I didn’t spend a huge amount of time playing guitar this week; though we did go to an Arlo Guthrie concert on Thursday which was surprisingly good. (And unsurprisingly full of old hippies, even Liesl and I were among the youngest people there, let alone Miranda.) Lots of his dad’s songs, lots of his songs, lots of songs by other people he met when growing up; I ordered a couple of song books after the concert, maybe I’ll try to learn some of them.

I’ve hit an arpeggio-heavy bit of the Rocksmith on-disc songs; still hard, but I’m doing a little better than the last time I hit those songs. So: progress, yay. No new songs this week; I downloaded Get Free, but I haven’t played it yet.

The February VGHVI Minecraft session was a small one: Miranda and I were the only people building, though one or two other people dropped in to chat. As is my wont, I started by flying around taking pictures; this time, a window in the ground caught my eye:

What’s that window doing on the bottom of that pit?

That window actually showed a view into the very first mine complex that we built in this world, albeit in a later room; I didn’t take any pictures of that room, but I did wander into the library across from it, and ran into a surprise:

Oh, hello there!

I see you peeking around the corner

Sorry, I didn’t mean to interfere with your browsing

After that, I flew around a bit; on a cliff wall near the temple complex, I ran into some more cows:

Cliff-dwelling cows

And that alcove between them caught my eye:

Alcove in cliff wall

So I decided to start digging, for the first time in ages, and Miranda decided to join me:

Miranda and I start digging

We started with a corridor going into the cliff and then going out to the left, where the cliff ends (just beyond the left cow): we put in a sitting room there, with a nicely furnished couch and bookshelves. And a big window, looking out on the temple complex.

The view out over the temple area

A lamp next to the couch

A door on the other side of the window

Bookshelves in the back of the room

That door on the outside leads to a natural set of stairs up to a roof area, so I went out there to explore a bit:

The window from the outside

The view from the roof, showing the towers

Wandering around up there a bit, I decided that we could build a set of internal stairs leading up to the roof as well, so we did that next. (With our traditional roles of me laying out the basic geometry and Miranda making it habitable.)

Working on the stairs

The view from the roof at night

The view of the temple complex through the window at night

The finished sitting room, including carpet

We left a good-sized chunk of space between the sitting room and the stairs; we decided to turn that into a workroom.

Carving out the workroom

Installing some furniture

More furniture and decorations next to one of the doors

Putting in a gate and flooring

That made a good start on the house; time to give it a name.

Cows. They’re remarkable cows.

But there’s still a lot to do! There’s a fair amount of space within the cliff on the level that we’re on, we just have to decide how to use it; there’s also room for at least one story above us, possibly for two of them. I’m sure we’ll get back to that this month.

I’d been on vacation, so no guitar for a couple of weeks, but I got back on Saturday, and spent several hours on Sunday playing Rocksmith. Which was fun, I’d definitely missed playing guitar over break!

I bought all three of the songs on the latest bit of Rocksmith DLC: Have You Ever Seen the Rain?, Ballroom Blitz, and Southbound. I’d played the former in Rock Band 3, and found it pleasant enough; it’s similarly pleasant in Rocksmith, though there’s not a lot to do, it’s all chords, with the only interesting aspect being a moving bass line in one section. (Hmm, and also that, on most of the C chords in the song, Rocksmith throws in a G on the bottom E string.) Ballroom Blitz was mostly straightforward but also quite fine, I’m looking forward to playing that again. And Southbound seems like a reasonable challenge for me right now.

Lots of string bending this week: some in Southbound, and some in the on-disc songs the game threw at me. Which I can still feel slightly in my fingers, I can use the practice!

Rocksmith put out a three-pack by The Cure this week; I got it, good stuff in it. Other than that, not much to report: I’m starting to get used to Cult of Personality (and I’m doing okay with the fingering that Rocksmith suggests), but it’s definitely not the easiest piece in the world. I’ve played that song enough times now that the game is going back to a standard rotation instead of throwing it at me every event, though. (And it only threw the new Cure songs at me two or three times, presumably because they were easy enough that that was all I needed to get to 90,000 points?)

I’m thinking I should probably change up my practicing a little bit: still do at least one event a weekend, to get random songs thrown at me, but also try to master one new song, so I don’t end up getting to where I can do a half-assed job at everything? We’ll see. I might also try going through other parts a little more systematically, in general I enjoy it when I see those in the double encores.

