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…

Rocksmith 2014 showed up this week, so I played it on Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday. But I ended up having enough to say about it that I wrote about it on my main blog rather than here, so: Rocksmith 2014 first impressions!

One thing that I didn’t mention there: I’m enjoying the songs in game quite a bit, which I wasn’t entirely sure would be the case going in. Yay for more Rush and Boston (are we going to get the rest of that album as DLC?), but also yay for random songs that I’m less familiar with. I’m still worried that there’s going to be a bit more metal than I can like, but the game gives me enough options to skip songs that I’m not in the mood for that that will be fine; between both games plus DLC I’m certainly not lacking in options to play…

Not much to report for the last couple of weeks; the one new song I’ve gotten is Wish You Were Here, which has the distinction of being a little harder than it seems and causing my hand to hurt. Both, I think, caused by its copious use of inverted power chords (or whatever you call them—like power chords but with a fourth on the bottom instead of fifth), I’m probably gripping too tightly and putting too much pressure on my pinky?

And I’ve been playing a bit of guitar outside of Rocksmith, too, trying to learn Itsumo Nando Demo. Memorizing it is a little harder than I somehow think it should be, but tractable.

But really the most distinctive aspect of this week is that it’s the end of this iteration of Rocksmith practice: Rocksmith 2014 is coming out on Tuesday. I’m curious to see what improvements they’ve done; sounds like mostly usability improvements, which is fine with me. And having more songs to play is always welcome, of course.

Pictures from the September VGHVI Minecraft session:

Miranda decided to turn the upstairs room that wasn’t a stable into a greenhouse. We didn’t want to put glass everywhere, but we put glass at the end:

Replacing the wall at the end with glass

Outside view of the glass

Then she started planting:

Starting work on the bed for the plants

The first version of the plant bed is complete

The first plants are added

That was a single-row version, but she expanded it to two rows with water between:

Adding water for the plants

Two rows of plants

Flowers at the end

It took a while for the pumpkin and melon to grow

Roger, meanwhile, was hard at work at his cathedral; that thing is going to be massive.

Roger working in the snow

An arch of the cathedral

Chipping excess blocks away from the arch

And Dan was working on his huge glass structure in a bay:

The glass continues to grow

Inside the glass

Miranda and I thought it would be a good place play hide and seek, at least at night

Closeup view of lava

Daytime view

I mostly just wandered around; the only building I did was helping with getting the glass front of the greenhouse in place.

Staying out of the snow

A loading error

Saying hello to my horse

Dan wandered by our house and Miranda made a stable for him, so he tamed a horse as well:

Dan taming a horse

Success!

Horse armor

It’s been a month since I gave a guitar status update, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been playing Rocksmith: it’s just that I didn’t have anything particular to write about. (Though there was one weekend day where I didn’t practice guitar because we spent the afternoon singing in Rock Band 3 instead.) I was basically just going through the new DLC that I downloaded; some was quite good (the songs from The Strokes and My Chemical Romance in particular), some was pretty boring to play (funk is nice to listen to and probably fun enough on bass but not so great on guitar), and Love Hurts was fascinating enough that I think I’ll write about it on my main blog.

But now I’ve finally played those enough that the game has decided to go back to the regular rotation. I’ve already started being a little more selective in what to play, ejecting songs from events if I don’t think I’ll enjoy / learn much from them, and I plan to do that more. And I plan to get back to practicing specific songs (and even sections of songs) instead of just going through events.

And I might learn a few more songs outside of the game: in particular, I’m thinking this arrangement of Itsumo Nando Demo might be worth learning.

Of course, it doesn’t make much sense to talk too much about my plans, because Rocksmith 2014 will comes out in just over two weeks, and once that’s out I’ll be spending my weekends diving into what’s new there…

It’s a three day weekend, and I played Rocksmith all three days. I’d downloaded a fair number of new songs this week: three-packs from The Strokes and My Chemical Romance, and several individual songs from other artists, something like 12 in total? And I’m definitely glad I had something new to play, I enjoyed the new songs more than I expected, and in particular those two three-packs were both good choices.

Some of the individual songs were a little boring, though (actually, if I’m remembering correctly, one of the songs from The Strokes fell into that bucket, too), so the flip side is that there’s a reason why I hadn’t bought these songs until now: I’m sure that there’s other DLC that I would enjoy if I gave it a try, but my success ratio is getting lower. So I doubt I’ll buy any more DLC until Rocksmith 2014 comes out; but I’m really looking forward to that, partly to get a lot of new songs and partly because I hope the game experience will improve somewhat.

I spent most of the August Minecraft session wandering around the cavern underneath the house. I was lost a fair amount of that time, but I did at least find a path from the stairs to the closest exit:

At the bottom of the stairs

Step 1 of the path

Step 2 of the path

Step 3 of the path

Step 4 of the path

Step 5 of the path

At the exit

And some random pictures from my other wandering:

Signs that we’d explored the cavern before

A bat flying around

Some cows near another exit

A random city picture

Watching the sunset from the alcove

Roger was working on his cathedral; I took my horse on a trip to visit him.

Roger contemplates the cathedral

My horse contemplates the cathedral

Roger decided the cathedral was too short, so he extended its base:

Extending the cathedral

A closer view of the extension

The wall between the pillars has been torn down

That cathedral is really large, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’ll be putting on the finishing touches a year from now.

While I was out with my horse, Miranda was making improvements in the stable:

More stalls, and some hay bales

She also put in a sofa in the alcove for better viewing:

Sofa in the alcove

Watching the sunset from the alcove

She wasn’t there for the first half of the session, though, so she didn’t get as much done as she normally does; I think next she wants to work on the other upstairs room, but she hasn’t worked out the details yet.

Contemplating her next steps