Like the last several weeks, I didn’t find time to play Ni No Kuni over the weekend, but fortunately I’d played it a bit in the middle of the week. I went to get on the boat; before that, though, I recruited another party member, a thief named Gyro. And Shizuku retired from battle, preferring to take an advisory role. In battle, Gyro has a distance attack, meaning that all three humans are better suited for the back row; one could doubtless come up with a class/race based reading of that apparent desire to send the Imagines up to the front lines to absorb all the damage…

And then I got on the ship! Which opened up the world map; you don’t just teleport from place to place, you have to control the ship. And right off the bat, we ran into a big storm, which forced us to change plans, going to a resort casino city to stock up on fireworks ammo or something. The down side of that trip was that the seas are full of wandering monsters, and, unlike, land, you can’t see them in advance to avoid them. Not quite Skies of Arcadia levels of annoyance, but not great, either.

I was being sloppy and had my first full-party death during this process. It turns out that the game revives the whole party with full HP/MP when you restart after a death; I like that decision, and it’s keeping in character with the game’s generally quite forgiving nature.

Some general practice notes:

• I’m up to 70% speed on that arpeggiation lesson; and it’s revealing that, not only am I not good enough at shifting to F chords, I’m actually not as good at shifting to G chords as I think I am. (And I did badly on the tremolo lesson this week, not sure what’s going on there.)
• I created a guitar practice playlist, to make it easy for me to go over my current batch of songs that I want to practice every week.
• I’ve started writing down key chord progressions for some of those for use when practicing outside of game, instead of trying to remember them. Which got me used to the notation of chords with a dropped note on the bottom, and also had me realize that the weird barred C chord in Take On Me is actually an E chord with a G# on the E string. Interesting.

This week’s new guitar songs:

• Have You Ever Seen the Rain: I’m only playing it now because I just downloaded it, it’s deservedly warmup, but I liked the moving bass part to move it into the practice rotation.
• I Need to Know: mostly plays around on the seventh fret, with a bit of arpeggiation thrown in, I can tell that the difficulty is increasing.
• I Feel Good: Different chords than I’m used to (more R&B / funk), but I got used to that soon enough, and I was surprised how much I liked the sound when plugged in. I need to work on scales more, though.
• Riders on the Storm: pleasant noodling around that felt more like a bass part than a guitar part. And then some annoying vagueness on the high frets.
• Stop Me if You Think You’ve Heard This One Before: some pleasant chord variants, I didn’t do so well on the arpeggiated bits.
• Need You Tonight: there were three different modes of the piece: some 9th fret chords, some rhythmic alternating strumming, and a bassy bit. All of which added up to something I enjoyed.

I went through a few songs on bass, too, and Liesl and I sung for maybe two hours? We were going through some on-disc songs that we hadn’t sung; and we seem to be getting better, we’re getting gold stars surprisingly often.

Quite happy with that amount of practice, given the number of other things I did on both Saturday and Sunday. And I was good about piano practice: I practiced on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. I’m on my second pass through the 6-Part Ricercar in the Musical Offering; it’s going quite a bit faster than I expected, though I’m also starting to realize just how little I understand the different voices in that piece.

It’s been a while since I’ve played Ni No Kuni over the weekend: Rock Band is a higher priority and is taking more and more of my time, so if my weekend is at all busy, Ni No Kuni falls by the wayside. And, indeed, that happened this week, too, but I’m getting caught up enough on my blogging that I found time one evening in the middle of the week to play.

I was in a port, where I’d just learned how to combine items from recipes. Unfortunately, I didn’t have very many, but one local quest involved learning a few of them, so now I have a few. The ship there wouldn’t give me a ride, though, because I didn’t have permission from the queen, so I went back to the previous city. (I’d been wondering why I couldn’t get into the palace!)

The queen turned out to be a sort of giant or something, and she wanted food. She reminded me of somebody in the first world, so I went back there and found that that person was a cheese fan; returning to the second world, I cast a spell on the milk fountain and made cheese. That did half the trick, and then I gave her a perseverance heart piece, so now she’s better; she gave me permission to ride the boat, and taught me two spells.