Nothing out of the normal to report this week. I bought one new piece of DLC for Rocksmith: Cult of Personality, its riff is a little trickier than I expected, and Rocksmith fingers it in a quite different way than Rock Band 3 did. Not sure which way I prefer yet. And I’ve finally played all of the DLC I bought other than that song enough times that I’m seeing on-disc content in events again; nice to see those songs again.

I get the feeling I’ve gotten better after my journey through the DLC. And I’m continuing to somewhat inadvertently unlock Master mode: I did that on Plug In Baby yesterday (fun with scales!), and I discovered that I unlocked it on Surf Hell some time ago and forgot about that. So I spent a little time today going through old mastered songs again, so they don’t get too rusty.

The violin recital that I was doing piano accompaniment for happened on Friday; it was fun, but I’m glad to have it over. I didn’t do a great job, but hopefully I did a good enough job that I didn’t distract from the kids’ playing.

Guitar wise, songs are definitely getting harder at the difficult level I’m at now; I’m generally only given four or five songs in my set, but it may well take me two hours to get to where I qualify. I’m not unhappy that I got that Rush 5-pack, but all of those songs are pretty trick. Still, they’re all rewarding, too. And other songs are fun; e.g. today I played Anna Molly and Hit Me with Your Best Shot, both of which are mostly chord progressions that are interesting enough to not be boring and that are also fun, combined with enough single note stuff to keep me on my toes. I do hope the game starts including on-disc songs in the mix again soon; not sure what the trigger will be for that. (Maybe the total number of times I’ve seen a song in an event?)

A busy weekend (we went to a concert this afternoon, the Brentano String Quartet performing works by Haydn, Bartok, Purcell, and Beethoven), so not as much Rocksmith as normal. But I did manage to go through a couple of events, one of which took quite a while because it threw me two Rush songs at about the 90,000 level. (I still have a ways to go to get the arpeggios right on Tom Sawyer.) From this week’s DLC I bought Anna Molly, which I quite enjoyed going through.

I’ve probably spent more practice time this week on the piano, actually, practicing for accompanying the Suzuki violin recital. We had the rehearsal on Friday; I was a little worse than I would have liked, but I did well enough on the first movement of the Vivaldi, and was pleased to learn that nobody was playing the third movement of the Vivaldi after all. That concert is this coming Friday; glad to be doing it, but I’ll be glad to have it over with as well.

I didn’t practice guitar at all in the middle of the week; I can’t quite remember why in retrospect, other than that I was a little busy and was spending some time practicing piano for the recital. Which is going okay; I still don’t like the arrangement of the Vivaldi pieces, but I’ll do a competent job at one of them and may get good enough to do a competent job at the other.

I did play a bunch of Rocksmith this weekend, though; my Japanese teacher had to cancel this week’s lesson, which freed up a noticeable amount of time. The game is still throwing an exclusive diet of DLC at me; I think that will change soon (it’s frequently asking me to get 90,000 points, which isn’t too out-of-line with where I was on the on-disc content), but I’ve been thinking that for a while, so who knows. Fortunately, I like all the DLC I got; I wish I weren’t seeing the same pieces quite so frequently, but I can deal with that. (And I’m on the edge of thinking it’s a bit of an overdose of Rush, but I can deal with that, too!)

Last week, I alleged that Rock Band 3 throws more chord variations at you during London Calling than Rocksmith does; I played through that song today, and I now no longer think that’s the case, I think it’s actually throwing the same chords at you, just on different strings. Interesting seeing the difference. (There’s definitely a difference in More Than a Feeling, though.)

I’ve played enough events now to unlock all the guitars, which prompted the game to give me a bit of a graduation speech. So I decided to look at the achievements; I had all the non-bass ones except for two that I can get any time I want and the ones for the games. I used that as an excuse to give most of the games a try; I got the achievements on the games for scales and chords, the other games will take more work. I’m still not a huge fan of the games, but they’re mostly teaching useful skills, so I’ll probably try to nibble away at those? (I seem to be in an achievement completionist mode these days: I’m working on getting all of the achievements in Mark of the Ninja, too.) I haven’t yet unlocked all of the pedals and tones; I assume the latter drives the former, and I’ll get the latter as I keep on progressing through the on-disc content.

