I only got in one Rock Band session this week, but it was a good one. I repeated the hardest of the barre chord lessons and all of the scale lessons, this time trying to use hopos on the chromatic scale one, and they went well. And I managed to make it through the remaining of the Hard lessons, on arpeggiation within chords, which was another fun one. (I’m sure I could have made it through it earlier, I was just tired when I’d tried it before. Though my increased fluency in shifting between chords certainly helped.)

After that, I went back into the songs, continuing through the Warmup songs. Which I was expecting to have to spend a fair amount of time on, but so far that hasn’t materialized: quite to my surprise, I made it through the remaining nine Warmup songs! I’m sure the time I’ve spent on barre chord lessons helped, as did the fact that many of the Warmup songs don’t actually use barre chords (preferring instead power chords or single notes), but for whatever reason, I went through each song at most twice with the mute on and once plugged into the amp (except for one or two songs using an alternate tuning, which I haven’t yet tried to figure out), and felt satisfied enough to move on at the end of that.

I’d been thinking that I’d want to spend a lot of time going through the Hard lessons over and over again. And while I’m still planning to return to them, it’s also looking like the difficulty curve even on Hard might be shallow enough that I can improve my barre chord skills by spending most of my time playing through actual songs. That would be pleasant if it remains true (which may well not be the case!): the lessons are well done, but playing through real songs is more fun.

I still sound pretty bad on the real songs, though. Some of that is because there is (copious!) room for improvement in my skills, but some is that playing a stripped down version of an easy song doesn’t sound that great. We’ll see how that changes when the songs get harder, maybe I’ll get inspired to put in more time on individual songs then.

And there was one song that was a total outlier, namely Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. When I got to it in the menu, I noted that Dan Bruno‘s score was over 600,000 points, which is extremely high for any song, let alone a warmup song! What turns out to be going on there is that it’s full of chords, and you have to play them pretty quickly; the chords are all easy ones to play (though you shift between five or six different ones, three-chord music it isn’t), but there’s a lot of notes to play (if you’re Dan) or to miss a fair portion of (if you’re me).

It’s also the first song where I haven’t been able to do the training sections accurately. They’re long, they both have multiple chord changes and individual chords that are repeated a lot, and that adds up to something that I am so far unable to hit 100% on. (Or, I seem to recall, get particularly close to.) It’s also a song where I’m feeling more dubious than normal about the strum detection and the string mute; the flip side is that it’s a song that’s relatively rewarding to try to play well plugged in, I think. I’m not currently planning to return to it to try to get better, but that would be worth considering.

The main bit of Pro Guitar excitement this week: I bought an amp! At the recommendation of a guitarist friend of mine, I went for a Fender Vibro Champ XD, and I have no regrets so far: I like the way it sounds, and it allows for what seems to me a decent amount of experimentation, which will help me get a better idea of the possibilities that are out there when/if I decide to move up to something fancier.

And it turns out that, indeed, playing Pro Guitar on Hard is good preparation for the real thing! I’ve only gone through three songs on Hard so far, but in all cases, when I played them plugged in I could definitely hear the music. Flourishes were missing, so I clearly have something to look forward to when I learn those songs on Expert, but buying the amp when I hit Hard was definitely the right choice. (And, conversely, I tried out a few songs on Medium with the amp on, and it just wasn’t the same.)

It was also very educational from a musical point of view. Most notably in learning how notes sustain on an electric guitar: when you’re playing in game, the game is in complete control of that, and when you play unmuted but not plugged in, notes don’t sustain very well. When I’m plugged in, though, notes sustain for a quite long time. In particular, it was quickly clear that I need to mute notes that I don’t want to sustain; for now, I’m doing that with the pick, but I should play around with other possible ways to mute.

That also raises the question: what should I do when the game gives me notes that are marked as muted? The game doesn’t really care, though it gives me advice to not hold down the strings very much; I’ll need to experiment with the different sounds I can produce with that. And hammers-on and pull-offs are much more real to me now: I’d been playing them for years without really believing that they could work (at some subconscious level, of course I trust Harmonix to represent music accurately within the game’s constraints), but it turns out that, yup, they work well! Though that is very much an area which I need to explore more, in order to figure out how to get notes to sustain best across transitions.

