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.

I didn’t do any building this time: I was exploring the caverns under the new house. Which were huge, and which had been explored before, it was just years ago! I immediately got lost this time; eventually I found my way out, and later I found an exit near the stairs to the house, but I still have a lot of work ahead of me before I understand the whole system.

What few pictures I did take:

An alcove full of mushrooms

Looking up in one of the huge caverns

A waterfall in another of the huge caverns

The first exit I found

Another exit. (I think this is the one closer to the house.)

Dan continued to work on his glass platform above the bay; I’m not sure how much he added, I didn’t get a lot of pictures of that, either.

This is actually a picture I took a month earlier but then lost in iCloud, but it’s pretty so I’ll stick it in here

Glass covering most of the bay

A closeup of the lava under the glass

As is frequently the case, Miranda was the most active of us, but she wasn’t building much: instead, she was exploring the fact that the latest Minecraft update added horses!

A horse!

Horses need a wider door

I get a horse, too. 🙂

Gold horse armor

I’m trying to tame my horse

It is not going so well

Success!

Riding across the snow

A donkey attached to a hitching post

Anvilania…

Miranda still has dogs, too

I practiced guitar both Saturday and Sunday this weekend; good stuff. A pleasant selection of songs in the events, generally hard enough for me to enjoy playing them without requiring too many attempts. And then I went through various of the songs that are either my favorites or ones that I’m working on; I added Sweet Home Alabama to the latter set, and I continue to think it’s a good choice.

Probably no guitar next weekend, we’ll have guests in town.

I played guitar with coworkers again this week (plus one friend of coworkers); again it was a lot of fun. I spent one of the songs (Hey Hey, My My) improvising, mostly reminding myself how minor scales work; no idea how it sounded to other people, but I enjoyed it. And we did Boys Don’t Cry again, where I played the regular part, and then we went through a song that the other people playing had written years ago; I learned the chords for that one. All good stuff.

I was too busy with on-call stuff for work yesterday to be able to play Rocksmith, but I had a good session today. Sweet Home Alabama seems like another song that would be good for me to add to the regular practice rotation: some plucking that’s just barely too fast for me and some two-note chords with a little more moving around and stretching than normal.

The other thing I noticed this week is that I’m getting better at Something Bigger, Something Brighter: I’ve been working on the arpeggios for that offline more recently over the last month, and it feels to me like I’m significantly faster than I used to be; I haven’t compared it against Rock Band 3 or a recording of the song, but I think I’m at full speed now, albeit with rough patches? So yay for improving after repeated practice.

The June VGHVI Minecraft session was a continuation of our large ongoing projects. Miranda and I moved on to the next area of the large house we’re building; she built some bedrooms on the other side of the hallway on the main floor.

Bedroom doors on the right side of the hallway

Starting work on one of the bedrooms

A finished bedroom interior

A hot tub in back of the room

I decided to see how much space there was for a floor above the main floor. (While keeping to my restriction of basically leaving the shape of the mountain intact.) It turns out that there was, so I hollowed out some rooms; I’m not sure what will go in them, Miranda does better at that than I do.

A long room upstairs

The upper window is the same one from the previous picture

A large upstairs back room, on the opposite side of the stairs

The outside door to that back room

An entrance area in the middle of upstairs

That upstairs entrance door, viewed from the outside

The outside view of the original entrance and the upstairs entrance area above it

A pillar above the stair area in the middle of the upstairs floor

Dan kept on working on the structure he was building in a bay:

Lots of glass above the bay

And lots of chickens in one area of that glass

Dawn breaks over the bay

A nice view of the pit under the train tracks, seen when flying back from the bay

Roger, meanwhile, kept on working on his cathedral; it’s going to be pretty amazing when it’s done.

The back edge of the cathedral

Inside the cathedral

One of the side windows

Underneath the cathedral

The front doors

Roger contemplates what to do next

On Friday, I got together with a few of my coworkers to play together; and that turned out to be a huge amount of fun. About half the time, we were playing songs that I know relatively well (e.g. Boys Don’t Cry); fun to do those in a group. But what was rather more interesting was the songs we played that I didn’t know at all; for those, I ended up spending the whole time improvising single note parts.

Which went a lot better than I expected! I mean, I don’t know how what I was doing sounded to other people, but I was entirely happy with it as basically my first experience in that sort of improvisation on the guitar. I guess I’ve picked up enough from playing solos in Rocksmith to be less afraid of the concept than I used to be; and while I frequently didn’t manage to hit the note I expected to play, most of the time I could set it up as a suspension leading to something else that made sense. So, yay for not freaking out and for going with the flow.

We’ll doing that again this Friday. I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to keep on doing it after this week, though: Friday evenings are generally family time, and with Miranda getting back in town I’ll probably be wanting to go home and watch Deep Space Nine with her and Liesl. And, unfortunately, my coworkers and I have a pretty disparate set of preferred days. Maybe something will work out; or maybe I’ll take this as a reminder that I should spend more time playing with Joan.

This weekend’s Rocksmith practice went well, too. These days, it’s pretty common for a couple of the songs in an event to be ones where I’ve done well enough in the past that Rocksmith doesn’t ask me to practice them before letting me perform them; so this time I only had three songs to practice. And, on all of them, I needed some practice before I could meet the game’s goals, and that practice was fairly pleasant. Two of them weren’t my favorite songs, but not ones I actively dislike (though, to be honest, there may only be one song in the game that I actively dislike); and one of them, Under Cover of Darkness, is one that I like quite a bit, I may well end up adding that to my regular practice rotation. So a good event, and, as always, pleasant practice outside of that.

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!