the game fewer chances to do its note detection; after playing around with it for a while, I decided that the game was actually accurately reporting that I sometimes was only strumming two of the strings instead of three. So, nice to have improved my playing that way, I only wish the game’s feedback had been a bit more direct.

I’ve (somewhat accidentally) unlocked master mode in a few more songs; I ran into The Guns of Brixton in an encore on Saturday, flubbing it completely, so I spent a bit more time with that song over the weekend. It points out something that sometimes happens with Rocksmith: the song has a basic repeated chord structure, but in some sections you only play partial chords, and which notes you play is pretty random. Also, there are a couple of basic strumming patterns, and which pattern shows up at a given time is similarly random. And there’s a real tension between that and playing the song from memory—I can easily play something from memory that will sound correct, but whether I happen to play exactly what the game expects is quite a bit more random. The game is forgiving, so if I want to maximize my score I can strum extra times and always play full chords, which will give me full points even if the game omits some of the strums or some of the notes of the chords, but doing that lessens the texture of the songs.

Fortunately, I’m not too score driven, so I don’t mind missing a few points while I explore songs. But it’s also probably just as well, given my temperament, that there are lots of songs where memorizing the whole thing is more reasonable.

Other than that, the standard stuff—a couple of events, which led to some focused practice on a few of the songs; more Tom Sawyer arpeggio practice; and a few playthroughs of some of my favorite songs.