A busy week and weekend, but I managed to get in some Rocksmith one evening mid-week, and I played it both yesterday and today as well. I’m splitting my time between the songs the game throws at me for events and practicing songs that I’m going to play with a coworker (with a little bit of practice songs that I’m likely to hit in master mode encores to boot); a pleasant enough mix.

The one thing that’s a little frustrating is that one of the songs I’m working on is Rebel, Rebel, and I haven’t been able to get the 100,000 points on that to unlock master mode in it. Part of that is my fault—I’m not as good at playing arpeggios that I’d like—but it also seems to be the case that the game occasionally says I haven’t played a note that I actually did. (And I don’t think my timing is off?) Not sure what’s going on there; maybe the vibrations from the different strings are confusing it somehow?

Though the main guitar-related note was that I finally wrote a long blog post on my main blog about games and guitar learning. I like how it turned out; and I was very pleased to see a tweet calling it “insightful” and to discover that the author of that tweet works at Harmonix and that he’s pointing my article out to somebody who works on Rocksmith. (Who also liked it.) So: I’m being read by the right people, and I don’t sound too crazy to them!

I did a bit of singing: still chipping away at Bohemian Rhapsody, still sounding bad. Also, I volunteered to do piano accompaniment at a recital for Miranda’s violin teacher’s students, so I started working on those pieces. Which rather worries me—the current list of pieces has four from Suzuki book 4 or 5 that I haven’t played before, and the piano parts there are tricky enough that they’ll need some amount of work for me to get comfortable with them. Hopefully it’s only a tentative list and some of those will end up not being in the final program; otherwise, I’ll need to be very focused on playing piano for the next few weeks…

As I mentioned last week, one of my coworkers has started playing Rocksmith as well. We talked about that and decided that it would be fun for the two of us to work on a few songs to play together. So we looked over the on-disc content, and came up with a list of seven songs: Are You Gonna Go My Way, Boys Don’t Cry, Higher Ground, Rebel Rebel, Take Me Out, We Share the Same Skies, and When I’m with You. I’d already memorized (or mostly memorized in the case of Take Me Out) one part of three of those, but four of them were songs that I still need to work on, but they’re all songs that I’m happy to learn.

Still, that’s going to eat into my time regularly progressing through the game. So, on two or three evenings this week, I practiced guitar for a while after I got home from work, before making dinner; that’s a time when Miranda had frequently been practicing violin, but she can do that earlier if the noise pollution bothered her.

This weekend, Miranda had a friend over on Saturday, so I didn’t practice guitar then (though I did practice piano a bit—I’ve volunteered to accompany at a violin recital next month). I used that as an excuse to get the grocery shopping out of the way on Saturday, so I could devote lots of time on Sunday to making music. Which I did lots of: I went through the seven songs that I had mastered, the other four songs that I’m working on that I don’t yet have mastered, and two events worth of songs that didn’t fit into those categories. I’m getting to where it puts me at the 90,000 point tier for most songs; I’m curious if it’s going to force me into mastering songs (which could be a bit of a problem, memorizing 7 or 11 or whatever songs is one thing, but memorizing 57 songs is another thing) or if it’s going to start switching up parts on me. (I think that the only time it’s ever given me a different part on a song from the one it started me on is when it’s given me a double encore.) If it starts going too far down mastery mode, I’ll probably take matters more into my own hands, either switching up parts myself or downloading DLC for it to use.

I also sang a little bit; though my voice is feeling rough and my lung capacity isn’t quite as good as I’d like. But I did manage to get five stars on Good Vibrations on Hard (though I sounded lousy doing it). No progress on Bohemian Rhapsody on Expert or 20th Century Boy 100%.

I played a bit of Rock Band 3 on Saturday, working on my vocals. I’m working on three songs now: Bohemian Rhapsody on Expert, Good Vibrations on Hard, and trying to get 100% on 20th Century Boy. And I didn’t succeed on any of them. I think I improved on all three, but there’s definitely a ways to go; and I’m not going to bang my head for too long on any of those goals. Not that I don’t like singing, but if I’m going to sing, I should probably do that with Liesl.

I did the singing while Liesl and Miranda were out of the house with one of our cars, and while I’d loaned the other car to a friend: otherwise, I would have been out of the house as well, going shopping. Because, as threatened, I wanted to go guitar shopping on Saturday. And, fortunately, Liesl and Miranda weren’t out for very long, so I did head out after them.

