It was another weekend where I was quite busy on Saturday, so I only had one day to practice; and I again chose Rocksmith over Rock Band 3.

In terms of non-song stuff: I did the tremolo technique challenge (quite easy, all the practice I’ve done on that paid off), which only leaves me with the chord challenge to do. So I think I’ve learned, or at least seen, all the techniques the game is going to throw at me; though, going through the menus, there seem to be videos explaining more techniques. And I unlocked another minigame, this time about scales. That was frustrating, because it’s something I really would like to learn, and the minigame seems like an appropriate method. But the game thought I was out of tune enough to miss notes; I fiddled around with tuning, but something weird seems to be going on with the frets.

Which is a nudge that I should get my guitar looked after—probably there’s some basic way it’s out of adjustment. Or maybe I should just buy a non-Rock Band guitar? I certainly plan to do that eventually, so maybe now is the time, I just don’t feel like figuring out how to pick out a good one.

After that I went through maybe 8 songs? The game really does have a solid library; Rock Band has more songs, but Rocksmith‘s taste seems like it’s probably about as good. (Perhaps slightly narrower, but narrower in a way that is reasonably consistent with my tastes.) And there’s a lot of overlap between the two games; I assume that means that the same bands are willing to be approached by both franchises. I also browsed the DLC selection, and there are lots of songs there that I would like; I haven’t bought any yet, because I haven’t finished the on-disc songs, but I’ll be happy to jump into the DLC when that’s over with.

A good session, minigame tuning frustration aside: I really enjoyed it. I’m still about pros and cons of the two games—particularly noticeable today was Rocksmith‘s forcing (or at least strongly encouraging) you to learn songs full speed as a whole instead of going through chunks slowed down. So at some point I’ll definitely want to go back to Rock Band 3 with an eye towards the differences, and towards getting out of that game some of what I’m getting out of Rocksmith. And, conversely, I’ll have to look through Rocksmith‘s various menus to see what options there are for learning songs. But for now I’m doing what Rocksmith is suggesting and am getting a lot out of that.

Pictures from the October Minecraft session:

I mostly wandered around. I started off with a few pictures of the center of town:

I don’t think this picture was on the side of the tower the last time I looked?

The edge of the city at sunset.

And then, when wandering over to see what Miranda was doing, I noticed lava flowing down the side of a mountain, and decided to strike out to the west. (Or at least what I think of as west, before sunrise/sunset got moved 90 degrees.)

Lava flowing down a mountain. Or at least a hill.

The snow on this tree makes it look like a face

Misty forest at sunrise

Valley between cliffs

Mushroom island

The only person I saw doing any building was Miranda, who was finishing off the wood temple she started last month. It’s done now, and looks rather lovely:

Starting the evening’s work on the temple

Looking into the birch room of the temple

Inside the birch room

The birch room from above

Looking into the jungle wood room

Inside the jungle wood room

A reminder of what last month’s pine room looked like

The central room

Finishing off the temple roof

The temple roof at night

We had a busy weekend coming up, so I didn’t think I would have any time on Sunday to practice guitar; which raised the question, should I play Rock Band 3, Rocksmith, or both on Saturday? I ended up going with Rocksmith, out of curiosity/novelty, and it was a very frustrating experience that turned out well in the end.

I decided that I would reserve one of my guitars for Rocksmith playing, to avoid having to worry that the muting would screw up its tuning. And I started the practice by going through more of the technique challenges: I tried the bends challenge again, and got a little better, but still didn’t do as well as on the other challenges. Then on to a couple of new techniques, namely palm muting and harmonics; both interesting to experiment with, I’ll have to work on them in game. And, finally, power chords: that was actually pretty frustrating, because I’ve spent a lot of time playing power chords in Rock Band 3, and I know my fingers were in the right place but Rocksmith was claiming that I was doing something wrong.

I’m still not sure what was going on there: maybe I really wasn’t doing something right (e.g. I might have only been strumming two strings at times), maybe the guitar was a bit out of tune, maybe there was something funny with my timing. Which is a problem I’ve already seen several times with Rocksmith: when the game claims you’re doing something wrong, it’s very frustrating trying to figure out what is actually going wrong. And there was an hour or so in the middle of my practice yesterday when that was happening all over the place, enough so to get me to consider giving up the game completely.

