What with GDC, I didn’t play Rock Band at all last weekend, and basically didn’t do anything musical for almost two weeks straight. This weekend was a little busy, but clearly I didn’t want to let that happen again, so I made sure to play some Rock Band on Saturday.

Which was, of course, great! I went through my regular round of practice pieces, and then on to new pieces: only three this week (like I said, I was a little busy), which were:

• Combat Baby: super fun. Nice single note bits, pleasant chords that were mostly bottom three/four strings but with some interesting seventh fret playing around. Learned something (especially about the latter) from playing it plugged in.
• Viva La Resistance; great song (one of my favorites to listen to on the disk), though actually not my most favorite to play guitar on. In particular, the alternating strumming is sometimes a bit too fast, especially when playing it muted; it improves significantly when plugged in. But even so I made it through it fine and there are a fair number of non-tremolo parts to enjoy; and it’s a reminder that I should get back to finding five minutes to do tremolo practice every evening. (Easy enough to do while cooking dinner, after all.
• Ziggy Stardust: the arpeggiations were extremely similar to those in More Than a Feeling, it had nice power chord mixture, single note runs, all around lots of fun.

In fact, tier three guitar has been great all around: More than a Feeling and Working for the Weekend remain two of my favorite songs to play. (I should probably come up with a tier three practice list to return to, and quite possible all three songs that I learned this weekend will go on it.) So maybe that’s my current sweet spot? Which is gratifying: I’m sure I’ll hit a wall at some point, but I’m halfway through the difficulty curve on Expert and I’m still doing more than okay. The flip side is that I’m not coming close to perfect on any of these; but that’s good, too, I imagine I learn the most if I can do well enough on a piece to enjoy it and to motivate me to really learn it while having enough flaws in my playing that I really do need to work to learn the piece.

Liesl and I also started chipping away at the DLC backlog on Saturday (on fake guitar/bass); nothing too striking there, though Call Me was a reminder that I really like singing along with Blondie. (I fear that the high notes there are just enough on the edge of my range that I’d be nervous singing when anybody else is along, alas.) And Liesl and I should go through the Hall and Oates and Heart songs on harmonies, too.

Today I put in my piano practice; felt rusty (and my fingers actually felt sluggish, through a combination of the temperature and being out of practice), and the Three-Part Ricercar sounded as bad as I can remember in a while. The Six-Part Ricercar started bad, too, but eventually got better; I really am getting close to not sounding horribly incompetent at that. And I went through some songs from My Neighbor Totoro at the end, always fun to play through Ghibli music.

Pictures from the February VGHVI Minecraft session:

First, the obligatory “flying around noticing stuff” shots. It’s amazing how well the temple area has held up as a center for our world.

Looking out over the temple

A chicken and chests

A watery cave

Pit inside the cave

Looking up from the bottom of the pit

Rain on bedrock

Dan decided to turn the session into a narrated adventure, here’s some of that:

Narrative 1

Narrative 2

Miranda returned to her platform from last time (which turns out to be a flower), finishing it off:

Working on the bottom of the flower

Added leaves

Completed bottom of flower

Starting work on the top of the flower

Enclosing the top in glass

Looking down into the furnished top

Inside the top

Signs

While Miranda was working on that, Roger was wandering around, and discovered a mushroom island; I went to visit him, because I’d never seen that either:

I'm a sucker for the art of Minecraft chunk loading

Mushroom hillside

Mushroom cows

Mushroom cave

Pink mushroom

Moon rises over mushrooms

After finishing the flower, Miranda made a floating island:

Floating island

The architect ponders

Trees, grass, flowers, mandala

Lamp and chest

Hut

Inside the hut

Pond

The bottom of the island

I was busy on Sunday, so I only got to practice on Saturday, but it went well. The missing arpeggiation lesson is finally starting to come together, I got 97% on it a couple of times. (Though I’m not doing so well on the tremolo lesson these days…)

Then I went through some of the old songs that I liked; Working for the Weekend and More Than a Feeling are both super super fun to play, and they’re both great for me to be working on right now on a technical level. So I’m definitely going to come back to those.