Busy day on Saturday (we went to The Pitmen Painters in the afternoon and I went to 915 Cayuga in the evening), but I did get in a bit of guitar practice in the late morning. I gave the lessons one more try, and I managed to make it through the easier arpeggiation lesson: once I started paying attention a bit more, I realized I was moving my fingers off of the D chord a bit early. The other remaining arpeggiation lesson is still rather tough for me: not so much because of the arpeggiation but because it requires me to quickly and forcefully shift to an F chord, which I’m not great at. The other lesson I haven’t succeeded at yet is the tremolo lesson—I’ve gotten 98% a couple of times, so clearly one of these weeks I’ll luck out and get 100%, but not yet.

My list of songs to practice is getting longer and longer. Yoshimi continues to get better; the main area where I’m having trouble in it is quickly shifting to that same F chord I mentioned above, so clearly that’s one of my next hurdles to focus on, I should add that chord sequence to my nightly unplugged practice. Also, I managed 4 stars on Take on Me, so my barred C chord practice is paying off: I’m still not at all comfortable with that shift, but at least I can succeed at it some of the time.

As to the new songs I’ve done: my left hand hurt when playing Centerfold, but the chord sequences seem pretty reasonable, I should add them to my practice routine as well. 20th Century Boy had these fast single note/chord combos, and I wasn’t sure what weight of pick to use there; eventually, I decided to compromise on a medium pick, which turned out okay. It sounded surprisingly non-awful when plugged in, given how many notes I was missing; I think the point there, though, is that I simplified the piece rather than flailing around at random, so while the game didn’t like that so much, my ears were less unhappy.

London Calling got me worried, because my Xbox froze up several times while practicing that. But eventually I realized that it was freezing up in the same training segment, so now I think something in that segment is triggering a bug in the game and OS, rather than it being a sign of my third (fourth?) red ring of death being on the way. That training segment was, unfortunately, one I could use the help on, though actually it’s hard enough that I’m not sure that going through that segment more really would have helped; it didn’t sound too bad plugged in, but that was for the same reason as 20th Century Boy, namely that I didn’t try to play that part at all accurately. Other than that, it had some interesting chord variants where I had my hand in the same basic position on the top four strings but had to move my fingers around a little.

That was yesterday; today I played through some Pro Bass. Get Up, Stand Up was fun, with only one hand position transition providing a bit of challenge; no reason for me to miss any notes there, though I didn’t quite get that far. Humanoid was some interesting hopo practice and required periodically jumping to the 15th fret. King George was probably the toughest bass song so far: lots of fast notes, and getting the third star took both time and luck. And Been Caught Stealing also had fast notes, but they were in sets of three notes with space after them (and in fact I could have treated the third note as a hammer-on if I’d wanted), so they were more manageable.

And then Liesl and I sang together for probably a couple of hours? It’s been way too long since we did that, we should really try to do that every weekend. We finally got 100% on Expert Harmonies (on Outer Space, I guess my practicing that on guitar has rubbed off subconsciously); quite surprised to see us at #22 on the leaderboard for that song, but I won’t complain.

I practice piano a couple of times (and once or twice in the middle of the week): I’m now done with a first pass through the 6-Part Ricercar, but I’ll need a second pass before I feel like the notes are at all starting to get into my finger. And I’m still not thinking about the 3-Part Ricercar as much as I should. I’m thinking I might also do another run through the Ghibli book—I went through the Nausicaä songs on a lark, and they’re really pretty—though notes are sticking when I hold down the pedal, so I’ll probably want to have that looked into first.

This week, I acquired my first non-CRT TV (yes, I am behind the times), which meant that I had to actually calibrate Rock Band before playing it. Which I was a little nervous about, but the automatic calibration that comes with the current guitar controllers works great, so I can’t tell any timing difference at all. Looks good, too, though you can definitely tell that the game’s not in 1080p.

