I continued my tour through Tier 4 this week:

• Foolin’: Not my style of music, but interesting enough to play.
• Killing Loneliness: interesting enough variant chords and arpeggiation; something weird going on with the tuning (dropped D but something else beyond that) so I couldn’t play plugged in, which was sad.
• Plush: pleasant chord variants, the arpeggiated bit was a bit hard for me, I enjoyed listening to those chord variants when plugged in.
• My Sharona: pleasant repetitive bassy part that taught me to lift my left hand to prevent notes from sounding; first solo was fun enough, second way too hard/long.
• Misery Business: fun single note runs, reasonably fun dropped D power chords, occasional quite odd chords mixed in there, half of which I could sometimes get. Unfortunately, the whole song seemed like it was tuned a half step low, so I couldn’t play it plugged in.

So: no revelations, nothing I’m planning to come back to regularly, but I’m happy to have gone through those songs. A bit of a pity that two of the songs were more unusally tuned than normal; ah well.

Which leaves me with only two songs and I’ll be done with Tier 4! Sir Duke and Humanoid, specifically; I was tempted to just finish the tier this weekend, but I had just enough errands to run on Sunday that I didn’t want to take a chance and squeeze in two more songs. Next, weekend, though! At least I hope so—I’ll be busy all day Saturday, but I should have time on Sunday. Though on Saturday I hopefully will have a chance to play Rock Band with Dan Apczynski and Kirk Hamilton, which I’m really looking forward to; I’m very curious what the game will sound like with good singers and with a plugged in guitar and bass. And I’m looking forward to trying out some of Dan’s guitars, I’m thinking it’s time for me to buy a better guitar to play with.

Liesl and I also finally got caught up on our DLC backlog on Sunday night: we went through maybe 35 songs, many of which were quite good. It’s enough of a blur that I don’t have specific recommendations to make here, but definitely a good way to take advantage of the fact that Miranda is out of town so we didn’t have to worry about keeping her awake.

It was a busy weekend (we were doing other things on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons), but I did manage to find an hour and a half or so to practice guitar. And I actually went through a couple of new songs then (as well as my normal practice of older songs), though admittedly the fact I went through two was for bad reasons: the first song, Before I Forget, was the sort of metal that I dislike enough that, given that I got three stars on it the first time through, I didn’t feel compelled to play it through a second time. Lots of fast boring notes at the start, sometimes single notes and sometimes dropped D power chords; the rest was stuff that I’m better at playing (otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten three stars!) but not stuff I enjoy listening to more.

The other song, Here I Go Again, was more pleasant: certainly not one of my favorite songs on the disc, but I didn’t mind it. The solo was way too hard for me, but also super short; I managed to maintain good streaks through the rest of it, leading to me (rather to my surprise) hitting #74 on the leaderboard. (And that only took, I think, three playthroughs?)

I think that’s ten songs down on Tier 4, and seven left? I won’t exactly say that the end of the tier is in sight, and I still think there’s a decent chance that I’ll hit a Tier 4 song that I can’t get three stars on without more practice than I want to put in right now, but for now I’m enjoying my progress.

I picked up Ni No Kuni yesterday for the first time in a while. For two weekends, I’d been too busy to play it; last weekend, I wasn’t so busy, but I was catching up on other stuff; and I’m busy this upcoming weekend. So I figured I should play it mid-week.

Upon starting it back up, I left the town I’d been in, and traveled to the next dungeon. It was dragon-themed, and started off looking puzzle-ish, with flames blocking one route and another route having a locked door. So I went in the third direction.

At which point I ran into tough monsters, and poison floors; these combined to cause me to act defensively in combat, and for me to worry about running out of magic. I didn’t take various branches of the dongeon, because they were covered with poison and I didn’t think they contained anything crucial (just chests with bonus stuff); I did reach a room that let me turn off some of the flames. So, with difficulty, I made it back to the entrance, where I could save and recharge.

What I couldn’t do was advance: the locked door was still locked, and I’d only turned off half the flames. So I guess I needed to do more exploring in that first direction; at the time, I assumed I should go down some of the poison branches, but now I’m thinking I should have used a spell to let me float over some pressure-sensitive plates in the room where I turned off the fire. In fact, now that I type this, I should have used a spell to let me float over the poison floors; silly me. (Maybe I would have thought of that if I’d been playing more regularly.)