For the new songs, I’m actually just going through the motions a little more than I have been in the past—not sure if I’m getting burned out a bit or if none of them are super exciting. Here are the new ones:

• Funk #49: Boring and repetitive, but playing plugged in was surprisingly instructional. There’s a hammer-on bit and a bit where you add the sixth string to the second through fourth strings, both of which made a difference that I wasn’t expecting when I listened to them.
• King George: Arpeggiation and chords at the start that I should have done better on; fun power chords; an easy, short, pleasant solo. I didn’t do particularly well, but I basically enjoyed it; not sure why I didn’t put in more time on it, maybe I should come back to it later?
• Turning Japanese: Another one where I should have done better, though I didn’t take many notes about the song, so I guess it didn’t make that big an impression on me.
• Oh My God: I did well on the repeated notes, okay on the chords, but much less well than I’d like on one scale bit.

The other thing about the guitar practice was that something started to feel funny with my playing part way through. I hope/assume it wasn’t the strings, given that I just replaced them; maybe it’s the picks? I should experiment more with that next time.

I also put in some Musical Offering practice this weekend, and for the first time I can start to see what the 6-Part Ricercar will feel like when I basically have it in my fingers and can actually start really listening to it. I still have some work before that happens, but I’m a lot more optimistic about the how it will be after my second pass going closely through the piece than I was a couple of weeks ago.

Again, I only played in the middle of the week, but at least I’m chipping along. We found the girl we were looking for, and fought a nightmare. Then we went back to the fireworks maker; she turned out to be his daughter, and made some big fireworks for us.

We went back to see; the fireworks made it past the storm, and we arrived at the next city. It looks like some sort of mining town or something, with pig people?

The battles seem to be getting tougher; I guess my skipping battles and not doing anything serious with items may be starting to bite us. Also, I was surprised that there wasn’t any dungeon in the casino city. (Though there was a battle arena for Imagines that I skipped.)

The main unusual event that happened this week was that I replaced the strings on the guitar for the first time. Electric guitars are different from other instruments that I’ve dealt with, because the strings are a lot stiffer; I wish I’d wound the bottom two pegs a bit more, but they seem to already be holding their tune fine, so I guess I didn’t screw things up too much?

This weekend’s pro guitar pieces:

• Werewolves of London: an alternate tuning, and the music itself was mostly boring but with a few bits that were harder than I’d like mixed in, all of which added up to something I didn’t enjoy.
• Me Enamora: It started off with single note bits that were fun but a bit too hard for me, then strummy bits that I had the wrong pick for (I would have liked a thin pick, but I couldn’t have played the single notes with that), then a solo that was definitely too hard for me, then repeating some of prior bits. I like the song; right now it’s too hard for me, but I hope that eventually I’ll come back to it and be able to do rather better on the single note bits in the start and somewhat better on the solo?

That was the last of the solid songs, so next on to moderate:

• Working for the Weekend: Really really fun, absolutely one of my favorite pro guitar songs. Though I didn’t take good notes on it, so I’m not exactly sure why I enjoyed it so much; I’ll definitely be playing it again and will find out more. It also sounded quite good plugged in.
• Hey Man Nice Shot: Full of fast dropped D power chords, changing constantly instead of repeating the same chord over and over again; the upshot was that I couldn’t hit them properly, and didn’t particularly enjoy the attempt.
• More Than a Feeling: Arpeggiation that started out a bit too hard but where I eventually started getting used to it; chord bits that were pleasant, and a surprisingly accessible solo. I should return to this one, too.
• I Can See for Miles: Surprisingly accessible and pleasant. It had unusual chords, but not too many different ones and they weren’t too difficult. And that made it quite interesting to play when plugged in, hearing what those chords sounded like coming out of the amp.

I also went through five (I think?) songs on Pro Bass. I’m actually on the moderate difficulty tier on both instruments now (though noticeably further ahead on pro bass), and bass is giving me trouble more and more often, though it’s still generally a bit easier than guitar.