The amp aside, though, I’ve only played very little this week. We have guests in town (summer being when grandparents come to visit their granddaughter), and yesterday in particular was quite busy with brunch, a musical, and dinner. So I didn’t have time to learn any new songs; I did manage to put in most of an hour on practice mode, though.

And I would seem to be making progress. There are 10 barre chord lessons; the first four went rather smoothly, which isn’t something I’ve been able to say in the past, and I made it through the last of them for the first time. The open chord lessons also went well, so probably I’ll soon reduce my frequency of practicing those. (Or maybe not, it’s core muscle memory and the better I get the less time it will take for me to go through them!) I also finished the strumming pattern lessons for the first time; those, I wasn’t so impressed by (it wasn’t even clear which strings I was supposed to strum when or what mistake I had made in a given attempt), and I don’t plan to return to them particularly often. I didn’t have time to go through the arpeggiation lessons (which I haven’t yet finished) or the scale lessons (which I have finished but plan to return to frequently).

I’ll happily dive in full force next weekend, though. My current plan is to go through songs like I have been and then play each song a couple of times unmuted and plugged in to see what it sounds like. And I have no idea what my rate of progress will be; I’m sure it will be slower than on Medium (both because of the difficulty and because I’ll be wanting to listen to myself), but how much has yet to be determined.

Last week I started on barre chord training, and my main takeaway there was that it was going to require a lot of (painful!) practice. Which I dutifully did: every weekday this week I pulled out the guitar after I got home and practiced for a bit. (Outside of the game: I didn’t plug in the guitar and left the strings unmuted.) Which was a good choice: I made a lot of mistakes while doing that, and learned something about the pitfalls of different finger positions.

And I still have a long way to go. I went through the game’s barre chord training both yesterday and today; I did better both times than last week, making it through nine of the ten sections, but it was a struggle, and I had to give my wrist frequent rest breaks. And the game was surprisingly generous: it doesn’t actually require you to be holding down the barre chord perfectly, though I’m not sure exactly what mistakes the game allows. (Maybe it lets you miss one of the high strings?) Still, it’s progress, and I’ll keep at it.

I also tried out the other Hard training lessons. And I was surprised to find that the barre chord lessons wasn’t the first group: there’s an open chord group of lessons before that, which (among other things) teaches you about E and A chords, which is kind of useful when working on barre chords! I did manage to go through all of that group, and all of the scale lessons; actually, I rather enjoyed the latter. Oddly enough, the chromatic scale was by far the hardest of the scale lessons for me—a chromatic scale should be straightforward on a guitar, one would think, but it didn’t turn out that way. There were two other groups of lessons that I dipped into but didn’t complete, I’ll give those a try again next week. (Actually, I’ll give all of them a try again, this is all core knowledge, and I’m not nearly solid enough at any of it to be able to move on.)

I also went through three songs. None of which had barre chords in them: they all had three-note chords, with open fifths. Which raised a fingering question: should I finger it like a barre chord where I happen to only be strumming three strings, or should my index finger be vertical? For now, I’m going with the latter, but any advice would be welcome. Also, the game kept on claiming that I was missing the three note chords when I thought I was fingering them correctly; eventually, I realized that I was in fact fingering correctly, I just wasn’t strumming through all three strings. (A bad habit I picked up from the two-note chords on Medium, where the game/controller really only makes you strum one of the strings.) Once I figured that out, I did a pretty good job on I Love Rock and Roll, which was nice.

I also took a break from pro guitar, going through London Calling on regular bass. Which was awesome, it’s a wonderful album with some pleasant bass lines. The only weird thing was trying to go for the all-upstrum 100% expert goal: for the second time, I thought I’d finished the goal (I certainly got 100%!), but I wasn’t credited with it. No idea what’s going on there.

