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.

I took way too many pictures this month, so I’m just going to dump them in here with minimal commentary. First, a bunch of wandering around pictures:

Tower from below in the haze

Top of tower in the haze

Glitch in water

Water at the top of a mine

Flying over the desert

Cliff face with arch

Underwater hills

Underwater lines and structures

I saw my first jungle:

Jungle oasis

The border of the jungle

The interior of the jungle

Looking down from the treetops

Looking up from the jungle floor

I wanted to be able to find my way back there, so I thought of making a map; the map didn’t update after the initial picture, though, maybe it doesn’t work when flying or something?

Trying to map

Sunset behind a snowy mountain

Sunset in valley

Glow of a house at sunset

Cows on a cliff

Chunk loading abstraction

Cave in cliff wall

Snow and sand

Squids and a duck. Uh, chicken.

Miranda is having to take state tests at school, and is none too pleased about that, so she decided to create a piece of art expressing her feelings.

Anti-testing art

Instructions for proper use

Snowballs work too

The artist examines her art

Dan was working on some sort of tower, here are some pictures of the work in progress:

Dan working on a tower

Outside the tower

Looking up at the center

Tower door

Roger was building pyramids; it was dark, and unfortunately I only got one picture:

Roger building a pyramid

And Pat was working on a sandstone palace, it looks like it will be huge when it’s done.

Pat building a sandstone palace

Palace door

Palace from above

Palace wall

Building the palace floor

Working on the palace tower

Tower and moon

Tower window

Inside the tower

I spent the last twenty minutes or so watching Miranda build a fire temple:

One wall of the fire temple

Purple flames

Looking up at the roof

Looking through the gate

Oblique view

View from above

Starting work on the floor

Laying out the glowstone

Underwater view of glowstone

Let's add some lava

The finished floor

It burns!

Enclosing the temple sides

Administrative note: the May VGHVI Minecraft session will be on May 24, not May 31.

For the second week in a row, I played some Ni No Kuni: not a lot, but I’m chipping away at it.

I took on a few errands in the city, but I didn’t actually finish any of them. Then I left the city, heading north to the ghost valley. That was a pretty standard dungeon; I did fine against the monsters, which is good, because I was afraid that my avoiding fights in the overworld might have gotten me a bit underpowered. No problems there, though.

Then, at the end of the valley, there was a house with a girl living there. I fast forwarded through the conversation more than I should have (especially given that the stated goal for this exercise is to learn Japanese!), but I think the gist was that she first lived there to look after the graves of her parents, but now is looking after graves more generally? There was something about the next area that she needed help with, so we volunteered to help fix it, or something.

I remembered that, back in the city, I’d crafted a new gun for Gyro; partly because of that and partly because Maru had been running out of magic, I used him a lot in the dungeon. (Though his gun still isn’t very effective, I should see what his magic is like.) That inspired me to look more in the crafting menu, because clearly it’s not just for disposable items: I found a recipe for a +50 magic point ring that I had the ingredients for, so I crafted one of those and gave it to Maru. (Oliver was already wearing one.) That should help with long fights in the future, I hope.

After that conversation, we went to the next part of the dungeon, which looked like a crypt of some sort; there was a save spot right at the beginning, so I saved there and stopped.

This weekend, I started on tier 4 Expert Pro Guitar. So far, I’ve managed to three-star every song; coming into this tier, I was not expecting to maintain that streak.

The first song I played was Rush’s Subdivisions. I’ve always enjoyed playing Rush on fake guitar, but this is the first time I’ve tried it out on the real thing. And it was tough but manageable (I was going to say tough but fair, but this is music, fairness is irrelevant), chords that I needed to work on but that I could deal with. And, sure enough, I enjoyed it: I think I’m probably going to put it into the practice rotation, because I suspect I have a lot to learn from it.

Next was Everybody Wants to Rule the World, the easiest of the on-disc tier 4 songs. I didn’t take notes after playing it, so I can’t remember the details: I remember there was picking that was a little too fast to be within my comfort zone, I can’t remember what else was going on. Pretty sure I enjoyed it, but not enough to want to frequently return to it.

