I went through four songs this week on Expert Pro Guitar. Low Rider was easy and boring, mostly sounding like an unimaginative bass part; but hey, at least I got my Pro Guitar gold stars out of the way, and reached 50th place on the leaderboard. I actually shouldn’t have missed any notes; I did make some mistakes though, and on my first playthrough the game frequently thought I was playing extra notes when I wasn’t. I’m not sure what was going on there, but when I played a little more crisply, then that didn’t happen as much, so I guess that’s good?

Last Dance was also easy and boring, but a little more useful: a significant chunk of the game had me switching between a simple I-IV-V barre chord sequence, and while I could do that well enough to not get an awful score in game, I didn’t do great, and it made my hands hurt. So that’s useful feedback: a touchstone that I can use to measure the extent to which I’m not completely incompetent, both by listening to myself and by building up my hand strength. I’ll certainly work on the chord progression in question outside of game, and play through it again in-game (plugged in) in future weeks.

For Beautiful People, I finally tried out the dropped D tuning plugged in; and, you know, it was more fun than I expected it to be. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to going through more pieces in that vein, but I should give them a fair shake instead of skipping them.

And I Wanna Be Sedated was interesting enough that I wrote about it on my main blog. And, as I said there, it also suggested something I should practice outside of game, namely alternating strumming of power chords: I’m bad at at it, and hit strings that I shouldn’t far too often when shifting chords. Like Last Dance, I’ll return to that song in future weeks.

I’m also thinking I should experiment more with different guitar picks; I’ll stop by a music store this week and pick up a few to try out.

I went through a few songs on Pro Bass; fun, though they’re definitely getting harder, enough so that I can’t just go through a whole swathe at once. And I finished off another group of the game’s lessons, just two of them left.

I’d been lax on my piano practice over the last week and a bit, and you could definitely tell: the 3-Part Ricercar actually wasn’t so bad, but I was at sea far too often during the 6-Part Ricercar. I’ll definitely have to put in more time on that in the middle of the week.

This month’s VGHVI Minecraft session was a quiet but pleasant one, with only Miranda, Roger, and myself present. (Largely talking about genealogy, as it turned out.) I thought I might build something out of my swamp house from last time, but I ended up just wandering around the swamp in fascination.

Swamp house in the rain

Sunset over the swamp

The main thing that caught my eye was that the swamp house was nestled in a corner of walls that were formed by a chunk transition caused my a Minecraft version update: swamp on one side, older style terrain on the other side, looking for all the world like a fortress. So I followed those walls for as far as I could see the chunk transitions. First, one direction:

One corner of the wall

Further along the wall

A watery transition

The transition continues

Another corner

The transition peters out at that corner in that direction. Next, the other direction, starting from a swamp tree hanging over the wall:

Hanging swamp gardens

Going in the other direction along the wall

Water emerging from a transition cliff

Really, the swamps in Minecraft are just beautiful. I love the different water colors; and, in the darkness, the trees look to me like strange shaggy beasts congregating in the countryside.

Swamp waters

More swamp waters, this time with some blue and some trees

Sunset over the swamp

Moonrise over the swamp

Shaggy tree beasts in the mist

And, finally, some non-swamp pictures; that squid seemed to have flashing lights or something.

A vicious attack squid

Patterns in the ice

The city looks as wonderful as ever

While I was wandering around, Miranda was putting a few more touches on the ice castle from last time:

Ice castle lattice (front)

Ice castle lattice (back)

And then one of us (not me, probably Miranda but maybe Roger) had the idea that next time we should play hide-and-seek. So Miranda started to build a suitable playground for that, with a library theme:

Beginning work on the hide and seek area

Miranda's first few buildings

Roof with arrow

This moving water strongly offended Miranda's sense of aesthetics

Enchantment!

I’d never seen an enchantment table before. I built a couple of buildings as well; the first was a tall, narrow tower:

Looking down the book tower

Book vertigo

The outside of the tower

Library duck approves

And then I built a floating library. (Well, mostly floating, there’s a ladder on one corner.)