And then there were the equipment events of the week. The said one is that the Squier controller is being discontinued. It’s still available at Best Buy; talking it over with Liesl, we actually decided to order a second one, on the theory that she’s dipping her toes into the instrument as well and having a second one available would also be welcome if the first one breaks. (She has quite a bit more experience than I do playing an actual guitar, though she usually plays bass in our Rock Band sessions.) If you’re finding this series of posts interesting and are on the fence about buying one yourself, I encourage you to take the leap: I’ve obviously found mine to be more than worth it.

On a more pleasant equipment note, I also ordered an amp! I talked it over with a guitarist friend of mine, and it seemed like the Fender Vibro Champ was the best tradeoff between price and quality. (I’m obviously quite enjoying my guitar learning so far, but I’m not committing to trying to become a really solid guitarist; so while I may well eventually buy a better guitar and amp, I may decide that sticking with playing the guitar in game is all that I’m up for.) So I’m really looking forward to its arriving this week and seeing what the guitar sounds like; I’m thinking that, every time I go through a song in game, I should try it once or twice plugged into the amp as well.

I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to practice next weekend—we have guests in town whom I might not want to inflict too much bad guitar playing on, and we have theatre tickets for Sunday afternoon. Which is okay: at worst, that means that I won’t have time to do much beyond regular barre chord practice, and that’s what I need much more than anything else.

At the end of last post, I’d figured out where my first stretch of track was going to be, and where my first two stations would be: a large one inside my home hill, and a small one near my new house. So now it was time to start work on one of those; I decided to tackle my home hill.

Miranda decided to help me design, so first we walked around the top of the hill a lot figuring out where things should go. Eventually, we noticed that the track location went in a line that connected a tower on top of the hill with a tree on top of the hill. That seemed to be too much of a coincidence to pass up, so we decided to go with that. After looking at pictures of train stations, we decided go go with a window at the top window of the roof, along with further windows down the sides.

A sunrise we saw while looking out the side of the hill

Leveling off the top of the roof

The skylight is in place

A view of the tracks from the roof

The tower, which we widened to match the skylight

After that, we had to figure out what to do with the sides. We decided to put windows and dirt in rows on the sides; also, the east side of the hill was quite a bit steeper than the west side, so we ended up building up the east side more. Once we had the windows in place, we went back up to the top and started hollowing out the inside.

Adding more windows on the west side of the hill

Extending the east side of the hill

Starting to hollow out the middle

Sunrise through the windows

Hollowing it out wasn’t too tedious at first, because it was narrower at the top and because it was dirt instead of stone. As we got further down, it started to drag on a bit; fortunately, however, the space started to look pretty amazing as it got taller, so the effort was worth it.

Space is starting to form inside

Lots of blocks bouncing around

It's getting taller

Now it's really tall

By this point, we were getting close to the track level, so it was time to figure out exactly how the sides would look where they met the ground. (Which was actually a few blocks above track level, because of the hill that we were on.) Eventually we decided to add vertical sides with double-height windows; they were in slightly different positions on the two sides, because of the different configurations of the land.

The windows on the east side

Looking through the station

And now we’re done hollowing out that part. And it looks great! Except that it’s clearly too short in comparison to its width: we’ll have to extend it further in to the hill, and possible also further out the sand dunes; I guess I’ll work on that next weekend. That will require some amount of fiddling with the shape of the hill, but now that I’ve gotten past my need to leave natural features exactly as they are, I think that will probably improve the look of the hill: in particular, the east side was way too steep before.

An inside view of the full height

The west side of the station

The east side of the station

And, of course, we have to furnish the station. Not least, laying at least one set of tracks! (There’s probably room in the station for around ten sets of tracks, it’s something like 26 squares wide.) I think I’ll put half-height blocks on the ground, to provide a raised bed above the tracks. Also, I’m not sure about the lighting: Miranda was lobbying for having minimal torches, but I’m not convinced that’s the way to go, so I may end up climbing way up the walls to add more torches. And we’ll want some sort of big window high up in the front of the station, once we figure out where the front of the station actually is.

A good day’s work, I’m glad to see this finally taking shape.