After which, of course, I sat down to practice. Aside from going through four or five of the older songs, my guitar practice was: Fly Like an Eagle (boring and surprisingly hard); Walking on the Sun (simple, fun, I somehow reached #98 on the leaderboard); Touch Me (meh chord practice, but the hammer-on bit was surprisingly instructive when I played it plugged in, I’m getting to where I rather like hopos though they still don’t sound as good as I’d like); Space Oddity (interesting chord variants in the strummy bits, a bit too long of a solo for me); Get Free (a surprisingly pleasant mix of power chords and single notes, I rather enjoyed it); Antibodies (at least I dislike it on Pro Guitar rather less than on other instruments; and I managed to break a pick on that one); and Du Hast (I suppose it’s good that my two least favorite songs on the disk showed up back to back, because now they’re both out of the way).

A quite solid weekend’s practicing, and now I’m done with Apprentice! On to, uh, Solid? (Two-dot difficulty.)

That’s Pro Guitar. I didn’t do so much Pro Bass, but I did get a few out of the way: My Sharona was quite a bit of fun; Working for the Weekend’s fast triplets were too much for me but it was quite pleasant otherwise (and rhyming “weekend” with “deep end” is lyric genius); Ziggy Stardust was absolutely the best thing to play; I Can See for Miles was fun in training, but in the actual song you play the same note over and over again for most of it (in fact, you can make it to three stars before you have to play a second note), and by the time you get to the interesting bits, it’s been long enough since your training that I for one screwed up; and Spanish Bombs never required you to change your hand position but had enough variation that I had fun nonetheless. (No reason why I should have missed a note on Spanish Bombs, and while of course I did miss three or four, I reached #6 on the leaderboard, though admittedly that doesn’t mean much for DLC.)

On the piano front, I’ve been slacking on my Musical Offering practice, but I did put in a decent hour. The Six-Part Ricercar continues to be extremely thorny; I’ll be done with my first pass at figuring out fingerings and hand placement in a couple of weeks, but I’m pretty sure I’ll need another full second pass before I can start seriously thinking about the musicality. I did at least work more seriously on the Three-Part Ricercar this time, instead of just coasting: it sounds good enough that I enjoy just playing it, but there’s definitely enough room for improvement that I shouldn’t settle for the way it sounds now.

I was busy on Saturday, so I didn’t get to play Rock Band; I did at least get to chat with Dan Apczynski a bit, and he told me that, when playing power chords, it’s generally best to only downstrum. So I’ll go back to that on I Wanna Be Sedated.

And today I was a little worried that I’d be pretty busy today with grocery shopping and watching the football game, but I actually ended up with a rather nice practice session. I went once through a few older songs (as is generally my habit these days), and then started in on the Apprentice level songs.

And it turns out that I’m fine with Apprentice level, too: I went through six of them. Good Vibrations made me glad that I’d practice alternating strumming; and, actually, it was the first song I can remember where I scored higher unmuted, because in that context the controller picking up extra string vibrations helped instead of hurting. Rock the Casbah didn’t have much to do on the guitar part, but what there was to do was fun.

Outer Space confirmed my opinion from Yoshimi that strummy songs are now an active plus for me instead of an active minus: nice shifting between chords, and I liked the way it added an extra high note on some of the D chords and dropped the note on the bottom string when transitioning from G to E. I’ll probably add that sequence into my midweek guitar practice, it’s fun and good for me.

Break on Through (To the Other Side) half sounded like a bass part and half was full of scales; the scales were also good hopo practice. Whip It had fun single note sequences that I did surprisingly bad on; I don’t really understand that.

Rock Lobster was the only one I didn’t like. The first half was overloaded with alternating strumming, the second half was overloaded with fast two-string chords. And it was using some sort of alternate tuning that I’m not familiar with (both the bottom two strings were lower, but there was more going on than that), I disliked the piece enough that I didn’t spend the time to figure it out.

Even though it was a three day weekend, I didn’t play as much Ni No Kuni as I probably should have: I was in a more Rock Band mood instead. (And a little tired on Monday because I was on call for work this weekend.) At least I did play it some, unlike the previous weekend, though, but clearly I’m not going to really make progress through the game until I start playing mid-week. Which hopefully will happen soon: I’ve beaten back the worst of my blog writing backlog, so hopefully I’ll be able to carve out one evening a week to make progress?

