I managed to practice guitar both days this weekend, but neither session was particularly long, so I only made it through four songs: Here I Go Again, Foolin’, Killing Loneliness, and Plush. Which had a lot in common: they were generally power chord heavy, but with something else in the mix (often arpeggiation on chords that were at least somewhat unusual), and with a solo that seemed manageable but that I didn’t put the time in to really learn.

Killing Loneliness pointed out that I don’t like it when songs use a dropped D tuning: I can kind of understand it in songs that are all about barred-E power chords, but that song switched between barred-E and barred-A power chords, and having to change my fingering when going between the two was a real pain. And Plush was quite difficult: I’m not used to C7m chords even when unbarred, and playing them barred meant that I had to quickly and forcefully get down my ring and pinky fingers, which I completely failed at. (And the arpeggiation in that song was quite difficult for me as well.) Definitely useful learning experiences all around.

Liesl and I also went through some songs on Sunday evening on fake guitar/bass. We did a couple of recent pieces of DLC: no surprise that Rock the Casbah was fun, but if you’re looking for Rock Band Network recommendations, we really really liked Crazy Idea by Goliath Down. I’d never heard of that band before, but a great funky sound. We also went through about a quarter of the Lego Rock Band songs: on average, I don’t like it nearly as much as the content on the main games, but there’s enough good stuff there to make it worth the $15-$20 that it costs these days to get and export the game. Swing, Swing made us both wish that game had vocal harmonies, I rather enjoyed Dreaming of You and Accidentally in Love, and I won’t complain about David Bowie or Elton John, so I’m looking forward to the remaining songs.

Two songs left on the four level difficulty, so I should be on to Nightmare next weekend; I hope we find time to do some singing then, too, since we didn’t do that at all this week. Though making it through more Lego Rock Band wouldn’t be the worst idea in the world, either.

It was a busy weekend, so not as much Rock Band as normal this week. Our friend Jordan came over on Tuesday, so we got him to sing with us; yay three-part harmonies! Not that we actually hit all three parts very often, but we enjoyed the attempt.

The surprising fun song there was Tubthumping: the end of that song has three quite distinct vocal lines, and the separation between those lines made it easier for us to hit all three of them than in songs with with more traditional harmonization. So: yay counterpoint!

I did spend a bit of time yesterday playing Pro Guitar, but I only made it through three songs. Smoke on the Water was, unsurprisingly, quite a bit of fun; easy outside of the solo, too, and the solo seemed learnable if I want to put in the time. I didn’t realize that the notes in the main theme were played on two strings instead of single strings; now, hopefully, I’ll be able to hear stuff like that better. It even sounded pretty good when I was unmuted and plugged into an amp.

I also enjoyed Portions for Foxes, though that song was a little beyond me. Some of the chords were unusual (partly caused by having the bottom string tuned to D, though I don’t think that was all that was going on), and there was more jumping between strings than I’m comfortable with. Definitely good exercise, at any rate.

The third song was Before I Forget; I don’t like playing metal, though the song wasn’t too unpleasant given that constraint.

I spent an unusual amount of time playing piano evenings and over the weekend, too. I’m tentatively thinking that I’ll try to get the Three-Part Ricercar from the Musical Offering back into my fingers: I used to be able to play that quite well, and I feel a little embarrassed that there aren’t any fugues that I can currently play to my satisfaction. So I spent a decent amount of time working on the first third of the piece, with pretty good results; of course, the first third is the easy part, so I have a fair amount of work ahead of me. Still, the ability and knowledge is there in my fingers, I just have to shake off quite a bit of rust.

I’d been meaning to go through the Yes DLC pack last week, but I got kind of distracted; I went back to that this week, finishing the remaining four songs on Pro Keys. Owner of a Lonely Heart was pleasant but slight, and its keyboard part was pretty boring; Starship Trooper’s keyboard part was harder and only a little more interesting, but the song itself was pleasantly bizarre enough that I was happy to play it. South Side of the Sky had a more satisfying keyboard part, and did okay on the “pleasantly bizarre” front; Heart of the Sunrise was my least favorite of the four.