Watching the sun set through the station

As expected, I finished the last eight Medium Pro Guitar songs this week. Which, honestly, weren’t my favorite songs: too many guitar solos with the vast majority of the notes missing, and which I actually don’t think I would have enjoyed that much even if the notes had been there. Still, there were some fun bits. And still: I’m done with Medium Pro Guitar!

Which means that the fun is about to start. Which I dipped into today, making it about halfway through the barre chords training; it turns out that “fun” is another word for “my left hand is hurting in new and different ways”. Fortunately, my twitter feed is filled with people named Dan who give excellent guitar advice, but clearly I have my work cut out for me.

I have more to say, but I think I’ll leave that for my other blog. I imagine that I’ll spend the next few weeks going through tutorials, hopefully finding time to practice barre chords (without the game, just playing the guitar unmuted) most evenings during the week as well. And I’ll probably dip into a couple of actual songs, just to see what those are like.

First, an interlude: I was sick a week and a half ago; and, while I didn’t feel like doing any design, I was up for some mining. Some pictures of that:

Lava beneath the latest pool I'd found

Redstone and iron

Gold and lava

More redstone and iron

Yes, I got 223 bits of redstone dust from this mining expedition alone

My current total stash

I did find some time for more serious Minecraft work this weekend, however. And after finishing the first floor of my new house, the natural next step was to extend above it. My plan of record was to connect it to a train station on the other side of the hill that the house is against, and I decided that it made sense to work on that, since that would affect the design of the second floor. So I dug some stairs into the hill, planning to join up with the train station.

Stairs in back of the house

Looking down from the top of the stairs

Once I got up to the top of the stairs, though, it wasn’t at all obvious what I should do. I looked around in various directions, and eventually came to the conclusion that it would be a lot easier to design and build the station if I actually had train tracks entering it.

The view across the top to the stairs

The train station location

The train tracks are going to approach from this direction somehow

So I decided to get more serious about planning exactly where the tracks will go. But first, a couple of shots of the house:

This house really needs a roof!

The graphics glitch on the stairs is fixed, yay. (And I removed the wood logs above the door, though I may put them back.)

So I marched across the desert. And marched back. And back, and back, and back. I was pretty sure that I wanted a track going in a straight line from the hills, which meant that I had to decide: 1) What elevation should it travel at? 2) Where exactly should the line be?

Eventually, I found an elevation that I was happy with, at a location that went between the two hills in question. The next issue was: where exactly should the station part be in the home hill? The problem was that the end of the home hill was entirely made out of sand: and that’s not a stable building material to hollow out. Again, after pacing around a bit (and climbing up and down the hill), I came up with a tentative plan: I’d dig a (quite deep!) trench through the sand part, and then a tunnel through a part where there was sand on top and rock underneath. And when I finally came to where there was dirt on top, I’d hollow out the middle of the mountain, making a gloriously large station.

The trench approaching the home hill

Looking out from the trench

The tunnel where the tracks enter the hill

With that plan in place, I built the bed for the tracks. I built it out of cobblestone: in some places, I replaced sand with cobblestone to provide a firm building material, while in other places I ran the tracks through the air.

Looking down while building an elevated section of tracks

The end of the tracks at the station near my new house

A view of tracks from below, heading towards my home hill

Another view of tracks from below, this time going towards the station near the new house

A random sunset picture I took while figuring this out

Finally, I started hollowing out the train station inside of my home hill. I still haven’t figured out the details: I’ve figured out how far it will go (the first picture below is a tunnel at the edge, going perpendicular to my tracks, though I may eventually fill in that entrance on the side of the hill), but the details of the interior layout are still quite unsure. It’s not even obvious to me what space I have to work with: I want to use the existing shape of the hill as much as possible, but it’s hard to figure out how much space there is inside without digging until I hit the outside.