A lot of guitar playing this week. I think I played Rocksmith two weekday evenings this week, and I played it either two or three days of the three-day weekend, and I got together with Joan to play guitar as well. And we sounded surprisingly non-horrible! She had me look up “12-bar blues”, so I watched a video about that (and then searched some more and got more confused, so I’m glad I started out with that one); that gave me something to work off of, and she played on top of that up at the twelfth fret. Which was a lot of fun, and something I’m not used to (my music background is classical, so improvisation is pretty foreign to me); good times.

As to Rocksmith, I’ve been going through DLC all week, both the songs I’d downloaded the previous week and the Clash three-pack that came out this week. (I hadn’t intentionally been focusing on DLC, but the game’s leveling up algorithm decided that that was what was appropriate to throw at me.) By now I’ve gone through all of those songs at least once, some of them twice, and I continue to think that they are a good, varied mix: e.g. this morning’s set was This Love, Tom Sawyer, Black Magic Woman, and Paris, and while I won’t claim that that’s the most coherent set of all time, I enjoyed playing each of the songs.

Some of the songs were ones I’d played on Rock Band 3 as well; interesting comparing the different versions. Rock Band 3 puts multiple parts together, and doesn’t expose string bending (or harmonics, as was noticeable in More Than a Feeling), but there are differences beyond that: Rocksmith uses two-note chords in More Than a Feeling while Rock Band 3 uses four-note chords, and some of the chord variants that Rock Band 3 has in London Calling aren’t there in Rocksmith. And I’m sure there are similar differences in the other direction, too. What’s a little more frustrating was finding the arpeggiation part in More Than a Feeling in Rocksmith: it’s there if you choose the appropriate guitar part, but when you’re playing at less than 100%, they don’t just remove notes, they change the timing. So that was pretty annoying: it was a part I knew how to play, yet the game was telling me I was doing the wrong thing when actually it was giving me the wrong notes! Eventually, though, I got good enough at what it was asking me to do to get those sections to 100% difficulty, at which point it gave me the correct notes.

(It would seem that I’m not the only person playing Rock Band less, because they just announced that they’ll stop releasing weekly DLC in a month and a half. No huge surprise—the Blitz rereleases mean that they effectively haven’t been releasing new DLC for much of the last month already—but a bit sad none the less.)

I had a string break today for the first time since I got the SG; I did buy an extra set of strings when I got the guitar, but the store didn’t have Gibson strings around, so they sold me some D’Addario strings instead. Which are fine, but my first reaction is that they’re a bit bright; I think I’ll try Gibson strings the next time I replace the new strings. Which raises the question of which type; I’ll start with the “Special Alloy Humbucker Guitar Strings”, but who knows what actually came on the guitar. (The web page for the guitar I have just says .010–.046, but it doesn’t specify the strings beyond that.)

The other thing I’ve been doing musically is practicing piano for the violin recital. Mostly pleasant enough, though I really am not thrilled with the arrangement for the Vivaldi pieces; I should probably go through those two most days between now and the recital, to at least try to get them sounding good.

Pictures from the January 2013 VGHVI Minecraft session; we’ve been doing this for more than two years now!

First, some pictures taken while flying around the world looking at things:

A pig inside the fire temple

A duck in front of the nether portal

A snowy island with duck and pig

Including chunk edge glitches, which always fascinate me:

Crevasse with mine

The view of that crevasse from the other direction, showing the abrupt edge against the water

A cliff at the edge of the water

A crevasse with pigs on the side and water along the bottom

Further down the crevasse, as the grass on the side gives way to trees

Strange water behavior in a crevasse

Some of our constructions had changed since the last time I looked at them:

Somebody added pictures to Miranda’s CST protest sign

There had been an explosion in the nether library

Roger was continuing his work on the foundation of his church; that’s going to be a big project!

Working on the church foundation

The church foundation is starting to fill out

And when I teleported to Dan, at first I couldn’t tell what he was doing, but it turns out that he was working on an enormous tower:

Dan working inside the base of the tower

Looking up through the darkness

Looking up in the daytime

The outside of the tower

Looking down the middle of the tower

A cloud passes through the tower

Miranda worked some on a building (that I think she’d started before, though I could be wrong), and then built an enormous tree next to the building:

Miranda examines the building

Books and a bed

The roof of the building

Starting work on the tree

A view of the tree and the building from above

Looking out upon snowy hills

Adding scaffolding and greenery to the tree

The bottom of the tree stairs

Climbing up the stairs

Looking out from the stairs

The top of the tree