Anyways: I spent a bit of time in the town I’d been in, seeing if there was anybody with a job that needed doing; I completed one job, but it looks like I’d found most of the jobs before going to the volcano. And then, as instructed, I went to the southern port. There, I got a crafting pot; that filled the last of the spots on the X-button menu, so I think I’ve got all of the game’s basic mechanics available to me now? (I don’t remember any more mechanics from the manual, though I haven’t gone back to confirm.) I can’t say that I’m super excited about crafting: I’m not in a micro-managing mood. But hopefully I won’t have to worry about it too much. (The game has been very generous about letting me run past monsters if I don’t feel like fighting them and still leaving me adequately powerful to fight bosses.)

A three-day weekend, which I took advantage of by putting in quite a bit of Rock Band time. Starting with the Pro Guitar training mode: coming into the weekend, there were only four segments that I hadn’t done, two within Advanced Single Note Runs and two within More Chord Holding and Arpeggiation. And I finished off one of the former (the fifth in that group, with tons of hopos); I still haven’t quite managed the first one (tremolos), though I’m not too far away, certainly I could do it if I get lucky. I didn’t manage either of the arpeggiation ones: I’m not particularly close to being able to finish the second segment in that group (I need to be faster at shifting into barre chords), but I think it’s mostly bad luck that I haven’t yet managed the third segment in that group.

Then I went to songs on Pro Guitar. I first went back to some older songs that had been giving me trouble and where I’d been working on the relevant techniques offline, and my practice definitely helped: on Last Dance, I had a much longer streak in the barre chord section than before, and I finally managed to at least get three stars on Take On Me, and while my streaks were still shockingly short, I fell out of them as often because of the alternating strumming on the D chord as because of jumping to the barred C chord.

As to new songs: Yoshimi was a song that I’d done surprisingly badly on at Hard, so I was worried about it on Expert, but it actually went much better: part of that is because my skills have improved, but a lot of that also has to do with my trying out a thinner pick. So I’ll have to keep my eyes out for other songs where I can use that. It sounded surprisingly good when plugged in, too, and actually I spent a while just playing it outside of game (unplugged and unmuted). Modern Love was easy to the point of being a little boring (so I guess not all DLC is harder than the rating says), but it’s so much fun to sing that I didn’t mind: that made it possible for me to sing while playing guitar. (Though, actually, the vocals at the end demanded enough concentration that I wasn’t able to sing them accurately while playing.) And Midlife Crisis was enough not my style that I didn’t put significant amounts of time into it. Which was the last Warmup song: glad to have successfully navigated that tier! Hopefully I’ll be okay for another tier or two, but I’m certainly going to hit some real challenges at some point, maybe halfway through.

Today I played a bunch of Pro Bass, all in the two-dot tier. (Solid is apparently the official name of that tier.) In general, a fair amount of alternating strumming, without too much moving around but usually with enough to keep me interested; Portions for Foxes was particularly good alternating strumming practice, I Need to Know and Outer Space were straightforward but pleasant, Rock Lobster was similar and easy enough that there was no individual note I should have missed (though I did miss several of them), Get Free was surprisingly pleasant the second time, once I got the notes right.

Viva La Resistance was much much harder than any of the preceding songs: the tremolo section in the beginning is fast enough that it took me a while to realize during training that I was only playing it at half the speed I’m supposed to! Pity, because it’s absolutely one of my favorite songs on disc (and my most surprising favorite on disc); something to work on, I guess? She’s Got the Look had fairly relentless alternating strumming, albeit not as fast; it was good practice on switching strings during alternating strumming. Foolin’ is a song that I don’t like and while I’m usually good at finding something interesting in the technique even on such songs, I didn’t manage that here. Here I Go Again was pleasantly easy; but I was shocked to discover when I finished it that I’d reached #25 on the leaderboard, I’m not usually in the top 10% for Pro Bass. (Makes me wonder how many people have played the song on Pro Bass.) I mean, I did a good job, but I wasn’t perfect or anything, and I would have thought many other people would manage a similarly good job? And Touch Me was pleasant enough, though I don’t have a lot to say other than that.