A tunnel going into the side of the station

Looking up at some of the space that I'm just starting to hollow out inside the hill

So I’ve got a lot of thinking ahead of me; in fact, it’s not clear to me whether I should work next on my home hill train station or the train station near my new house. (I now have enough context that I should be able to work on the latter, unlike at the start of this post.) And I’ve got an awful lot of digging ahead of me in the home hill! Fortunately, I recently moved my Minecraft folder to Dropbox, so I can dig away at the hill on the laptop downstairs while watching TV or otherwise occupying myself.

I finished a bunch of songs last weekend, but with Liesl’s father in town, I didn’t expect to make much Pro Guitar progress this weekend. But actually it’s been surprisingly productive: I went through three songs while Liesl was picking him up from the airport, and another nine songs today.

That brought me through the end of Nightmare, and through the first four songs of Impossible. So only 8 songs left on Medium; I should definitely finish it up next weekend, and I might even start the next round of training! Which makes me happy, both because I’m really looking forward to Hard, and because Medium is getting to be a bit boring. Not always—some of the songs are helping me get more fluent at moving between chords (and teaching me how much work I have ahead of me before I get good at barre chords)—but, at this difficulty level, many of the songs are about the solos. Which I don’t really enjoy: I don’t particularly enjoy playing high up on the neck of the guitar, and there are also so many notes missing in the solos on Medium that you don’t really feel like you’re doing much.

I also hit 5 million career score for Pro Guitar, which is a nice milestone. And, bizarrely, I was in the top 2% on Bohemian Rhapsody; I didn’t do a spectacular job or anything, so my only hypothesis is that not many people must be making it through the Impossible songs on Medium yet. Or maybe that song is so boring on guitar (so much waiting around!) that not many people even bother to try it…

I wasn’t as good as I sometimes am in taking pictures during the May VGHVI Minecraft session, but here are a few:

Pat continued work on the underwater tunnel; we still have quite a ways to go to cross the ocean, and the part of the ocean where we were working now was rather deep. So he had to do a lot of diving; I helped some with the glass placement. It didn’t help that the ocean above it was frozen over; eventually he placed some burning netherrack to melt the ice, so we didn’t suffocate while diving.

Towards the start of the ocean tunnel

The current end of construction; the hills outside are the ocean floor

Burning netherrack to melt the ice

Eric had been working on a secret project in the last session, as it turned out, and he finished it this time: a Skull Mountain, complete with lava flowing down from the eyes.

Skull Mountain

The base of the mountain, complete with burning sheep

There was a rather nice cavern inside, with a pool at the bottom.

Inside the bottom of the skull

Inside the top of the skull

I’m still not sure exactly where the skull is in relation to the rest of our landmarks. I started wandering back, and came across a cavern with a huge waterfall that somebody had clearly explored before, but I ended up just teleporting myself back.

A huge waterfall in a cavern

Miranda and Roger had been working on the area near the temple: Roger had been carving out land (for an acropolis, if I’m remembering correctly), and Miranda put up some rather nice lamps there.

Lamps outside the temple

Miranda working on a lamp

Temple and lamps during the day

Somebody added a bed to the altar

Miranda also finished off the train station, adding a rather nice roof with skylight.

Inside the train station

The roof of the train station

This weekend, Liesl and Miranda were out much of the day on Saturday, and I took the excuse to play a bunch of Pro Guitar; and I did a fair amount today as well. The result is my most productive weekend in ages: I went through 20 songs, finishing off the Moderate tier, completing all of Challenging, and starting on Nightmare.

The songs are fairly routine by now: I’m still going through training mode, but it’s been a while since I needed to play through a song more than twice after that to feel that I was doing a credible job at it, and there were a couple of songs this week that I only played through a single time. (Which, admittedly, had as much to do with my not liking those songs very much; still, I did a decent job on that single playthrough!) So I’ve learned most of what I’m going to get out of Medium, I think: two note chords don’t hold much fear for me, at least at the speeds that Medium has me play them at.

Most, but not everything, because some of the songs definitely had their twists. There were a few odd three-note chords that the game threw at me, and there were more two note chords on the same fret than I’d previously been used to, most of which I actually tried to play as barre chords instead of using separate fingers to hold down the two strings.