Starting work on the floating library

Inside the floating library

Let's add some enchantment tables

The top of the floating library

The floating library at sunrise

Floating library and tower

During this time, Miranda was working on a labyrinth, which I was sadly remiss in taking pictures of:

Entrance to library labyrinth

We’ll give it a try next time. (Which will be January 26th, Minecraft nights are the last Thursday of the month.) Come join us!

This week’s pro guitar practice was interesting enough that I wrote about it on my main blog, so go read about it there! Outside of that:

On Saturday, the three of us went to a musical version of The Secret Garden. Which was pretty awful, but for some reason it led to us introducing Miranda to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat on the ride home. Which Liesl and I sung along to, and we enjoyed that enough that we pulled out Rock Band and sung through the rest of the afternoon.

And fortunately my throat has recovered from the constant draining that it was doing a month or so ago: cleaning the air ducts really made a difference, I guess! So we kept that up for an hour and a half (stopping only because of dinner); and I was pleased to discover that I seem to be gaining a bit of range on the bottom, and that my voice sounds better overall as well. So I’m glad that the practice seems to be paying off! Still not good at hitting close harmonies, but hopefully that will also improve as we continue to sing together.

This week, I didn’t have a huge amount of time to play Rock Band, so I decided to focus on Pro Bass and on my guitar technique. For the former, I went through 10 songs, finishing off the Apprentice tier on Expert; quite pleasant, started off very easy but the last few gave me some opportunities to make mistakes, albeit not enough opportunities that I decided to replay any of them. There were also several bits that were fast enough that I used them as alternating strumming practice.

As for guitar, I went back through the Hard Pro Guitar barre chord lessons, and a smattering of other ones. The good news is that I’m better at barre chords than I used to be, and in particular the one lesson that took me a couple of weeks to master I succeeded on the first try this time. But the bad news is that it took me a few tries on some of the other lessons and that my hand ached after doing them, so clearly I should work on barre chords more. Really, I should work that into my outside-of-game practice, instead of restricting the latter to alternating strumming.

I also practiced the 6-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering three times (I believe) this week; I’m making progress, though there’s a long way to go before I even have the notes down. I only practiced the 3-Part Ricercar once; that piece is scaring me a bit, I should confront that.

I was busy this weekend, and I felt like spending my free time reading and playing music, so: no Ni No Kuni. Fortunately, I’d played a bit mid-week, so I have a little bit to report, but not much.

Specifically, at the end of last week, I’d just talked to a girl in the first world. I went and talked to her father next, who had gotten possessed somehow; I first fought the monster that was possessing him (the only battle I’ve done in the first world) and then, with the help of his wife, gave him a “kindness” heart piece.

After that, I went back to the girl, and gave her a “courage” heart piece. She’d been staying in the house, but I guess there was nothing physical wrong with her, just something mental wrong with both her and her father? At any rate, with that healed, I went back to the second world, and gave the girl there a courage heart piece as well. She got better, and decided to join my party (together with her Imagine). Her name is Maru, and she’s a healer.

Her father taught us some spells, and told us to go to a volcano. I wandered around town a bit, helping people, but then headed out of town to the volcano, saving right outside it.

Lots of Rock Band this weekend. On Saturday, I decided to give Pro Bass a try; I jumped in on Expert, on the theory that, on the non-pro versions, Expert Bass is probably a little easier than Hard Guitar, and that proved to be the case for Pro as well. So I ended up going through all 11 of the Warmup songs, and the first 3 (I think) of the Apprentice songs.

So they were obviously easy enough that I didn’t feel compelled to play most of them multiple times (and I got a full combo on one and a 625-note streak on another), but they were fun! My ears weren’t always doing a great job of picking out the bass lines from the music; so while I was more aware than I normally am of harmonic changes, how they expressed themselves was occasionally a bit surprising. And this being Expert there were some bits requiring more dexterity than I could comfortably do: Werewolves of London had these cute little flips, and there was another song (I’ve forgotten which) that was tremolo-heavy. In general, I enjoyed playing single notes (instead of chords) without the ostentation of guitar solos, and I’m planning to continue with this for a while.