After that, Liesl and I grabbed microphones, and sung through those songs; Miranda wandered down at some point and joined us as well. I can imagine Owner of a Lonely Heart being in the vocal rotation fairly often; the other songs were quite a bit on the long side. Miranda dropped out then, but Liesl and I kept on going; we must have sung for about two and a half hours? Our high point was reaching 24th place on the leaderboard for Viva La Resistance: we often rank well on DLC, but that’s the first time we’ve done anything like that on on-disc content. Which, in its own way, is sad, a sign that Rock Band 3 has overshot most of its audience: we did a credible job, but not a perfect one, so I think it must be the case that not many people are doing harmonies. At any rate, if we’re going to rank well on one of the songs, I’m happy for it to be Viva La Resistance, because “Your theocratic neofascist ideology / is only getting in the way of my biology” is my favorite lyric on the disc.

On Sunday, I put in my Pro Guitar practice. I finished the last three Moderate songs: This Bastard’s Life was fun, but the chord transitions were a bit too hard for me (though figuring out what was going on with three-note fragments of chords was interesting), The Killing Moon was useful practice in switching between A and E barre chords on the same fret and had surprisingly fun solos, and Heart of Glass was kind of meh. And then I did the first three Challenging songs, Everybody Wants to Rule the World, Something Bigger, Something Brighter, and Lasso; nothing too exciting there, and I didn’t feel like it was a particular step-up in difficulty. I was glad to have finished six songs, though, and my left hand was letting me know that it felt that I’d put in quite enough practice!

I had Monday off from work, and Liesl and Miranda were out in the morning, so I decided to spend the time doing solo vocals. Mainly going through London Calling: I’d gone through that on the different instruments, but while Liesl and I had sung some of the individual songs, I’d never gone through them all at once. And I’m very glad I did that: the lyrics are amazing, the music is very good, and my chest voice needs the practice. After that, I went through fifteen or twenty on-disc songs, checking off several of the goals in the progress. (I’m now in the top 1% for fan count, with 415 million; also a sad sign of how the game has done, because you only have to be in around the top 5000 people to be in the top 1% of that metric.)

Very pleasant week, in particular I’m quite happy to be finding time for both Pro Guitar and to do Vocal Harmonies with Liesl. Not sure that I’ll finish Hard Pro Guitar in 2011, but if not, it shouldn’t take me too far into 2012 before I move up to Expert.

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 week’s VGHVI game was Rock Band 3, with a Billy Joel focus. Four of us were there, and none of us were in the mood to play drums (I would have except for, you know, Billy Joel), so we had to split into two pairs; a real shame that the game doesn’t allow online Guitar + Bass + Keys groupings. I certainly enjoyed playing with Sarah Elmaleh (me on Pro Keys, her on Bass), though! Aside from the pleasure of playing through the music, I had my sights set on achieving score goals by playing through Captain Jack, since it contains a bunch of repetitive chords that it’s easy to get a good multiple on. And achieve score goals we did: we managed to get 1.39 million points, with just the two of us! (Sarah is obviously a quite credible bassist.) Makes me wonder how well we could score on that with a four-person band; I’d have to think 2 million at least, but probably noticeably more.

Eventually, Roger bowed out, and we’d made it through enough Billy Joel, so Jonathan came over to join our band and I switched to vocals. Which was also fun (I’m enjoying singing these days a lot more than I used to); my favorite bit there was that I got 100% for the first time on non-harmony vocals (I do harmonies most of the time), and the song in question was Blondie’s Heart of Glass. Yay for singing in falsetto!

I also spent a fair amount of time this week trying to memorize 風の丘 (from Kiki’s Delivery Service) on the guitar. Which is a lovely song, and I quite enjoy playing it, but it’s like pulling teeth. Enough so that I’ll probably write about it on my main blog, so I won’t go into details here.

On Saturday, Miranda and I went violin shopping: she’s moving up to a full-sized violin. Nice to have an excuse for me to play violin, so she could hear differences between instruments and bows when somebody other than her was playing; I’m a pretty mediocre violinist (though still much better than I am at guitar), but at least I’m good enough to be not completely useless as an example.

