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.

I continued my tour through Tier 4 this week:

• Foolin’: Not my style of music, but interesting enough to play.
• Killing Loneliness: interesting enough variant chords and arpeggiation; something weird going on with the tuning (dropped D but something else beyond that) so I couldn’t play plugged in, which was sad.
• Plush: pleasant chord variants, the arpeggiated bit was a bit hard for me, I enjoyed listening to those chord variants when plugged in.
• My Sharona: pleasant repetitive bassy part that taught me to lift my left hand to prevent notes from sounding; first solo was fun enough, second way too hard/long.
• Misery Business: fun single note runs, reasonably fun dropped D power chords, occasional quite odd chords mixed in there, half of which I could sometimes get. Unfortunately, the whole song seemed like it was tuned a half step low, so I couldn’t play it plugged in.

So: no revelations, nothing I’m planning to come back to regularly, but I’m happy to have gone through those songs. A bit of a pity that two of the songs were more unusally tuned than normal; ah well.

Which leaves me with only two songs and I’ll be done with Tier 4! Sir Duke and Humanoid, specifically; I was tempted to just finish the tier this weekend, but I had just enough errands to run on Sunday that I didn’t want to take a chance and squeeze in two more songs. Next, weekend, though! At least I hope so—I’ll be busy all day Saturday, but I should have time on Sunday. Though on Saturday I hopefully will have a chance to play Rock Band with Dan Apczynski and Kirk Hamilton, which I’m really looking forward to; I’m very curious what the game will sound like with good singers and with a plugged in guitar and bass. And I’m looking forward to trying out some of Dan’s guitars, I’m thinking it’s time for me to buy a better guitar to play with.

Liesl and I also finally got caught up on our DLC backlog on Sunday night: we went through maybe 35 songs, many of which were quite good. It’s enough of a blur that I don’t have specific recommendations to make here, but definitely a good way to take advantage of the fact that Miranda is out of town so we didn’t have to worry about keeping her awake.

It was a busy weekend (we were doing other things on both Saturday and Sunday afternoons), but I did manage to find an hour and a half or so to practice guitar. And I actually went through a couple of new songs then (as well as my normal practice of older songs), though admittedly the fact I went through two was for bad reasons: the first song, Before I Forget, was the sort of metal that I dislike enough that, given that I got three stars on it the first time through, I didn’t feel compelled to play it through a second time. Lots of fast boring notes at the start, sometimes single notes and sometimes dropped D power chords; the rest was stuff that I’m better at playing (otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten three stars!) but not stuff I enjoy listening to more.

The other song, Here I Go Again, was more pleasant: certainly not one of my favorite songs on the disc, but I didn’t mind it. The solo was way too hard for me, but also super short; I managed to maintain good streaks through the rest of it, leading to me (rather to my surprise) hitting #74 on the leaderboard. (And that only took, I think, three playthroughs?)

I think that’s ten songs down on Tier 4, and seven left? I won’t exactly say that the end of the tier is in sight, and I still think there’s a decent chance that I’ll hit a Tier 4 song that I can’t get three stars on without more practice than I want to put in right now, but for now I’m enjoying my progress.

I didn’t play any Rock Band the previous two weeks, because I was too busy practicing piano for Miranda’s violin recital. That’s over now, though (and it went well), so: back to guitar!

I did a little more review than normal on Saturday; fortunately, I wasn’t too rusty. And my triplet practice is paying off, I did noticeably better on Something Bigger, Something Brighter than in previous weeks! The new song I tried that day was Portions for Foxes; it was in a dropped D tuning, which normally I don’t like, but that’s largely because I associate it with metal power chords. (I have nothing against power chords, my complaint is with the metal part of that association, though I actually find power chords less enjoyable to play in a dropped D tuning.) This time, the chords were all over the place, including chords that included open bottom strings where that wouldn’t have made sense otherwise; worked well. And it was a good challenge level in general. I don’t plan to return to the piece, if for no other reason than that my guitar has a hard enough time staying in tune even when I’m not changing the tuning, but I’m glad I went through it.

Today I learned Fly by Night. Which took maybe ten tries (I’m not sure) before I got the third star? It didn’t feel that hard, and didn’t sound that bad when I played it plugged in; I think what was going on there was more that the song fairly regularly threw isolated chords at me that I missed (in some cases because the controller has a harder time detecting them, e.g. when I play an A chord one of the strings frequently registers as first fret), so even when I’m hitting most of the notes I almost never built up a streak. But I kept at it, and eventually managed to get that third star. Still, it took long enough that I decided two songs was enough for the weekend.

