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

We’re done with summer visitors, so I got back to Rocksmith this weekend. Which started off by throwing more Rush at me: YYZ and Red Barchetta this time. And a couple of other songs, too, maybe My Sharona and I Miss You? Pretty tough group; I had a target of 90,000 on most but not all of them. And I hit my target on some and missed it on some, but on the whole I felt like I was doing better than the last time I saw those songs, and I got a little better at them while practicing that day.

Then, that evening, instead of watching Deep Space 9, Miranda was in the mood for playing Rock Band 3. So we did that, for the first time in a while, and it was (of course) super fun! Miranda on vocals, me on (fake) guitar, Liesl on (fake) bass, except that one song in I pulled out the mic stands, and Liesl and I ended up singing along as well. (And doing better than we used to do when playing + singing in that song.) Really glad we did that. And Miranda is a Rush fan, so we ended up continuing that theme, singing another couple of Rush songs.

I can’t remember what I played on Rocksmith on Sunday (I should have written this up then!), but it was back to a noticeably easier level. So I went through the event rather more quickly, and then went through my current standard-ish set of songs.

Good weekend, glad to be getting back in the groove.

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