And then there was Killing Loneliness, which had one section (the first or second bit, I can’t remember) that was by far the hardest thing I’d seen in training mode. It was reasonably long, moved reasonably quickly, and while the chords were (almost?) all two-note chords, the progression was such that you basically no choice but to play them as barre chords, even when the two notes were on different frets. Plus a bit of moving between strings, just to keep you on your toes. I was floored by it when I first saw it, but after going through it four or five times, it was pretty clear what the best approach was—it just happened to be an approach that I wasn’t used to taking! After another 10 or so goes, though, I was playing through it fairly solidly, and when I hit that section in the full song (it occurred fairly often, as it turned out), I managed to play it correctly live as well.

That felt really good: a nice bridge to what Hard is going to be like, I imagine. I also see what people mean when they complain about their wrist aching when learning barre chords, because my wrist hurt some after that song. And my fingertips continue to hurt, but it was manageable even this weekend, and I don’t expect to play longer stretches for the foreseeable future, so I’m over the worst there, I think. My back also hurt some: I think I was keeping pretty good posture, but the guitar is heavy enough for me to notice it, and the sofa I’m playing on doesn’t offer good support.

Actually, my body positioning is something I’ve been wondering about: I suspect that, as I play barre chords more, I’ll want to have the neck angled up more than I have been, and maybe I should shorten the strap a bit. My next door neighbor is a guitar teacher: at some point, I may ask her for a one-off lesson, for body positioning help and also for suggestions of exercises to play. (Chords, scales, etc.)

Only 20 songs left, and then on to Hard! Despite my progress this week, I won’t make it through all those songs next weekend, because we have a guest in town, and it wouldn’t shock me if I had three more weeks of Medium ahead of me. But the end of Medium is in sight, and the beginning of what I imagine will feel a lot more like real guitar playing. (I’m planning to buy an amp soon after I hit Hard.)

I was wondering how many people had been diving into Pro Guitar. The answer, judging from the leaderboards, seems to be “not many”: I’m actually in 724th place right now, which seems shockingly high to me. And my scores are a lot higher on Medium than they were on Easy, so I imagine Hard will be a similar jump: in fact, it looks to me right now that doing a good job on most of the songs on Hard would be enough to put me in the top 1%. (There are 284 people in the top 1%, so I’m comfortably within the top 3% already.) I’m assuming that means that there are 25,000–30,000 Pro Guitar controllers out there, though maybe there’s a good-sized population that doesn’t show up on the leaderboards? (You don’t need an account to show up there, though.) Who knows, maybe I’ll end up monitoring the Pro Guitar leaderboards the way I monitored Pro Keys. (I’m a little surprised to see that I’m still in 40th place on the latter.)

Not too much to say today. I was worried I wouldn’t have a lot of time to play this weekend—yesterday was a bit busy, and I participated in a podcast recording today—but I got a decent amount in today, making it through most of the Moderate songs. And the guitar continues to work well, so the cable was definitely the problem.

Some of which were surprisingly easy—I guess Walk of Life must be a lot harder on the higher difficulties? Though I can’t quite hear how; also, I’d never noticed before that some of the early chords in that song come in a touch late, I was glad the game didn’t try to force me to do that. Other songs were rather more difficult: I’m having to jump around a bit more, and sometimes chords are coming a little closer on each other’s tails.

Also, one of the songs made me play barre chords: while it only gave me two notes at a time, it alternated between the lowest two and highest two strings, so treating that as part of a single barre chord was clearly the way to go. Which didn’t go too badly, actually, but clearly it’s something I need to work on: by the end of that song, I wasn’t reliably holding down the notes in the middle of the chord, and I got the feeling that my left hand was working too hard.

My other random observation of the day: so far, I’m finding big rock endings super unsatisfying on the pro guitar—for whatever reason, the realism of the instrument rather destroys the illusion for me. Maybe that will get better as my guitar skills improve, however.

Anyways, I certainly have challenges waiting for me when I reach Hard, judging from how the barre chords and faster sections went today. Which is a good thing! And if Medium holds my interest through the higher difficulty tiers better than Easy did, that’s all to the good as well.