I’m done with The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance; mostly not very actionable, but there are a couple of chapter on deliberate practice at the end. Which suggest that I should focus my guitar practice more: don’t spend so much time playing through full songs (especially ones that are too easy or too hard for me), do spend more time working on techniques or bits of songs that are within reach.

Or at least that’s what I should do if my goal is to increase my expertise. Which isn’t wholeheartedly the case: all things being equal, I’d prefer to get better at guitar, but enjoyment is primary. Still, when working on piano / harpsichord pieces, I enjoyed focusing on sections, and I’ve enjoyed working on guitar techniques as well, so there’s no particular reason why those two goals should be in conflict.

So I’m changing my routine. I’d already started working on pinch harmonics and tapping; now I’m picking a few songs and dropping into riff repeater on no mistakes / 3 repeats mode for isolated sections. (Specifically, Love Hurts, More Than a Feeling, and probably Anna Molly.) Which has been a good experiment so far: just the act of going through small sections repeatedly lets me see little bits to work on beyond the notes.

And I’m reducing the amount of random songs that I’m playing through. Which, actually, is good timing—the game’s “recommended” list sorts by fewest number of plays, which means that, the more you play, the more likely you are to run into songs there that you’ve been actively avoiding. Good to be exposed to songs like that every once in a while, but not heavily; I think I’ll lean on nonstop mode rather than recommended songs to get my dose of randomness.

Not much to report about Rocksmith, which is why I haven’t been blogging about it recently: it’s still awesome, I still spend a good amount of time on it every week. I continue to be impressed by Session Mode; it works well, and the game continues to suggest new things for me to try there. The game has also started to suggest that I building tones; I’ve been doing that as prompted, but I haven’t really jumped into that particularly.

Mostly I’m still playing through songs, of course. But I’m also thinking I should work a bit more on specific techniques; so I’ve been trying to learn how to do pinch harmonics over the last month (with some success in isolation, though I haven’t tried it in the middle of a song), and today I started working on tapping. Na Na Na Na has a good tapping section; if I set the difficulty to where there are only pairs of notes, then I can do it okay, but right now triplets are too hard for me; they don’t seem completely out of reach, so that’s a sign that that’s a plausible section for me to work on. I’m also falling out of the habit of doing non-game practice (e.g. going through the arpeggio section of Something Bigger, Something Brighter, or learning Itsumo Nando Demo); I blame that on me having the guitar packed away because of the kitchen work. But the kitchen is almost done, there should be less than three weeks left.

I should also spend more time just focusing on individual songs, and in particular using Riff Repeater to get sections solid. There are a few songs that I’m playing every week (Love Hurts and Anna Molly, at least), and several others that I play frequently, but I’m not really taking them super seriously. In general, I still enjoy playing lots of songs, and I do feel that I’m getting better, but I suspect that I should be spending more time on focused practice, at least to the extent that that doesn’t hurt my enjoyment. I’m reading through The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance right now; I haven’t gotten to where it talks about specific recommendations yet, but I may well change my practice style once I get to that.

Oh, and today I tried following the game’s advice for how to string a guitar, which differs slightly from how I had been stringing in terms of how it sets the initial loop of the string; seems to work well, I’ll probably stick with that method assuming that the strings stay stable. And I bought a capo yesterday, though I don’t have any specific plans to use it: they released a capo-only Oasis song last week, but that didn’t seem like my style.

So, a transition period: once I finish that book and once the kitchen is done, then I’ll probably change how I practice: it will be easier to practice outside of games on weekdays, I’ll go see if my neighbor is offering lessons, and I’ll have science giving me advice. But I’m feeling pretty good about things even without that.

In Rocksmith news from other blogs: I enjoyed this Rampant Coyote progress report.

Pictures from the last Minecraft session of the year:

It was rainy when I started up the server; I ended up wandering around for a while taking pictures in the rain.

Skull mountain in the rain

A lonely figure floating in the rain

Yellow sky

Evening turns to night, part 1

Evening turns to night, part 2

Evening turns to night, part 3

Behind the house

An open field behind town

Rainy mossy tracks

But eventually the rain ended:

Stars at night

The town at night

A gold horse wandering around

Looking into the greenhouse

A cat in a house

The other main focus of my environmental photos was glitches: they seem more frequent in the current version, of which I approve.

Underwater tunnels

A glitch cutting through town

Glitch hills

Massive glitch at sunset

Roger worked a bit more on his cathedral:

Starting to add pews

More construction

Hills behind the cathedral

And Pat starting building a new tower:

Starting work on a tower

The base of the tower

A second pillar

Fleshing out a wall

More wall

Almost done with the bottom walls

Building a spire on top

More spire

The textures on top

It looks like there’s another spire going up?

And Miranda decided to make improvements to the village we found the previous month; I didn’t get pictures of most of her work, unfortunately, but I did stop by for a visit:

Working on the village

A villager observes me

In fact, two villagers observe me

Some villagers are stuck in water. (Miranda added railing to help them, but it was too late…)

Underwater villagers

Building some stairs

Walking up the stairs

A successful rescue

A top-down view of that area