And it was a success! I ended up just playing Gibson models; mostly SGs, though I gave one Les Paul a try. (Which was great, but not great enough for me to want to spend $700 more on it.) I was thinking I would give the SG Special Faded a try, since it’s supposed to be a solid SG for a good price. (Ignore the list price on that page, it’s available for a lot less retail.) And they had one (with the Worn Cherry finish, which was really lovely); I liked it a lot, and would have been very happy to walk out with it.

But somebody had put a 2011 50th Anniversary SG Standard 24 for sale up in the consignment section for only $150 more, and that really was a wonderful instrument. I tried out a few different models, but I kept on coming back to those two; I liked the looks of the SG Special Faded maybe a bit more, and actually it had longer sustains, but the Standard had more character in its treble pickup. (The Special had a very clear sound on both the regular and treble pickups, but too little differentiation between the two.) So ultimately I decided I liked the sound more for the Standard, and the price difference was great given the difference in list price (not that I plan to resell it, but still: the difference in value between the two is more than $150), so I went for it.

And I’m super super happy with that. I brought it home, plugged it in, and fiddled around; then I started going through songs on Rocksmith. And songs where I’d been starting to hit my limits all of a sudden were a lot easier, the fingerboard was just easier to move around on, and bending strings was a lot more natural. (And those sustains are ridiculous.)

So: it was the right time for me to buy a new guitar (and the right time in a way that it wouldn’t have been a month and a half ago), and I’m very happy with the choice of instrument.

Not much else to say on the Rocksmith front; basically, I’m just going through the events. I unlocked the last bonus song; I was starting to get a little annoyed at the bonus songs because they’re sometimes focusing on solo techniques that I’m not that interested in, and in fact this week I ran into one of them (Boss) that was the first song that I’ve felt was really too hard for me in ways that I’m not actively interested in struggling with right now. Except that, in the same event, I had to play another bonus song, Six AM Salvation, which is both super fun musically and has very amusing lyrics. So: yay bonus songs after all! (I still wish there were a way to tell it “don’t show me Boss again in the rotation”, though.) I’m still generally seeing the same part over and over again for a given song, I wonder when it’s going to start showing me more parts?

One of my coworkers also started playing Rocksmith over the holiday; and another is interested, and I think might be interested in using it to learn bass. Which could turn out really fun – it could give us access to a common set of songs that we could play with two guitars and a bass. So who knows, maybe this will lead to me playing guitar outside of games!

I thought this was going to be a light week: my parents were visiting, so I didn’t practice guitar yesterday. But they left this morning, and they actually left early enough this morning that I could start playing Rocksmith at 10am. Which meant that I had a bunch of time to play that game: I went through the seven songs that I’d unlocked Master mode on (I’m getting faster at that practice, though all the songs still require weekly review), and my current event was only four songs, with three of them taking only one or two playthroughs to get the target score. And, once I’d done that, the next event was only three songs, so I did that as well.

And even with that, I still had time left before I needed to go grocery shopping, so I decided to chip away a bit more at vocals in Rock Band 3. I finished I Got You on Expert (took several tries), Bohemian Rhapsody on Hard, and Good Vibrations on Medium. (With Miranda popping up to sing along as soon as I started Bohemian Rhapsody; Liesl joined in on that one, too.) So now only two songs left; I think I’ll be able to do Bohemian Rhapsody on Expert with a bit more practice, but I’m dubious about Good Vibrations. (Maybe I’ll be able to get it with judicious octave shifting, who knows…)

Still: approaching the end of my regular Rock Band 3 practice. Which is sad; more exciting is that I’m planning to go shopping for a better guitar on Saturday. The Rock Band 3 Squier has served me well, but I’m definitely running across its limitations now.

(Administrative note: if anybody is subscribed solely to the ‘pro guitar’ tag of this blog, I’m going to stop using that tag for general guitar learning, reserving it in the future for those rare occasions when I’m actually talking about Rock Band 3 pro guitar. So from now on I’ll just tag Rocksmith posts with ‘guitar’ (as well as ‘rocksmith’, of course). Though of course those posts will continue to be the vast majority of the posts in this blog anyways, making the tag almost pointless.)

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.

Yesterday, Liesl and I went through the Blitz songs in Rock Band 3. A good collection: nothing that I was super in love with, but very few that I disliked, and in general we had fun. We went through them on guitar/bass; for a lot of the songs, it seemed like the vocals were the high point, so we’ll have to go through them again in vocal harmonies. (And I should do another sweep of songs that I haven’t played in pro keys, too.)

