My guitar practice has gotten into a better rhythm than last time I talked about it. I’m not sure I’m practicing more, but I’m enjoying it more and feeling I’m getting more out of it. Basically, I’ve realized that I wasn’t getting as much as I could have out of the game’s “Recommended” list in Learn a Song mode – I’d been going through the songs there in a relatively superficial fashion, going quickly from one to the next. Which is fine to spend some of my time doing, but that’s what the game’s “Nonstop Mode” is for: a good way to spend 20–30 minutes, but not the best way to spend the majority of my practice time.

So now, when I’m going through the recommended songs, I dig into individual songs more. (At least most of the time.) Instead of playing through a song once, now my most typical experience is to play a song twice, dropping into Riff Repeater mode in some sections the second time, maybe spending 15 minutes on the song? And I’m liking that a lot more: it’s transformed the experience from “play a song badly and feel dissatisfied” to one where I feel like I’m getting better in some small way on each song I try.

I’m also doing one exercise that Joan suggested, though it’s too early to see results for that. And I’m not doing Session Mode as much, which is fine; I’ll come back to that later, but it’s okay for me to take a break now. I’m also not currently focusing too much on my favorite songs, but I imagine I’ll come back to that at some point as well, too.

Pictures from the April VGHVI Minecraft session:

I returned to the tunnel that I’d dug last month:

Returning to the tunnel

Lava in a mine

The previous end of the tunnel (I think)

And then I kept on going; after not too long, I hit some water:

Water floods the corridor

Getting a good look at the underground river

Building a glass passage under the river

I built a glass passage under that river and kept going. Eventually, I decided to dig up to see where I was; and again I hit water, this time flooding down from the surface. I didn’t take many pictures in the thick of things, unfortunately, but eventually I managed to block that off, I went sideways a bit and then dug up:

Digging up to the surface

My original chimney went into a lake, as it turned out, but fortunately I got lucky and my second one didn’t hit water. With a bit of work, I managed to build a glass enclosure around where my original chimney hit the lake bottom, so then both chimneys worked:

A chimney in the middle of the water

Looking around

After that, I went back to the city. We had a new participant, Tom; he was building a colored tower, so I took some pictures of that:

Tom’s colored tower

Working on the tower

Looking down into the center of the tower

And Miranda was continuing to improve the village that we’d discovered maybe half a year ago:

Returning to the village

Inside the library, with one of the villagers keeping track of me

Out on the dock

A villager is stuck

The building on the other side of the dock

A view from the roof

Starting to extend one of the buildings

Then I traveled back to the city (encountering one interesting glitch along the way), and took pictures of the tower that Pat had finished:

A cube of lava and tunnels in the water

Pat’s finished tower

The top of the tower

A view from higher up

Not a lot to say here; I’ve been practicing regularly, no huge insights or anything. Though I’ve been feeling a little less energetic than I had been in the past, both about learning guitar and learning Japanese; and playing into that is the fact that I’ve been really enjoying a programming project I’ve been working on at home for the last couple of weeks. I think I still want to keep on playing guitar regularly, but I might shift into more of a maintenance mode – put in three or four hours each weekend, but not focusing particularly on actively improving in any particular way? We’ll see.

There wasn’t a lot to take pictures of in the March Minecraft session: Miranda couldn’t be there, so she wasn’t building, Dan was still traveling in a straight line, and we mostly talked.

While talking, I decided to follow Dan’s lead and also travel in a straight line; I just did it underground, coming out of the very first tunnels we dug back in 2010:

The start of my tunnel

I hit a cave fairly early on:

Breaking into a cave

The bottom of the cave

Except that it wasn’t a cave, as I discovered when I went inside:

Looking up

I think that’s something that Jonathan blew up years ago; as you can see above, it’s a huge pit under one corner of our big train track loop.

Continuing on, I ran into another cave, this one a real cave and a fairly interesting one:

Water and lava

An underground river

One end of the river

A lava pool at the end

A mine shaft above

I took more pictures of the mineshaft, but honestly: those all look kind of the same. And I ran into two or three more caves; pleasant enough, but nothing super distinctive, here are the best of the pictures.

Lava, redstone, and diamond

A zombie

My passage above another cave

An interesting experiment, but I kind of think I won’t continue it this month?

Pictures from the February Minecraft session:

Somebody built a tall pole next to my swamp house

Oh, so that’s where that tower is

But then Dan asked us if any of us had seen a procedurally-generated temple before, so I teleported to him:

New to me, too!

Entering the temple

Alcoves on the side

Another door on the outside

And then, when I looked up, there was a path overhead; it turns out that he’d been building that for a few month. So I decided to follow it back.

A path in the sky

Ocean and sand

Ocean peaks

Horses

An island at dusk

Lava at night

A village in the distance

Passing over another village

Cutting through a mountain

I have more pictures; it was a long trip back! Eventually, I reached the end of the path; it was somewhere familiar, though I don’t think I could get there from the main city without guidance. So I wandered back from there.

The end of the road

A river canyon

An arch over water

While I was doing this, Miranda was continuing her renovation of a village we’d discovered several months back. I only took a few pictures near the end, but I think she was working on houses on the dock:

A house next to water

The other side of the dock

And eventually I made it home:

Back at last

Not a lot to report on the Rocksmith front; I’ve been mostly plugging away as I had been. I did finish all the main Session Mode missions this weekend, which is super cool; and I think I’m sounding noticeably better now than I was when I started Session Mode? At least with the right band; there’s a blues one (blues scale, 12-bar blues chord progressions) that I’m getting along well with. And I’m not sure why the game took so long to nudge me towards shifting positions and zooming out, but now I’ve learned how to do that within the Session Mode interface; it’ll be very helpful getting liberated from playing scales in root position.

Pictures from the January Minecraft session:

First, the standard flying around, looking at random stuff:

A cave under some tracks

A glass spike I hadn’t noticed before

The top of the spike, in snow

The spike is attached to Dan’s glass structure in the lagoon

The cows and chickens are still there

A lit corner created by changes in terrain algorithms. (The corner, that is: the lights I added a year or two ago.)

A building somebody built years ago.

Glitch #1

Glitch #2

Glitch #3

A curtain of rain

Patrick was continuing work on the spire he’d started last time:

Extending the spire

A closeup view of the top

Patrick on a platform

And Miranda continued improving the decor in the village we’d discovered a few months back:

Miranda reworking the village

Colored glass windows

A top view of the church

A villager poses for a picture

A villager inspects the inside

Looking up through the inside

Different textures on the building next door

Inside a house

An aerial view of the house

Reworking a column

Out by the water

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