I also took a swing at a few of the Expert Pro Guitar lessons: I certainly need to improve my technique.

Saturday evening, Liesl and I went through several recent DLC songs, with her on non-Pro Bass and me first on non-Pro Guitar, later coming back on Pro Keys. And it was all great music: the Stevie Wonder DLC is absolutely one of my favorite DLC packs (I was going to say my single favorite, but on reflection London Calling clearly has that title, and there may be others that rank with Stevie Wonder), but I also enjoyed the other songs quite a bit. Specifically: “Galactic Love”, by New Nobility; “Frankenstein Teaser Trailer”, by Richard Campbell; “Welcome to the Black Parade”, by My Chemical Romance; “El Monstro”, by Dance for the Dying; “Break Me” and “Pretty Boy”, by The Irresponsibles. If you’re looking for DLC, I recommend all of those: not a dud in the bunch, some very good indeed, and I really wish “Welcome to the Black Parade” hadn’t been released before Pro Keys was available.

And today, I played my first songs on Expert Pro Guitar, which was awesome! Living In America’s main difficulty was that I found it hard to jump from an open E power chord to a seventh fret power chord: my fingers still can’t quickly hit chords quite as firmly as I’d like. Also, while I’ve been working on my alternate strumming, it’s less regular than I’d like. And the other interesting thing about that song was the different sounds that it makes: the game represented some of that difference by telling you to mute some of the chords, but my guess is that the game uses muting to represent a range of techniques. I could be wrong there, and certainly I need to spend more time experimenting with producing different sounds out of the amp. (I played through the song maybe six times, half muted and half amped.)

And I had as much fun playing The Hardest Button to Button as any other time I can remember with the game. (Which is saying something!) Nothing fancy, which combined with enough repetition to mean that I could learn the bits; but there was also enough variation to keep me on my toes. Some amount of arpeggiation; some amount of power chords; and a couple of variations on power chords, with it having you extend your finger over an extra string on one barred E power chord and having you occasionally dip over to an open E between barred A power chords.

That song, in particular, was quite a lot of fun to play while plugged in. Normally, I’m sight reading for significant chunks of most songs; but with that one, once I’d gone through it a few times and was used to the harmonic shifts in the song, I knew what to do everywhere, including bits where they switched things up. And hearing what those varied power chords sounded like was quite instructive: e.g. the sharp note that you get by extending to a fourth string gave me quite a bit of motivation to strum precisely enough so that I’d hit the bottom four strings without accidentally strumming the fifth string. Muting strings to cut off notes was also important; it’s something that I’d been doing instinctively, but I played around with it a little more consciously, including seeing how it felt different with both the right hand and the left hand.

After I’d played through it plugged in several times, I went back to playing through it muted to see if I could get a good score; I did (5 stars, 309th place on the leaderboards), but it felt very odd indeed playing without hearing my strings. Incidentally, I’m barely in the top 1% on Pro Guitar now, and finishing eighteen Pro Bass goals put me comfortably over 500 million fans.

I’m not planning to play through every song on Expert Pro Guitar; and I hope that there will be songs that I like enough to want to focus on them for quite a while. (I bought a bunch of Pro Guitar DLC upgrades yesterday, too.) But certainly today was an auspicious start to that experiment.

(Not much to report on the Musical Offering front: I played a couple of times, but in general evenings this week I wanted to spend hanging out with Zippy instead of practicing piano. I’ll get back to that, though!)

Very little to report this week. On Tuesday, I went through a dungeon on the way to the next city; I had to do more spells, including a few where I ended up trying several of the ones in the book before I happened across the correct one. (I think that wouldn’t have been necessary if I’d been more fluent in Japanese and/or had been paying more attention.) I got another Imagine in that dungeon; this one hatched from an egg.