Eventually, I figured out one of the issues: the game was accurately reporting that I was out of tune on some of my notes, and it wasn’t an issue with the guitar not being tuned properly: it’s just that, when playing the first fret, if you don’t put your finger on the fret (or immediately below it), instead putting it significantly higher than that, then the note is noticeably sharp. So once I put my finger in the right place, then all of a sudden I started getting credit for notes. Which was good to have learned; I just wish the game could have somehow been more explicit about that. And, after that realization, the game got somewhat less frustrating to me.

Which raises some interesting questions. How much rounding should the game do on notes? Should it round all notes to the nearest fret, on the theory that your fingers are probably basically in the right place, that if the note is out of tune then it’s frequently a sign that your guitar is out of tune, which you can’t do much about in the middle of a song? If it can’t do that, could it give you guidance on improving your pitch? Should it try to infer a model of how out of tune your guitar is and how out of sync your audio and video is, and try to act accordingly, giving you guidance on areas where you aren’t matching the model?

I tend to think it should be smarter; I’m less sure about the “round to the nearest fret” issue, but to some extent I lean towards doing that as well. Which would make it more gamey, more mechanical; but in this instance it seems like the two sweet spots are either an easy-to-understand mechanical model or a more complex model that acts like a human teacher, and right now the game is in a bit of a grey area. (I feel that way about pitch bends, too.)

I’m still thinking about Rocksmith versus Rock Band 3. My current guess is that I’ll spend most of my time on Rocksmith for the next month or so, and I’m certainly getting something significant out of it, but I’m not at all sure that that’s a sign that it’s the better game. It’s by far preferable to be able to hear what you’re playing, and somewhat preferable for the game to try to teach a wider range of techniques; but, if I want to really hear what I’m playing, I can play Rock Band 3 with the guitar plugged into the amp. The issue there is that Rock Band 3 will detect false strums; Rocksmith, in contrast, will let you do whatever you want when it’s not telling you to play, so actually maybe what I want is Rock Band 3 without a penalty for false strums? Which I can get a reasonable approximation of by just not caring about my score and turning down the crowd noise.

And if you set that aside, then what are the other differences? I’m not nearly far enough into Rocksmith to understand what learning a song is like in it; my suspicion is that adaptive difficulty is kind of fun but ultimately not what I want, that I’ll miss Rock Band 3 picking out of specific sections to focus on (maybe that’s there in Rocksmith?), and that I won’t care about Rocksmith‘s video games at all. I definitely think Rocksmith‘s idea of having multiple guitar parts is a good one; but Rock Band 3‘s music library is far superior. (Though I appreciate Rocksmith reminding me that I should listen to the Rolling Stones more…) Either game’s notation is fine. (For guitar; Rock Band 3‘s lack of ambition for keyboard parts is not so cool, though of course Rocksmith doesn’t have that at all.)

There has to be some sort of conceptual synthesis possible going forward. I’m not sure what, though, and I also somewhat suspect that neither company is going to do another iteration refining either game beyond the valiant first attempt that each is. Maybe I’m wrong about that; maybe I’ll have to wait another five or ten years for somebody else to take a swing at the problem and for technology to catch up with these issues. (I wonder: is there a homebrew scene around the Rocksmith guitar to USB adapter?)

On Saturday, I went through my practice rotation, which is getting pretty long, and then tried maybe four more Tier 2 songs. I don’t remember all of the songs I tried, but I tentatively think Need You Tonight and Livin’ on a Prayer will enter the practice rotation. That rotation is getting pretty long now, but I tend to think that’s a good thing: the Tier 2 songs in particular have lots of bits that would be good for me to learn and that are definitely within my grasp but that I can’t play fluently yet. So if the length of the regular practice rotation means that I don’t have time to try out new candidate songs to add to it, I’m okay with that: that means that I should practice more until I get good at those parts! They’re all songs I don’t mind playing, and several of them I quite like, so I’m happy to play them over and over again from week to week.

And today I tried Rocksmith; there were good and bad parts, but overall there were more than enough good parts that I’ve changed the title of this post to reflect what I expect to be the focus of this series going forward. Because I really like listening to the guitar, and I also like having the strings respond normally instead of having the muting damping their movement, and it’s great to have a game that lets me do that.

Which isn’t to say I loved everything about Rocksmith from the start. There was one frustrating period when it claimed I missed a bunch of notes; I eventually figured out that what was going on was that my guitar was out of tune, and the game’s automatic tuning hadn’t picked that up. My guitar unfortunately goes out of tune super easily; I’m not sure how much of that is the amount of playing I’ve done with the mute on, and how much is the bad job I did restringing it the first time I replaced strings, but there’s something not right there. (I have two of the Rock Band 3 Squier guitars and no other electric guitars, maybe I should just use one of them solely for Rocksmith.) Once I figured that out, though, things got a lot better; in fact, it seemed at times that Rocksmith does a better job of note/strum detection than Rock Band 3. (I’ve already gotten a 200 note streak; incidentally, the audio lag hasn’t interfered with my enjoyment of the game much at all.)