One bit that I hadn’t realized: the Blitz soundtrack includes two songs that were part of Rock Band 2 but that we weren’t allowed to export to Rock Band 3, namely Give It Away and Spoonman. I in particular really appreciate them for including Give It Away, because without that, it would have been impossible to play all of Blood Sugar Sex Magik in Rock Band 3, which kind of sucks. So yay to Harmonix for making that possible again.

Today I went through some pro guitar: I went through some of the tier 0 songs again and then started on my second tour through tier 1. In terms of tier 0, I think I’m going to leave I Wanna Be Sedated, Last Dance, and Yoshimi in the rotation for a while: they all have me emphasizing different core techniques that I still have significant room for improvement at, and they’re all songs I basically enjoy, so I should keep on going with them. Probably the solo for I Love Rock and Roll, too.

I wish I’d taken better notes on tier 1, because there were two or three songs in today’s selection that I also felt that I should replay, I just can’t remember what they were! And, of course, several that I was less excited about and will drop. (And one that I was unsure about: I really like The Only Exception, but that’s mostly because of singing, I don’t know yet how I feel about its guitar part. I’ll probably keep it in the mix for another week, though.) I only went through maybe six of the tier 1 songs, it wasn’t a particularly long session, so lots more exploring to come.

On Saturday, I had a pleasant time at Dan Apczynski‘s place playing games with him, Jorge Albor, Mattie Brice, and Kirk Hamilton. Which was super fun; we played some board games (Pandemic, Betrayal at House on the Hill) and some Rock Band 3, and Dan even gave me some super-useful guitar tips! Just having him show me around his setup was useful, but he also had some suggestions on getting better tone.

On Sunday, my goal was to finish Tier 4. Which I did! Well, sort of: the two songs I had left were Sir Duke and Humanoid, and I only managed two and a half stars on Sir Duke. Which I do think should probably be Tier 5, and has one characteristic that makes the game particularly unforgiving when playing it, namely that it has slowly strummed chords that it represents as a closely spaced arpeggio instead of a chord, and the timing is almost impossible to get right on that. Though the flip side is that I later found a section where it was perfectly happy to let me strum chords extra times; not sure what’s going on there, but I guess I got to cheat the scoring both ways, so it all balances out? Lots of ninths and minor sevenths, though, which I’m not good at; I enjoyed the song, and I can imagine returning to it eventually, but for now, I’m not going to put in the time to get three and a half songs.

That one is just DLC, though; for in-game achievement purposes, though, the one that counts was Humanoid, and that one I did manage to get three stars. Actually, if I’m remembering correctly, I got four stars on it? It’s unpleasant metal, and in particular I didn’t enjoy the fast dropped-D power chord stuff at the start; I did enjoy a later reasonably trick bit involving jumping between medium-high frets on the high strings and then low frets on low strings, that’s something I wouldn’t always have been able to do. Still, ultimately: not something I enjoyed, I went through once and then declared victory.

I’d also downloaded a couple of pieces of DLC this week. Good Girl was Tier 3, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it: some pleasant power chords, some full barre chords that I was pleased that my hands could jump to with very little problem. And the single-note runs were within reach, too. I’m thinking I might even add that one to the regular practice rotation—not my favorite song overall, but the guitar part is fun and instructive for me right now.

The other was Drops of Jupiter. Which was only Tier 2, but I found it a lot harder than Good Girl: a fair number of slightly unusual bits and some arpeggiation that I didn’t always get right. It was reasonably fun to play, but I don’t think I’ll return to it.

So: Tier 5 next! I’m pretty sure that Sir Duke is only the first of many songs that I won’t get three stars on, and I’m also sure that solos will start to be way beyond me. (I’ve started adding scales to my out-of-game practice in an effort to help with that.) I doubt I’ll push all the way through Tier 5, and certainly not through Devil Horns, but I’ll see what I can do. And when it gets too hard, I’ll probably start over at the beginning and really try to learn stuff.

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?

I spent a decent amount of time in the middle of the week playing through music outside of Rock Band. On the guitar, I continue to try to learn 風の丘, and that continues to be like pulling teeth. But I am doing a slightly better idea at seeing the chords in the piece; I’m also using it as an excuse to learn how to play an E minor scale on the guitar, though that’s not well enough ingrained to have any effect on my playing of the piece yet. And I’ve been playing piano some, mostly the first five parts of Pictures at an Exhibition. Which, it turns out, Miranda rather likes; I’m toying with the idea of trying to learn more of the piece, not sure which way that will go yet.

