Guitar Status: August 4, 2013

We had guests in town last weekend and we will guests them in town next weekend, but this weekend was free, so I made sure to practice guitar both days. And the setlist that Rocksmith gave me on Sunday was unexpectedly interesting: it was Anna Molly, Limelight, Do You Remember, Message in a Bottle, The End of the World, Tom Sawyer, and Play with Fire.

A couple of those were straightforward, but the rest weren’t. I’d been practicing the main arpeggio section in Tom Sawyer for the last month or two, but I hadn’t gone through the song in that time, so it was good timing for me to take another swing. Went well enough, but clearly I have quite a bit more room for improvement in that song; I think I’m going to switch over to practicing the whole thing.

And then I had to deal with Limelight; before I memorized the arpeggio section in Subdivisions, I hadn’t realized just how frequently Rush uses the same idiosyncratic chords and just how much they like Bs, but now I know!

Message in a Bottle was a good sign of my increasing dexterity: I already was able to play the arpeggios at the start, but it had been a stretch in the past. And it was a little bit of a stretch when I first tried the song this time, but not so much even then, and after going through it a couple of times, I was getting to where I could at least see what it would be like to play it comfortably. So my left hand is getting better; more of a surprise was how it felt to go through Play with Fire, my right hand was a lot more confident when jumping to the top three strings. I’m still not able to play that piece as solidly as I’d like (I still can’t even reach 90,000 points on it), but clear signs of improvement.

Nice to see that the practice is paying off.