And then there’s a discovery I made: if you hit down on the D-pad on the screen after finish the song, you see tons of stats: longest streak, a breakdown of accuracy percent on each section of the song, a breakdown of how much of your score is due to accuracy / streaks / overdrive, etc. I would say that I have no idea how I’d been unaware of this for so long, except that the on-screen indicator isn’t very obvious and I’m usually not thinking about the D-pad. Still: very glad I learned about that!

I practiced the Musical Offering a couple of times this weekend; the 6-Part Ricercar is still hard, but I’m getting through it, so hopefully in another month I’ll be able to play the whole thing and not sound dreadful. There will, of course, be a lot of work to do after that, but that’s when it will really get fun, so that’s okay.

Not a lot of Rock Band last weekend. I was thinking I should try out different picks, so I went to a local music store; after realizing that the picks cost fifty cents each, I ended up buying one of about half of the models that they had. When I got around to trying the different picks, I was kind of regretting it for a while—I guess I liked a few of them more than the pick I’d been using, but I didn’t see a huge improvement? But then I found one that I rather liked: a little thicker and more textured than I’d been using and with a similar slightly rounded tip. So: success! At some point I’d like to try significantly different guitar picks—e.g. at work there’s a triangular much thicker one that I found surprisingly interesting—but it’s definitely a start.

On Saturday evening, Liesl and I finished the songs from Lego Rock Band. Which I don’t regret buying, because the game is quite cheap these days, but on average I don’t like the songs from it nearly as much those in other games. And we went through a couple of pieces of DLC; I’ve forgotten what they were (it’s been a busy week), but they were pleasant. (And I’m way behind on DLC, I really need to catch up on listening to them to see what I want.)

And then I tried out three songs on Pro Guitar. Rehab was okay; it felt more like a bass part, and a not-all-that-interesting bass part at that, but wasn’t unpleasant. Get Up, Stand Up was not very interesting noodling around on one chord.

The third song was Take On Me. I’m used to DLC songs being harder compared to on-disc songs with the same rating, and this was no exception. Though the interesting thing was that its main difficulty was that it required me to play a barred C chord—I don’t think I’d really had to do that yet, or was even aware that that was much of a thing? There was also one annoying segment that asked me to play a bunch of muted notes slightly faster than I would have liked; I probably would have enjoyed that if the notes weren’t muted so I’d had to think about the fingers, but as is I just didn’t like it.

Ah well: it’s a piece that I bought because of the keyboard part, and ended up quite enjoying the vocals on it; it’s okay for me not to love the guitar part. And it’s given me something new to practice, which is always a bonus. So I’ll work on barred C chords offline, and then come back to the piece in a few weeks when I can hit them more reliably. (Or: fail them less completely reliably.)

Weekends in December had been horribly busy; something had to go, and Ni No Kuni was it. But I finally got back to playing it this weekend.

I went through the volcano dungeon that I’d arrived at last time. Right before the top, there was a training grotto (“cave of trials”); it had a few non-combat puzzles, including a logic puzzle that I was proud of myself that I managed to puzzle out the Japanese well enough to get it right on the first try. For anybody else who is stuck there and googles this: on the outside of the statue/spell logic puzzle bit, the left statue wants fire and the right one wants ice. (Those are the paired statues with the writing from the back of the book on them.) And inside that room, first heal the dog, then talk to the bird, then cure poison on the bull, then unlock the dragon.

Once I was done with that, I learned how to capture Imagines. Which, honestly, I have mixed feeling about: I’m not actively excited about the combat in game, but I’m not sure adding a larger cast of characters for me to manage is the answer for that. Ah well; I’m done with that dungeon now, time to go back to the city to tidy up loose ends and then off to a southern port.

Though I imagine progress will be slow: I have a few more blog posts to write before I’ll feel comfortable playing instead of writing mid-week. Eventually I’ll find more time, I hope…