Liesl and I also finished going through all the on-disc vocal harmonies content; that’s been a lot of fun, and while there are songs that I have no desire to sing again, on balance it was good to have an excuse to branch out more than normal. I was amused to see that we’re in the top 1% of the harmonies leaderboard: so now I’m there on pro keys, pro guitar, and harmonies, and pro bass is certainly attainable. Pro drums, not so much; and, while I haven’t checked, I doubt I’m particularly close to the top 1% on solo vocals, I think there’s a lot more people who have done a few songs on harmonies than who have gone through all the songs. (Also, Liesl is a better singer than I am.) Still, we have gotten gold stars on many of the songs; in fact, I think the “5 star every song on expert harmonies” goal may well be attainable for us?

Another week where I didn’t play Ni No Kuni at all on the weekend but at least I chipped away in the middle of the week. Though I was quite tired that day when I did it, and it was a very dialogue-heavy section, so I barely know what happened!

I went to the casino city, looking for this fireworks guy. I think he wanted me to find his star pupil, so we went looking for her. We started in the casino, but we couldn’t find her; Gyro quite liked it there, but Maru was of rather the opposite opinion. We went to the inn after that, and must be about to trigger a plot point, because the game saved automatically. Rather than sleeping, though, the other two left; I needed sleep in the real world, however, so I stopped there rather than trying to figure out what was going on.

The other Ghibli experience of the week was going to the new Ghibli movie, The Secret World of Arrietty. In the lower tier of Ghibli movies, I would say, but their lower tier is still pretty good.

I was getting over a cold this weekend, so even though it was a three-day weekend I didn’t play as much Rock Band as I normally do (and didn’t play piano at all); but I did eventually get in five songs on the guitar. Specifically:

• Sister Christian: Fun power chords, combined with some nice flips and other variants. (Training mode didn’t warn me about that, but I was pleased to discover I could sight read them.) The solo was a bit beyond me, but will be good to return to when I’m better. And I was shocked to be ranked at #74 on the leaderboard, no idea what was going on there.
• The Con: It had you strumming odd subsets of the strings, and I’m fairly sure it was using an alternate tuning. The result was that I didn’t feel like I was actually playing the song, just a gamified variant of it; I didn’t even try to see what it would sound like plugged in.
• False Alarm: In general, I’m not much of a punk fan, but it was fun to play (albeit noticeably faster than I would have liked). In particular, it changed up the power chords, moving around a bit on the lowest string of the chord, which made it more interesting than it would have been otherwise.
• Don’t Bury Me … I’m Still Not Dead: I was worried about the chords where you only play the A and G but not the D string, but they sounded fine when plugged in. It was a bit faster than I’d like, but not too bad, and was fairly power chord heavy. I used a medium pick on this, which I’m noticing myself doing more often: songs with fast chords but also with single note runs.
• Living on a Prayer: Honestly, in some sense I think this is the perfect Rock Band song. Total rock anthem, guitar part with a pleasant mixture of power chords, bassy bits (maybe a bit too many bassy bits, to be honest), a solo that doesn’t overstay its welcome, in the middle of the difficulty spectrum, over the top chorus, reflexive lyrics containing a euphemism for a guitar, ridiculous key change. So glad they redid this for Rock Band 3—not really so much my style of music, but it’s archetypal purity in the context of the game more than makes up for that.

The other thing that happened this week was that I broke a string for the first time. I didn’t have any spare strings (whoops! Normally I’m better about advance planning than that), but fortunately I have a whole spare guitar, so I could keep on going.

Pictures from the January VGHVI Minecraft session. First, some general photos:

Cows hiding behind the ice

A strange spire in the distance

A pig is riding the rails

No more mountain? Sad.

Sunset behind the mandala

Next, we played hide and seek; Miranda got annoyed at me at some point and started throwing lots of eggs, which turned into chickens.

Jonathan examines the chickens

Chickens by the door

Chickens outside

After that, I strolled around a bit more, and came across a warm, welcoming bed:

That looks comfortable!

Whoops

That was a mistake

Wreckage

Pat built a glass tower out in the sea:

Glass tower

Tower at sunset

The top of the tower

Inside the tower

Looking down at the water

And Miranda started work on a platform nearby, though I don’t think she’s done with it yet:

Purple platform under construction

Closer view of platform

Bottom view of platform and tower

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.