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!

The new piece this week was Call Me. Fun to play; at first, the game said I wasn’t doing very well, though. This sometimes happens with power chords, and I think the problem here was exacerbated by the fact that the chord wasn’t repeated, giving the game fewer chances to do its note detection; after playing around with it for a while, I decided that the game was actually accurately reporting that I sometimes was only strumming two of the strings instead of three. So, nice to have improved my playing that way, I only wish the game’s feedback had been a bit more direct.

I’ve (somewhat accidentally) unlocked master mode in a few more songs; I ran into The Guns of Brixton in an encore on Saturday, flubbing it completely, so I spent a bit more time with that song over the weekend. It points out something that sometimes happens with Rocksmith: the song has a basic repeated chord structure, but in some sections you only play partial chords, and which notes you play is pretty random. Also, there are a couple of basic strumming patterns, and which pattern shows up at a given time is similarly random. And there’s a real tension between that and playing the song from memory—I can easily play something from memory that will sound correct, but whether I happen to play exactly what the game expects is quite a bit more random. The game is forgiving, so if I want to maximize my score I can strum extra times and always play full chords, which will give me full points even if the game omits some of the strums or some of the notes of the chords, but doing that lessens the texture of the songs.

Fortunately, I’m not too score driven, so I don’t mind missing a few points while I explore songs. But it’s also probably just as well, given my temperament, that there are lots of songs where memorizing the whole thing is more reasonable.

Other than that, the standard stuff—a couple of events, which led to some focused practice on a few of the songs; more Tom Sawyer arpeggio practice; and a few playthroughs of some of my favorite songs.

It was a three-day weekend, but I somewhat uncharacteristically only practiced guitar on two of them. Part of that was having a violin recital coming up: I needed to practice piano for that, and we had a rehearsal for the Bach Double. Some of that was wanting to leave a bit of time to burn down my list of one-off things. And some of it was wanting to relax and hang out with Liesl and Miranda. (E.g. we played a bit of Galaxy Trucker today, and made a more complex dinner than normal.)

Still, I did get in good practice on two of those days. Nothing huge to report: I’m sticking with my mix of doing one event a day (to go through a random mix of old songs, plus some new songs if I’ve bought any over the last week or two) plus some focused practice (that Tom Sawyer arpeggio section) and some of my other favorite songs (went back to More Than a Feeling for a while and got the solo up to 100%). A very pleasant (and, I think, productive) way to spend time.

The game threw the rest of the Rush songs at me this weekend: Limelight, Red Barchetta, and YYZ. Generally on the hard side for me, though some of the chords were familiar from Subdivisions and Tom Sawyer. All good stuff, but I think right now focusing on Subdivisions as a song and on the arpeggios in Tom Sawyer is enough Rush for me; maybe the next time they come around I’ll do better. (Subdivisions is quite tractable; Tom Sawyer will require more practice, but it’s good practice.)

They released a Maroon 5 pack this week; I got Misery and Harder to Breathe, and enjoyed both of them. Good chord practice in the former, and the latter is pleasantly funky.

The other thing that’s going on musically is that there’s another violin recital coming up soon. The main new piece for me is the Bach Double; I like it a lot, and one of the other students playing it came over today to practice it with Miranda and me. Good stuff, it sounded okay when we started and pretty good by the end.

We didn’t have a Minecraft night in March, because I was on vacation, but we did have one in April. It actually ended up being only Miranda and me, but that was just fine, because we’d started a building project in February, so we wanted to continue with that.

Our cow guard stands watch

We’d left things with a couple of hallways, a living room, a workroom, some stairs up to the roof, and a whole lot of rock to carve out. Some of that rock is on this level; there’s room for at least one more floor above, and of course lots of room below. But we decided to start carving out more space on the first level, starting from the entrance: it’s a fair amount of walking from there to the first room.

We didn’t want a big room by the entrance, but we decided to have a nice little nook there to sit in, plus some coat hooks. (Almost all Miranda’s design here, I just do the broad carving.)

Some new windows by the front door

The entrance nook

The nook, hallway, and stairs

After that, we started work on a much larger room. It’s behind the workshop and the living room; I honestly can’t remember exactly what we planned for it (it’s not done yet), but knowing us, it’s probably mostly going to be a library? It connects to the hallway and to the living room; there’s also one quite large niche at the end of it with a window overlooking the temple. (We’re trying to fit fairly well into the existing exterior shape of the mountain, and it happened to bulge out there.)

Putting a window from the hallway into the new room

A dangerous criminal is behind bars

The outside window in the new room

Looking down at the temple from that window

Starting work on the floor

The door between the new room and the living room

The other side of that door, with some pictures and shelves added.

At this point, we got distracted because Miranda wanted to set off fireworks. So she did! Some outside, up on the roof, and some inside the new room, because, well, why not?

Outside fireworks 1

Outside fireworks 2

Outside fireworks 3

Outside fireworks 4

Outside fireworks 5

Outside fireworks 6

Inside fireworks 1

Inside fireworks 2

I’ve hit the Rush portion of my song list in Rocksmith, clearly: the game had me play Subdivisions last week, Tom Sawyer this week, and I see both Red Barchetta and Limelight in the next event. Subdivisions was great because its arpeggio section was good practice for me; the arpeggio section in Tom Sawyer uses some of the same chords but throws in a few more, as it turns out. Which is also great: there’s enough common ground between the two songs for me to be able to start to make sense of Tom Sawyer, but it’s definitely a stretch for my current abilities. So after I’d gotten to where I could play the song well enough to qualify for the event, I went back to that section to work on it in practice mode; I returned to it again on Sunday and even on Monday morning (I took the morning off from work), a good choice.

I can’t remember too much about the events other than that; but I have been playing songs outside of events more and more often these days. Sometimes I’m returning to the same songs, often trying to learn multiple guitar parts from them (More Than a Feeling, Anna Molly, Six AM Salvation); sometimes I’m just dipping into fun stuff. Sometimes I focus on sections in riff repeater mode, sometimes I just play through the whole thing.

This morning I decided to try to unlock all of the pedals, so I went to look at what on-disc songs I hadn’t gotten 70,000 points on. There were a few, and rather than bang my head against them, I decided to try out alternate parts to unlock the pedals that way. And that was an interesting experience on itself: unsurprisingly, it turns out that songs that I’d been having trouble with the main part on are also tricky (but more manageable) on the other parts, so I got some good practice with fairly fast plucking and pull-offs.

After doing that, though, I got to where I’d gotten 70,000 parts on at least one part of all songs except for The Star-Spangled Banner; I started working on the latter and then I realized that it wasn’t showing me a tone to unlock! So I looked more closely and realized that, on some songs, there’s an alternate part that unlocks a different tone than the main part does. So I guess that’s what I’ll work on next week; certainly my experiences with trying out alternate parts have been almost universally positive. Heck, maybe after that I’ll go through all of the alternate parts that I haven’t tried yet.

I like where my practice is going these days: playing through events some to give me randomness, working on a few specific songs to get better at them, working on arpeggios specifically to try to improve my skills there, and also trying to explore more broadly. This adds up to a very pleasant way to spend my weekends.