And this weekend I was in a more Rock Band-y mood than a Ni No Kuni mood; I entered the city, and found the person I was supposed to talk to; he claimed not to know magic, but his assistant reminded me of somebody in the first world. So I went back there, and talked to her briefly, but I needed to cook dinner so I didn’t finish that task.

Pictures from this month’s Minecraft session (which really is the November one, we just pushed it back a week).

As has been the case in recent sessions, I mostly spent the time flying around, seeing what the new terrain is like. But first, some miscellaneous pictures:

Cow on the beach at night

Digging through to the nether roof

Lava arrow

I think that lava arrow is natural rather than constructed, but it actually does a pretty good job of pointing back at the portal.

Roger found a nice cliffside with jack o’lanterns:

Faces on the pumpkins

Better view of the waterfall

And Mattie was amused by the chicken that had wandered into a cave that Jonathan had explosively excavated several months back:

Chicken in cave

Looking up from the bottom of the cave

Now a bunch of pictures from my wandering. There were some quite sudden chunk transitions as old rendering algorithms and new rendering algorithms clashed, here’s one of my favorites:

Cliff glitch

Side view of cliff glitch

This was the first time I’d seen swamps, I think, and they’re rather lovely.

A swamp

Swamp at nightfall

Moon rising over swamp

Some more random pictures from the wandering:

Lava in a cave trench

I just took this one because of the message on screen

Sunrise way up high in the sky

A village I ran into

Now, back to glitches: here’s one that led to a cave being connected directly to the ocean.

Inside the cave

Closeup view of the water

View into the cave from the outside

And more glitches, include a rather charming old-fashioned floating island, followed by some non-glitch environmental pictures:

Square island corner

Cows next to glitch cliff

Floating ark

Island in mist

Strange moon

I’m still mostly blocked on construction projects, but when I found that swamp area again, I thought I’d make a little house in it. Miranda made fun of the small size of the house, but I think it’s kind of cute; I’ll have to come back again during the day to see how well it fits into the surroundings.

Green patch in the swamp

Swamp house

Looking out from the house

The house is lit up

As is usual, however, Patrick and Miranda were not at all blocked on construction! They decided to build a rather amazing Ice Palace on top of the ocean ice near the spawn point, right above the underwater train tunnel.

My first view of the ice palace

A decoration on top

There's a chicken coop in the back; here's the top view

And here's the side view

When I came back in the day, I found that the palace had turned into a meditation on the nature of captivity:

Distant view during the day

Closer view during the day

Imprisoned snowman

Please, let me out!

The chickens are happy with their prison, however

The middle of the palace, including a squid swimming between the palace and the tracks

When I came back the next night, Miranda had decided to expand the imprisonment theme with some pigs (with the flames from the spawners adding to the gruesomeness!); first, though, some pictures of other additions:

View of the front at night

A tree grows in the middle of the palace

Building a pigpen

Roast pork!

Side view of pigs

Eggs to go with the bacon

(I’m not sure that Miranda has the same interpretation of the imprisonment theme as I do; she’ll doubtless chime in below. I think it works rather well, though.) And some last pictures as dawn breaks:

Sunrise over the palace

Sun and the palace tree

Shapes in the distance

As expected, I finished Hard Pro Guitar this week. Which was great! I’ll go into details more on my main blog, but, for the record, the last four songs were: 25 or 6 to 4, whose solo was interesting enough solo practice; Llama, about which I have nothing good to say; Beast and the Harlot, whose main positive feature was that it wasn’t Llama; and Roundabout, which defies description. So, not my favorite group of songs, but really that’s my fault: we’re clearly well past my level of competence even on Hard, especially at the solos. It will be refreshing to go back to the easier songs: even with the switch to Expert, I imagine I’ll find more in those songs that I can play well.

My other musical project has been the Three-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering. Which is now at a state where I’m not making stupid mistakes, but I could stand to improve its musicality. And, frankly, I could use help with that: I am sorely tempted to fly to Paris to beg a lesson from my harpsichord teacher. (Well, maybe I’m sorely tempted to fly to Paris for other reasons. But still!)