But, ultimately, I’m going to stick with the lesson I took out of that hour and a half of play: this game is not for me. I don’t like JRPG’s, my Japanese isn’t good enough for me to enjoy the narrative (and I strongly suspect the narrative isn’t that good), and if my goal is to learn Japanese, there are much more effective ways for me to spend my time. No regrets about ordering the game and playing through the beginning, but I should have put it down some time ago, and have done so now.

I didn’t play any Rock Band the previous two weeks, because I was too busy practicing piano for Miranda’s violin recital. That’s over now, though (and it went well), so: back to guitar!

I did a little more review than normal on Saturday; fortunately, I wasn’t too rusty. And my triplet practice is paying off, I did noticeably better on Something Bigger, Something Brighter than in previous weeks! The new song I tried that day was Portions for Foxes; it was in a dropped D tuning, which normally I don’t like, but that’s largely because I associate it with metal power chords. (I have nothing against power chords, my complaint is with the metal part of that association, though I actually find power chords less enjoyable to play in a dropped D tuning.) This time, the chords were all over the place, including chords that included open bottom strings where that wouldn’t have made sense otherwise; worked well. And it was a good challenge level in general. I don’t plan to return to the piece, if for no other reason than that my guitar has a hard enough time staying in tune even when I’m not changing the tuning, but I’m glad I went through it.

Today I learned Fly by Night. Which took maybe ten tries (I’m not sure) before I got the third star? It didn’t feel that hard, and didn’t sound that bad when I played it plugged in; I think what was going on there was more that the song fairly regularly threw isolated chords at me that I missed (in some cases because the controller has a harder time detecting them, e.g. when I play an A chord one of the strings frequently registers as first fret), so even when I’m hitting most of the notes I almost never built up a streak. But I kept at it, and eventually managed to get that third star. Still, it took long enough that I decided two songs was enough for the weekend.

Not many pictures this month: people either weren’t doing much building or weren’t telling me about it. First, a couple of shots of older scenes:

A deep cave with a waterfall going down into it

Looking down from the mossy tower

Dogs inside a house

Speaking of animals, Jonathan was spawning cats and kittens, here are some pictures:

Cat by a tree

Jonathan with cats

Cat and kitten in snow

Miranda and I decided to return to the cave that we dug out in the very first VGHVI Minecraft session back a year and a half ago. First, a picture from the door to the cave:

Moon through cave entrance

I dug out an alcove on one side, with a magic library in it:

Working on a library

Putting an alcove in the back

And Miranda built a somewhat more elaborate set of rooms on the other side:

Rooms with hearth

Sleeping alcove

You can tell that we both like libraries

Still chipping away: I didn’t make a lot of progress this weekend, but a little progress is better than nothing. We went back to the pig city, and told the king about the missing staff and the graffiti in the ghost valley. He told us that the graffiti was associated with pirates near a jungle village, and gave us a passport that would cause the villagers to grant us entry. And he also taught us a teleport spell so we could return to cities we’d previously visited; I’m not currently planning to do that, but I’m glad it’s an option.

I wasn’t sure where the jungle city was, and I didn’t get an arrow on my map, but I figured heading for the boat might work, and sure enough, once I got on the boat, the map did tell me where to go. So I sailed there; there was some drama going on with a religious artifact (some stones used in a festival?) and a girl were both missing. But both showed up quickly, I’m not sure what was going on with that. We were told to go north to find the pirates; that’s where I stopped.

I’m still mostly making sure I don’t do an awful job as accompanist for the Suzuki recital on June 8th, so I didn’t practice guitar at all on Saturday. Today, I went through the standard review stuff; the main question that raised is whether I should try finger-picking the triplets in Something Bigger, Something Brighter. It’s a lot easier (at least for that part, there’s another tremolo bit where I assume I’d want a pick), but I don’t think the guitar will detect finger-picking nearly as well for game purposes (though I haven’t tried recently), and I also have no idea how they actually play it in real life. I’m currently thinking that, if I were good at using a pick, playing it that way wouldn’t be a problem, but who knows.

As to new songs, I went through two that I’d recently downloaded, namely The Only Exception and Jerk It Out. Both are tier 1, though a bit harder than I expected from that level: chord progressions that were slightly unusual, enough to throw me for a bit of a loop but in a good way that will bear further studying. And certainly I enjoyed playing both of them.

Liesl and I also went through a few pieces of DLC on harmonies: the Hall and Oates 3-pack, Heart’s Alone, and The Only Exception. All good songs; the one surprising bit there was that we managed to get 100% on Maneater, I totally wasn’t expecting that.