On Saturday, I decided to go through some of the Yes DLC on Rock Band. I got side-tracked, though, because when I sorted the keyboard songs by artist, the first artist was A-Ha, and I decided to go through Take On Me first. Which turned out to be super fun, albeit slightly frustrating: catchy tune to play on keys, and there’s no individual note in it that I should miss, so why can’t I get five stars on it? I don’t know, and I tried over and over again, but failed; grr, except I had enough fun in the process that I didn’t really mind.

After doing that for most of an hour, I decided to switch over to vocals; also super fun, and it turns out that the top note in the song (which shows up several times) is also the top note in my vocal range. Which, honestly, made me glad nobody else was in the house at the time—to hit it, I really had to belt out the note, and while I was in tune, my timbre was less than wonderful. Still, a nice exercise in stretching my range, I should return to the song and practice it some more. In fact, it turns out that the bottom notes in the song are either right at or right below the bottom of my vocal range, so it’s great for stretching in both directions!

After that, I did move over to Yes, going through I’ve Seen All Good People. Which was also extremely entertaining, on both keys and singing. I did rather better on the keys that time, not making nearly as many stupid mistakes; Liesl was home by then, so we did harmonies when it came time to sing, and I managed to hit harmonies beneath the lead several times, which I’m normally pretty bad at. Not sure if I’m getting better or if the increased separation between the vocal parts helped; I won’t complain either way.

Today was a guitar day. I’d had Modern Love running through my head constantly since last week, so I decided to make it my inaugural Pro Guitar upgrade purchase. And I’m happy with that decision: simple chords coming slowly enough to make the transitions fairly straightforward, but there’s definitely something satisfying in playing a fun piece that I should be able to do well on and actually doing well.

After that, I went back to the on-disc content, going through Viva La Resistance, The Look, Walk of Life, and One-Armed Scissor. All of which but the last I like quite a bit, and even the last one was interesting from a didactic point of view. As were several of the earlier ones: e.g. the repeated notes in Viva La Resistance were a useful thing for me to work on. (Great song that, too.) I played through all but the last of those songs (including Modern Love) plugged into the amp, and they actually all sounded pretty credible: nobody is going to confuse me with a serious rock guitarist yet (not by a long shot!), but at least I didn’t feel that I had to apologize to everybody in earshot for any of those four songs, as happens sometimes.

(The one weird thing about playing unmuted: I’m surprisingly bad at tuning guitars. You’d think that, given that I had a part-time job tuning harpsichords while I was in high school, that I’d be better at that? For whatever reason, though, I have a somewhat hard time hearing the beats when testing a plucked guitar string against the sound of a piano; maybe I’d do better if I plugged the guitar into the amp and skipped the piano?)

Very pleasant week musically; and I strongly suspect that this week’s earworm will be Take On Me, which I’m okay with. (Though I don’t like it as much as Modern Love; hmm, maybe I’ll try to convince my brain to obsess over Viva La Resistance instead?) I should be able to finish the Moderate songs this week; I still have at least a couple of months of Hard Pro Guitar ahead of me, but the end is visible in the hazy distance?

This weekend was an interesting one: I was going through a manic bit, and it expressed itself by making me feel very musical, in a scattered fashion. After the previous weekend, I’d bought some Billy Joel sheet music, so as soon as everybody else was awake I went through that on the piano. (With occasional singing and whistling.) Then, to work off some energy, I switched over to Rock Band drums; I was pleased to be able to make it through the Warmup songs on Expert, and while Killing Loneliness defeated me on the next tier, it has the rhythm pattern that I need to work on (regular yellow notes with red and pedal alternating, the latter on the off-beats). So I’ll probably return to that one the next time I’m in a drumming mood, it’s definitely good practice. Also, inspired by Kirk’s comment on the Experience Points Podcast, I gave Vaseline a try; a pleasant challenge on Hard but not quite as good for me to focus on as Killing Loneliness, and way too hard for me on Expert.

After that, Liesl and I did some vocal harmonies; and I put in my Pro Guitar practice, going through (I think) another four songs there. Also, that evening, we went through some recent DLC (me on non-pro Guitar, Liesl on Bass); mostly Yes, which I wasn’t thrilled by, though I’m hoping I’ll like it more on Pro Keys.

We had friends over on Sunday, so I didn’t play any Rock Band that day; I did find time to bang out some Ghibli music on the piano, though. On which note, later that week the song 風の丘 got stuck in my head via the excellent Brasta Ghibli album; it wasn’t in my piano book, but I found a quite nice guitar version, so I’m trying to learn that now.