I decided to keep the Three-Part Ricercar in my fingers, but to mostly move on to learning the notes for the Six-Part Ricercar. Which has been interesting so far, though clearly I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. But then a funny thing happened today when I went back to the Three-Part Ricercar: my ears did a much better job than they had of parsing out the different voices! So, all of a sudden, improving the musicality of the piece doesn’t seem nearly as out of reach: I like the way it sounded today a lot more than I had, and I’m really looking forward to playing around with different possibilities.

Good times. And my throat is feeling better, maybe we’ll get back to harmonizing next week?

I increased the volume of my Ni No Kuni playtime this week: I’m trying to treat it as the current game I’m playing rather than as Japanese study, which means that I play it when I have (non-Ascension) gaming time in the middle of the week instead of segregating it to the weekend. I’ve actually been fairly busy with other projects this week, so I still only played it twice, but that’s more than in previous weeks, and the weekend play session was several hours long.

When I stopped last week, I’d just entered the first city, after giving somebody a heart piece: he was lacking in “やる気”, which means something like willpower or motivation. And, when I entered the city, I found other people with the same problem, including the king. (Who was a sort of cat person, as were many but not all people in the town.) Before they would let me talk to the king, I had to do some fetch quests, but eventually I got to talk to him, and had to figure out what was wrong; at somebody’s suggestion (I think it was a sort of wise woman person, but it might have been Shizuku?), I went back to the first world to find the king’s twin in that world, to see if I could get an idea of what was wrong.

There wasn’t much going on in the first world; I assume I’ll eventually drag back another party member from there, but not this time. The king’s twin turned out to be a cat, who liked having its ears groomed; when I went back to the second world, it turns out that the king’s “earpick” had gotten stolen. So I was supposed to go into an underground sewer system to get it back.

Outside the sewer, I ran into a boy who was planning to go in there. I told him he wasn’t up to it, but he showed me his Imagine; after realizing that I was a magic user, he decided to give me his Imagine instead. So I guess acquiring each Imagine is going to be a special event of some sort? When I fought my first battle, I still only had my old Imagine in my party (along with Shizuku and myself), but my old Imagine was vulnerable to a water attack that the first monster had, so the game showed me how to swap party members mid-battle. I think (but I could be wrong) that you’ll always have three people in your party: yourself, one Imagine, and one non-Imagine; I stuck with the other Imagine through this dungeon.

Which was noticeably longer than the first dungeon: more monsters, and the monsters weren’t as much pushovers. So I had to heal several times, use healing items (both for HP and MP, the in-game item description turns out to say what each item gives you even though the Magic Master is silent on that), and use some crystals in the environment that give you a one-time partial refill on one of those. Monsters respawned more frequently than I liked, and I ended up running past them some of the time. There were two very minor puzzles, and one chest that I wasn’t powerful enough to open; the boss didn’t present any particular difficulties.

After that, I gave the earpick back to the king; that helped, but he was still lacking in motivation, so I had to find another heart piece to give him. That put him back to normal, and he gave me his magic staff; I’d hoped it would let me open the chest in that dungeon, but no dice. I then wandered around town trying to find more people to help; one ghost gave me a bit more of a tutorial in using the Magic Master (including an artifical alphabet it uses in a couple of places), a few more people needed their will restored (and I couldn’t find a heart piece for one of them), and one person only talks to cats, so I’ll have to come back to help that person. I also unlocked the ability to use stores and change people’s weapons.

I think I’ve done everything I can in the city, though there are three loose ends; I’ve been told the next city to head off to, so that’s what I’ll do next week? It continues to be a pleasant enough game, with more of a mixture of different types of things to do than I’m used to in a JRPG. The Ghibli charm has worn off to some extent, however: still nice art (and the king from this city was very reminiscent of The Cat Returns), but it’s been a while since I’ve heard a piece of music that made me sit up and take notice, and the characters and plot aren’t giving me a strong Ghibli vibe. I’m still quite happy to be playing the game, for both aesthetic and didactic reasons, but I’m not quite as excited as I was when I started.