I told Miranda’s violin teacher that I could be the accompanist for his students’ next recital, so I spent most of my music time this weekend going through those songs. Mostly songs that I’ve played before, and in particular the hardest ones are all ones I’ve played before, though there are a few new ones that will require some amount of practice. So I imagine I’ll be somewhat busy going through those until I feel that they are well enough into my fingers that I won’t distract from the students’ playing; the recital isn’t until June 8, so I certainly have more than enough time.

When playing Rock Band, I mostly went through old songs. And, actually, they mostly sounded pretty good, or at least not awful, I’m happier than I have been about the sound that’s coming out of the amp. The newest song that I added to the rotation is Something Bigger, Something Brighter, whose triplets I’d been practicing all week; the practice helped, but it’s still way too fast for me to play at full speed without missing a bunch of notes. Something to work on, definitely: my right hand needs to get better at that kind of stuff.

The one new piece this week was Smoke on the Water. Which I was excited about, and which turned out to be fun enough, but still a bit of a disappointment. Basically, the only part that’s at all difficult is the solo: it’s a tier 4 song, but if you throw away the solo, it’s more like tier 0. (At least that’s how it felt to me, though maybe it’s unusually well-suited to me: I ended up #85 on the leaderboard, which is quite high for me for on-disc content, and it’s a popular enough song that I would think many people would have taken a swing at it?) The solo actually would be a good one for me to work on, if I should so choose: it’s definitely too hard for me, but most of it is noodling around without changing your hand position too much, so if I spent the time to learn the hand position changes, the rest would be good practice. I’m not planning to do that right now, but maybe eventually I’ll make a run through the game trying to get better at solos? The one other thing that I learned was when playing it unmuted: there are arpeggiated chords with a fair amount of space after them. If I just play them normally, then the last note of the chord sounds for a while; so I experimented with lifting up my left hand after playing the last note to mute the chord. Worked pretty well, though there’s definitely room for improvement.

This week, I did the second half of the dungeon I started last week. That second half turns out to be a ruined city, rather than a crypt; I rather enjoyed the layout there, both in terms of its geometry and its art. I used a few too many items during the final boss fight (it took me a while to realize that yes, I really should spam healing), but I did okay. After which I went into the crypt behind the boss and found that somebody had already been there and taken the magic staff I was apparently looking for; that person left some graffiti, so we decided the next step was to go back to the pig city and ask around.

On our way back, we stopped at the house before the ruined city with the girl in it; it had been destroyed, and looked like it had been destroyed for years. So it turns out the girl was a ghost of some sort as well. Then we went back to the city, and I saved when I got there.

Not a lot of practice this week, but I did go through my standard practice list (throwing Subdivisions onto it), and do a couple of new tier 4 songs. Specifically, on Saturday, I did Something Bigger, Something Brighter; most of that piece is fast triplets that I’m nowhere near accurate enough on. Which was frustrating at first, but actually I enjoy the way the triplets sound when I play them unmuted and when I don’t have to keep up with the actual song, so now I’m converting that into a practice bit for outside of game, and am hoping to get better at it. Which is good, because I have a long way to go: I was convinced for a while that it was going to be my first non-three-star song, but when playing it unmuted I actually managed three stars through a combination of being able to hear the triplets a little better and having the game being a little more forgiving on the non-triplet sections. (Normally, playing unmuted is bad for your score, because it falsely claims you’re strumming in pauses just from string vibrations, but on fast runs, that actually sometimes fills in glitches in your playing, so I got up to 4x multipliers in places where I probably didn’t deserve it.)

I also broke my A string on Saturday; this time, rather than replacing all the strings, I just replaced that one. Here’s the video I used this time, worked well, and I’m managing to get the string wound more neatly.

On Sunday, I learned Lasso. Which turned out to be quite good for my level: the chords are a bit unusual for me and a bit fast for me, but in both cases they’re definitely within reach. The only bit I can’t get is the solo, which basically is playing something fairly straightforward on the G string combined with accents on the high E string—it’ll be a while before I can do that, but at least now that I’m thinking about it that way I can do the G string part and sound good and have a framework for thinking about it if I want to try both parts.

My D string broke while I was in the middle of today’s practice; not sure if that’s a coincidence or if strings generally have similar lifetimes or if combining new strings with old strings puts extra stress on the old strings somehow? At least I’m good at replacing strings now; and at least I have a backup guitar, so I can just swap guitars until I’m done practicing.