I’m still mostly making sure I don’t do an awful job as accompanist for the Suzuki recital on June 8th, so I didn’t practice guitar at all on Saturday. Today, I went through the standard review stuff; the main question that raised is whether I should try finger-picking the triplets in Something Bigger, Something Brighter. It’s a lot easier (at least for that part, there’s another tremolo bit where I assume I’d want a pick), but I don’t think the guitar will detect finger-picking nearly as well for game purposes (though I haven’t tried recently), and I also have no idea how they actually play it in real life. I’m currently thinking that, if I were good at using a pick, playing it that way wouldn’t be a problem, but who knows.

As to new songs, I went through two that I’d recently downloaded, namely The Only Exception and Jerk It Out. Both are tier 1, though a bit harder than I expected from that level: chord progressions that were slightly unusual, enough to throw me for a bit of a loop but in a good way that will bear further studying. And certainly I enjoyed playing both of them.

Liesl and I also went through a few pieces of DLC on harmonies: the Hall and Oates 3-pack, Heart’s Alone, and The Only Exception. All good songs; the one surprising bit there was that we managed to get 100% on Maneater, I totally wasn’t expecting that.

I told Miranda’s violin teacher that I could be the accompanist for his students’ next recital, so I spent most of my music time this weekend going through those songs. Mostly songs that I’ve played before, and in particular the hardest ones are all ones I’ve played before, though there are a few new ones that will require some amount of practice. So I imagine I’ll be somewhat busy going through those until I feel that they are well enough into my fingers that I won’t distract from the students’ playing; the recital isn’t until June 8, so I certainly have more than enough time.

When playing Rock Band, I mostly went through old songs. And, actually, they mostly sounded pretty good, or at least not awful, I’m happier than I have been about the sound that’s coming out of the amp. The newest song that I added to the rotation is Something Bigger, Something Brighter, whose triplets I’d been practicing all week; the practice helped, but it’s still way too fast for me to play at full speed without missing a bunch of notes. Something to work on, definitely: my right hand needs to get better at that kind of stuff.

The one new piece this week was Smoke on the Water. Which I was excited about, and which turned out to be fun enough, but still a bit of a disappointment. Basically, the only part that’s at all difficult is the solo: it’s a tier 4 song, but if you throw away the solo, it’s more like tier 0. (At least that’s how it felt to me, though maybe it’s unusually well-suited to me: I ended up #85 on the leaderboard, which is quite high for me for on-disc content, and it’s a popular enough song that I would think many people would have taken a swing at it?) The solo actually would be a good one for me to work on, if I should so choose: it’s definitely too hard for me, but most of it is noodling around without changing your hand position too much, so if I spent the time to learn the hand position changes, the rest would be good practice. I’m not planning to do that right now, but maybe eventually I’ll make a run through the game trying to get better at solos? The one other thing that I learned was when playing it unmuted: there are arpeggiated chords with a fair amount of space after them. If I just play them normally, then the last note of the chord sounds for a while; so I experimented with lifting up my left hand after playing the last note to mute the chord. Worked pretty well, though there’s definitely room for improvement.

Not a lot of practice this week, but I did go through my standard practice list (throwing Subdivisions onto it), and do a couple of new tier 4 songs. Specifically, on Saturday, I did Something Bigger, Something Brighter; most of that piece is fast triplets that I’m nowhere near accurate enough on. Which was frustrating at first, but actually I enjoy the way the triplets sound when I play them unmuted and when I don’t have to keep up with the actual song, so now I’m converting that into a practice bit for outside of game, and am hoping to get better at it. Which is good, because I have a long way to go: I was convinced for a while that it was going to be my first non-three-star song, but when playing it unmuted I actually managed three stars through a combination of being able to hear the triplets a little better and having the game being a little more forgiving on the non-triplet sections. (Normally, playing unmuted is bad for your score, because it falsely claims you’re strumming in pauses just from string vibrations, but on fast runs, that actually sometimes fills in glitches in your playing, so I got up to 4x multipliers in places where I probably didn’t deserve it.)

I also broke my A string on Saturday; this time, rather than replacing all the strings, I just replaced that one. Here’s the video I used this time, worked well, and I’m managing to get the string wound more neatly.

On Sunday, I learned Lasso. Which turned out to be quite good for my level: the chords are a bit unusual for me and a bit fast for me, but in both cases they’re definitely within reach. The only bit I can’t get is the solo, which basically is playing something fairly straightforward on the G string combined with accents on the high E string—it’ll be a while before I can do that, but at least now that I’m thinking about it that way I can do the G string part and sound good and have a framework for thinking about it if I want to try both parts.

My D string broke while I was in the middle of today’s practice; not sure if that’s a coincidence or if strings generally have similar lifetimes or if combining new strings with old strings puts extra stress on the old strings somehow? At least I’m good at replacing strings now; and at least I have a backup guitar, so I can just swap guitars until I’m done practicing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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