I had a great time practicing guitar this weekend. I finished the (non-unlockable) Rocksmith 2014 songs; a solid collection, though there aren’t too many I’m madly in love with, and maybe it has a little more metal than I’d like? (But it’s by no means actively metal-heavy, don’t get me wrong.) And I dipped into a couple more lessons; I think I could probably benefit from doing those more.

But what impressed me the most about the game is that I finally started taking Riff Repeater mode seriously, and it’s really good. It’s super-configurable, for better or for worse, but once you get the options right, the result is great. Some of the configuration lets you mimic the different modes from the original Rocksmith; but some is new. I appreciate having control over how few mistakes I have to make before it bumps me up a speed/difficulty level: the original game’s desire for almost-perfection as something I found annoying, but it also seems reasonable to put that under my control because sometimes I want to be asked to hit every note in a section. And, no matter what, I appreciate having not only a count of how many notes I missed but also being shown the specific wrong notes on the repeat, so I can see where I need to focus more.

I think that combined with the vast number of tracks I have available to me means that I’m going to spend more and more time working on individual songs; I still like being confronted with random songs, I can easily imagine me spending more than half of my practice time in one of the more random modes (either recommendations or nonstop play), but I want to dig into individual songs more. (And the fact that the game lets me flag some songs as “favorites” helps with that, too.)

I’m also coming to terms with alternate tunings more. I don’t exactly like having to change my tuning between songs, but with new strings, it’s not nearly as bad as it had been. So I’ve stopped fleeing alternate tuning songs when I run into them in nonstop mode.

Lots going on with the game, I should probably gather my thoughts write another post about it on my main blog…

Pictures from the October VGHVI Minecraft session:

At first, I decided to wander around the house and the cave beneath it.

A bat decided to visit our house

Some stairs I’d forgotten about in the cave

The bottom of the stairs

I guess I dug a bit too deep…

Then I wandered around the city; it turns out that there were some pillars stretching up above it that I wasn’t aware of.

A mysterious glass pillar

The top of the pillar

Looking down at the city

There’s a brick pillar, too

It’s been a while since I’ve visited the temple

Hello, golden donkey

After that, Miranda called me over to the eagle tower that Pat had built a while ago, and we played hide-and-seek there.

The top of the eagle tower

The lower part of the eagle tower

Inside the tower

Hiding place 1

Hiding place 2

While we were doing that, Dan was building a big tower out of lava, way in the middle of nowhere:

The top of the lava tower

Looking down into a pool of lava

Hello, lava

Miranda bathing in lava

The base of the tower

Looking up from the base

The view from under the base

And then I started wandering back; I had no idea where I was, so I had to turn on debug info to find my way.

A sheepy cave

A strange corner

I got my guitar back on Saturday from having it set up; I can’t remember exactly what he said he fixed, but he adjusted the frets and intonations, and said it should buzz less. Felt a little better when I played it in the shop, but now I’ve adjusted to the new feel and I can’t really tell the difference; it was good before, it’s good now.

Actually, probably the biggest difference right now is just having new strings. (Ernie Ball Rock and Roll; I think I like them about as much as the Gibson Humbuckers I’d been using?) I assume that’s the reason why I spent less time fighting the tuning in Rocksmith this weekend; good thing, too, because I’ve gotten to a section of the songs where nonstandard tunings are coming right and left. (I played through three in E flat / dropped D flat today, and three or for in E flat standard.) On the one hand, I wish there weren’t so many songs in nonstandard tunings; on the other hand, some of them I’m definitely glad are there. (E.g. Ultra Soul by B’z, in standard tuning but with a 444 A; chord progressions that are unusual to me when I play them but that I’ve heard in other J-pop.)

And there are songs that I am not glad are there: I think Rocksmith 2014 goes a little further into metal than the original did, and I have zero interest in learning how to play, say, Slayer’s War Ensemble. But I’m sure there are people who think that’s great, and I have more than enough other songs to play to keep me very busy; my main request right now is a way to flag individual songs as ones that I don’t want to see in recommendations. (Hmm, now that I think about it, I’ve seen references to removing songs from Nonstop Mode; I should look into how that works.) Maybe it’s there, I haven’t looked super hard, it’s just not obvious to me.

At any rate, a pleasant weekend of guitar. I’m most of the way through the new songs; I think I probably have 10-15 left to go through, I’m not sure? And for songs I like I’ve been going through them a few times; I still haven’t started really focusing on learning individual songs by dropping into Riff Repeater mode. Eventually I’ll do that, honest I will…

Oh, the other new thing that happened this time was that I got put into Master mode for the first time. I really like how that works: I appreciate the warning that fading out the notes gives me, it hasn’t yet done it on any sections that it’s not plausible for me to learn, and it’s sent me back out when I started messing up. So my first reaction is that it looks great: nudges towards memorizing songs without throwing me in the deep end.

I decided to bring my guitar in to get set up today; that will take a week, which means no Rocksmith tomorrow.

Today was interesting, though. I learned that the game models tapping; which, on the one hand, sounds like a technique that I should learn, but on the other hand mostly occurs in sorts of music that I’m not all that interested in playing? The one song that I played today didn’t do anything to disabuse me of either notion, at any rate. A bit frustrating that the game had a hard time detecting notes that I could hear just fine; I think its detection on the upper E string is not so great, I run into problems when tuning that string.

On which topic: another one of the songs I was playing today was in E flat / dropped D flat tuning, which meant retuning all the strings. And that was a pain, both getting it in tune to play that song and then getting it back in regular tune. I’m tentatively thinking that a lot of what’s going on there is that I need to replace my strings; another side benefit of getting it set up, I’ll have to keep that in mind the next time the game seems to be acting odd tuning-wise.

Not a whole lot to say other than that; a pleasant enough practice session, tuning and tapping frustrations aside. Oh, and the tone-switching on Subdivisions makes that song a little more annoying to play than in the original Rocksmith: the tone that they use for the arpeggiated sections brings out the audio delay somehow. Maybe at some point I’ll see if I can plug headphones directly into the 360? I also browsed the lessons to see what other techniques there were that I hadn’t learned; I’m mostly done with them, but I see more advanced lessons for techniques that I’ve seen the basic lessons for, so more lessons for me to go to. And certainly lots more practice for me to do on techniques that I’ve been exposed to; I did a bit better today at muting with my fretting hand than I have been, at least…