The gradual ramping up of difficulty is interesting; right now, songs are too easy, but that’s understandable, and I’m willing to give the game a pass on that. (I suspect I’ll like the adaptive difficulty quite a bit eventually, in particular that it will allow me to play all the notes in the body of a song but only some notes in tricky solos.) At first, I was playing song after song instead of going into the technique trainer (easy to do the way they designed it), so it actually threw techniques at me in songs before I knew what the notation meant or how to perform those techniques; eventually, though, I went back to the technique trainers. I’ve gone through about half of them so far, and they seem fine; I’ve only gone through one of the minigames (the one about sliding), and I wasn’t at all impressed by it, but I’m reserving judgment for now: it may be that they’re an effective way to make drilling techniques be more bearable.

Like Rampant Coyote said, it’s nice to be asked to perform a wider range of techniques than Rock Band 3 allows. Though so far I’ve really only had to do with one new technique, namely bending strings, and my experience there has been iffy: not sure how much there has to do with my lack of experience / understanding of what to listen to, how much has to do with the game not clearly explaining what’s going on, and how much has to do with the fact that the Rock Band 3 guitar I’m using has these bumps along the frets that make bending strings much less smooth than I’d like.

The game’s notation seems fine; not better than Rock Band 3 notation, but not clearly worse, and I suspect that, after flipping the string ordering in the options, it will help me a bit at learning tablature, which is potentially useful. Though the one time so far that the game has thrown barre chords at me, I couldn’t sight read them at all just from the notation; but even that was useful, because then I had to rely on the chord names, so I got some practice translating chord names into barred A minor and major chords. I assume it will become second nature soon enough, though.

I’m still very much getting used to the game: it has its opinions about how to do things, and I’m pretty sure those opinions aren’t how I eventually want to spend my time learning guitar, but I also suspect that those opinions are a pretty good guide for what I need right now. And, poking through the menu options, it looks like it has a reasonable range of knobs to turn to let me use it as a song learning tool.

So I’m definitely glad I followed Rampant Coyote’s lead. Like him, I think I’ll stick with both games, but it really is great to have a game that is encouraging me to listen to the sounds I’m making, instead of consciously keeping me in a fantasy bubble.

It was a busy weekend: I had friends coming over on Sunday afternoon, which meant that I did grocery shopping on Saturday, so no Rock Band practice on Sunday and only an hour or so on Saturday. (I might have been able to find more time on Saturday if I hadn’t played Drop7 for the first time that day…)

So I went through most of the standard practice routine on Saturday, but that’s about it. Still, that’s enough to keep my fingers at least somewhat limber, and I’ve been doing a decent job of chord practice evenings in the middle of the week. It’s not the only busy weekend coming up, so expect more posts like this in the future.

(I didn’t play any Rock Band today, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t play games at all: Drop7 aside, I played a couple of games of Diamond Trust of London against a computer followed by three (I think) against Jorge Albor; I suspect there’s quite a bit of meat there, though I doubt I’ll play the game regularly enough to know for sure. And then Mattie Brice joined us for the Gears of War board game (with Liesl in the fourth seat); a quite solid board game, enough so that it actually got me curious to play the video game…)

Tier 2 would seem to be the tier of songs that I don’t really like very much but that probably would be good for me to add to the rotation for didactic purposes. The latter certainly makes sense, given my level; the former is, I suppose, bad luck. With that in mind:

Last week, I said I was adding London Calling and 20th Century Boy to the rotation. The former is staying in there, but when I played through the latter this week, I decided that the solo at the end was annoying in ways that I didn’t particularly want to work on. I also tried out four new songs this week, all of which I would learn something from practicing but none of which I was super excited about practicing. Right now, I’m thinking I’ll stick with I Need to Know, I Got You (I Feel Good), and Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before, but I’m not 100% sure about that; Riders on the Storm doesn’t make the cut. (Which makes the practice rotation pretty long: I spend most of an hour at the start of each session practicing the same songs. That’s fine, though, it’s good for me; in fact I should probably spend more time, focusing on the trickiest bits.)