Today, I went through the middle third of 2112, namely Discovery and Presentation. I was pretty sure that this was going to be the first song I didn’t manage to three-star: my first run, I wasn’t that far over two stars, there were some very rough bits. The thing is, though, the rough bits are in two parts: it ends with a long solo that’s way too hard for me, so that’s a total loss. But the rest is chord sections; they’re somewhat unusual, but I managed to get the basic approach right for most of them, and when thinking about it more, I was pretty sure I’d be able to do a passable job at the one chord section that I’d totally screwed up. So I went back through the training section for that bit, and played it over and over again, and eventually managed three stars on the song. (And 26th place on the leaderboard, DLC leaderboards are kind of silly.)

So: I’ve managed to survive my first week of tier 4! Wonder how long that will last…

I didn’t put in as much time on guitar as I normally do this weekend, maybe around two hours or so? But I did make it through three pieces (plus the usual assortment of review.)

The first was This Bastard’s Life. It had tons of seventh chords, including what I think are slightly nonstandard variants; educational but very hard, I only managed to get my third star on the final held note. I would probably profit from playing this over and over again, though right now I’m not planning to put in the time; I wish I had other pieces that let me learn some of those seventh chords in a slightly friendlier context.

Next was Killing Moon. I felt that This Bastard’s Life was marked as one tier too easy; Killing Moon, in contrast, seemed to me to be marked as at least one tier too hard. Repeated easy chords over and over again; single notes with room between them and not requiring much hand movement. I guess the difficulty was assigned because of the solo, which was long; but the solo was super easy as well (again, requiring very little hand movement and slow enough that it wasn’t hard to sight read most of it), so I’m not sure why it was marked as tier 3 instead of, say, tier 1. Having said that, I ended up at 49th place on the leaderboard, so I guess it somehow played to my strengths?

Finally, Heart of Glass. A bunch of single notes, with string jumping, and a few two-note chords that were unusual enough to give me trouble. I barely managed the third star, which surprised me, I felt that I should have done better than that.

And, with that, I finished tier 3! I suspect that this is the last tier that I’ll be able to get three stars on all of the songs (at least on this go through)—I expect I’ll be able to play many of the tier 4 songs, and even enjoy several of them, but random variation in difficulty means that a few will hit my weak points enough that I won’t be able to get to three stars without more hours of work than I’m willing to put in. We’ll see, though; just making it to tier 4 on expert feels like a real accomplishment, and I’ll be perfectly happy to start over with the easiest songs, trying to really master the ones I enjoy the most.

I didn’t feel like immersing myself in guitar this weekend, so I ended up playing Ni No Kuni for the first time in almost two months. I’m definitely losing steam here – I’m not devoting as much time to the Japanese as I could, and I’m also not that into the gameplay, so I’m not super motivated to continue. And I suspect that the combination of those will mean that I miss out on gameplay details that will make it very hard for me to progress, so I’d be pretty surprised if I made it too much farther through the game. Having said that, I am getting something from it Japanese-wise, and if I want to put in more time on that side of things, I can, so I’m not stopping yet.

Anyways: spent some time in the pig people city, looking for the next wise person. I’m not sure exactly what happened – we said some passphrase that let us into an alley, we met with somebody with a sick girl (I think a little sister?), then we put on pig disguises and went into the palace. There, we had a big boss battle, I was worried I wouldn’t make it through but we did manage to survive. Then, we met the king, who seemed to be the next wise person, but he didn’t want to help. At some point in this process we got a medicine and gave it to the sick girl; she got better, and we got a heart piece from her which we gave to the king, so he got better.

In this last scene, Gyro revealed himself to be (I think) the king’s older brother. (So the king wasn’t a pig person, which surprised me – are all these pig people humans under the armor?) The king didn’t teach us any new spells, but he told us the next place to go, I think some sort of ghost place.

I was out of town for the last couple of weeks, and I was pretty busy today catching up with stuff, but I did manage to get in a bit of practice. Mostly I went through old favorites; the one new song I tried was One-Arm Scissor. Which was quite tough at the start, hard enough that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get three stars on it, but after a couple of tries I started being able to play the unusual chords in it. Sounded quite odd when plugged in, I think there must be some sort of alternate tuning going on there?