The other event this week was that Rampant Coyote published this comparison of Rock Band 3 and Rocksmith. Most other posts I’d read strongly took the side of one game or the other; in particular, Rocksmith proponents’ negative comments about Rock Band 3 left me thinking that I didn’t expect to be aligned with their judgment about Rocksmith, since clearly we disagree about Rock Band 3. But this post spoke favorably about both games; and I am definitely seeing ways in which not listening to the guitar is causing me problems. I’m still worried that Rocksmith is not the solution in that regard, because of the audio lag that it apparently introduces with normal TV setups, but it’s only $45 these days, and I’m spending enough time on guitar that it’s worth a flyer at that price. So I’ve ordered a copy and will give it a try.

I played a decent amount of Rock Band this weekend. I finished the Tier 1 songs on the current Pro Guitar run; Get Free would be a good candidate to add to the rotation from a didactic point of view, but it’s enough not my style that I’m skipping it, and Antibodies and Du Hast are probably my two least favorite songs on the disk! The beginnings of Tier 2 are better, though—I think I’ll add both London Calling and 20th Century Boy to the rotation. (Though, if I’m remembering correctly, the hardest bit of London Calling causes the console to freeze up if I try to learn it in practice mode, so that could be interesting…) The practice list is getting pretty long now, with a fair variety of what I think of as slightly nonstandard chords in it; that seems good for me, and if that means that I spend most of my time practicing the same songs and only a little bit of time trying out new songs, I’m perfectly fine with that.

I also went through all of the songs I’d bought with a keyboard part that I hadn’t yet tried on Pro Keys. Which was mostly songs from Rock Band Blitz, though there were a few other one-offs there. Nothing too stunning to report there, though it was generally a pleasant enough experience.

I practiced guitar on both Saturday and Sunday; not hugely long practices either day, but I went through my current practice rotation both days plus a few other songs. One of which, Whip It, is getting added to the rotation: nothing too complicated, but good single notes and arpeggiation, a song I should enjoy playing but would learn from getting rock solid at. I considered adding Touch Me and Space Oddity to the rotation, too, but ultimately decided that I was on the fence about both of them in terms of what I’d learn from them and I didn’t enjoy either song nearly as much as, say, The Only Exception.

The other thing I did was sing through all of the Blitz songs in vocal harmonies. I was quite surprised to find that 24 of the 25 songs had harmonies parts (and the only exception, Give It Away, was one that fully deserves its place because it makes Blood Sugar Sex Magik complete again); and, while I was expecting the vocals to be good on those songs based on listening to them in other game modes, I was quite surprised just how fun harmonies specifically were in them. So: Blitz is a mediocre game on its own, a pretty good track pack for guitar, but it turns out to be stunningly excellent for vocalists (especially vocalists with somebody else to sing with), significantly better on average than the non-Beatles on-disc games.

Pictures from the September 2012 VGHVI Minecraft session. Which was a mellow one – Miranda was the only person doing any building, and she showed up late, so mostly we just chatted. But here’s what she was working on: she started a wood temple complex, near the earlier fire temple.

Outside the wood temple

Miranda and Roger examine the inside of the temple

More of the temple complex

Tearing up the floor in preparation for finishing it

The finished hallway floor

The finished floor of the room

Miranda doing one last inspection

A nighttime view from the roof

I didn’t play much Rock Band this weekend: we decided to watch the last six episodes of Last Exile on Sunday afternoon, and that combined with grocery shopping didn’t leave much time for guitar practice. No regrets about that, though: Last Exile is a great show, and what guitar practice I did was productive!

I went through my new normal practice songs: from Tier 0, that means Last Dance, Yoshimi, and I Wanna Be Sedated. And I was very pleased with how Last Dance went: I got a 513 note streak, only missing two chords, both near the start. (And one of them was a two-note chord, no excuse for that.) So I’m getting significantly better at barre chords: I’m going to keep the song in the rotation to consolidate those gains and to build up strength (I can make it through one playthrough no problem, obviously, but my hand is somewhat tired at the end), but that’s a huge improvement.

I’m doing less well on the other two; Yoshimi in particular I really would like to get better at. And then I moved on to Tier 1; from the previous songs, I decided to keep in Outer Space and The Only Exception, and I also went through Jerk It Out and will add it to the practice rotation as well. I definitely have room to improve in Outer Space, but it’s good solid chord practice for me to work on, and the solo is also useful practice. The other two have somewhat more idiosyncratic chords; I’m not sure the specific chords and chord transitions themselves are going to be common enough for me to need them for many other songs, but they’re all chords that I would like my hands to be able to do without thinking. Plus, Liesl and I both like singing The Only Exception, the lyrics are very sweet.