On Thursday, I realized that I’d somehow missed playing through three of the Billy Joel songs on Pro Keys; not sure how that happened, but I fixed that lapse on Saturday. Good stuff, as always. And then today I went through three more songs on Hard Pro Guitar; we’re definitely getting to a level where my lack of skills are showing. On two of the three pieces, I only managed two stars on my first playthrough (and this was after spending a good amount of time on training mode); while I got three stars on both eventually, I’m not reliably hitting the chord transitions, especially ones that mix barre and non-barre chords. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a lot better at that than I was a few months ago, but there’s clearly room for improvement, and I imagine my progress will slow down further as songs get harder.

Despite my difficulties, those three songs were a lot of fun; I only stopped when I did because we needed to make dinner fairly soon and because each song takes quite a while to go through on training mode and then play it several times. But we had a little bit of time left, so Liesl and I went through five or six songs on Vocal Harmonies. Which was super fun: like I said above, I’m enjoying singing more and more these days, especially when singing with Liesl. My favorite song today was Modern Love, both because I really like it and because I can hit the harmonies pretty solidly on that; the other highlight was trying Expert difficulty and finding that we could actually do fine at that level. In fact, we got gold stars on one of the songs; I think Expert vocals must be easier in this iteration of the game than previous ones, though I’m sure the fact that we were both trying to sing the non-harmony bits helped as well.

Good times; I’m still not sure why I’ve been on a musical binge for most of the last month, but I’m not complaining at all.

I wasn’t feeling nearly as manically musical this weekend as last weekend, so while I did play an unusual amount of piano this week (and started learning a Ghibli song on the guitar), this weekend I mostly focused on writing blog posts about Catherine instead of spending all my time playing Rock Band. (Oh, and I went violin shopping with Miranda and accompanied her on the piano when she practiced today, both of which were fun.) I did put in two and a half or three hours of Pro Guitar practice today, though, going through the last four Solid songs and the first two Moderate ones.

I don’t remember too many details; somehow I got 58th place on the Werewolves of London leaderboards, which makes absolutely no sense given that I didn’t feel that I did a surprisingly good job there. I Can See for Miles was quite a bit of fun to play (and sounded not completely horrible plugged into the amp, even); there was one other song that I rather enjoyed, but I’ve already forgotten which one it was. And I’m a lot better at shifting quickly between barre chords than I used to be: there’s still huge amounts of room for improvement, but there’s also absolutely no question that playing the game is improving my guitar skills substantially.

Almost halfway through the songs on Hard. Though I imagine the second half will take longer than the first! A long journey, and I imagine Expert will raise the stakes quite a bit, but I’m still managing to make progress.

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.

Last weekend I was pretty busy, so no Rock Band. This week, though was different: it was a three-day weekend with no plans outside the house, so I got in some playing every day!

On Saturday, I tried out a few more of the Expert Pro Guitar training lessons. Without a lot of success in general, though I think the alternating strumming ones should be doable and will be useful practice for me. And I went through three songs; I don’t remember the details, but I did enjoy the Doors one. (Not one of the on-disc songs, it was part of the free launch DLC.)

On Sunday, I decided to work through more of the Billy Joel DLC on Pro Keys. And that was super fun: I don’t think that Pro Keys stands up to Pro Guitar in general, but playing through Billy Joel can be pretty amazing. I’m not sure how many songs I went through on Sunday—maybe six or seven?—but I was very glad to have taken a guitar break and gone through those. Liesl started singing along, and that sounded like fun, so we ended up going through some of them on vocals once I was done practicing the keyboards; it turns out that his vocal range even matches mine pretty well! (Though I didn’t get to sing in falsetto as much as I prefer…)

I had two Billy Joel songs left after Sunday, so I went through those two today. And they were both quite something in their own way: Scenes from an Italian Restaurant has a couple of sections that are pretty ridiculous, but the song as a whole was a good deal of fun. (At least when I was getting the timing right on the off-beat chords—that song would be rather different with two hands, one of which was actually playing on the beat…) And She’s Always a Woman was one arpeggiated chord after another, which turned into quite an experience: the structure is there, just a bit harder to see because of the arpeggios than it would otherwise be, and revealing that structure in my playing felt great.

So I am now a complete Billy Joel convert. I’ll stop by a local music store on the way home from work tomorrow to see if I can pick up some sheet music, because I’d like to go through that on a real piano. And the singing was fun, too: I should spend more time doing that than I have been over the last year. Maybe Liesl and I will go through the harmonies for the on-disc Rock Band 3 content?

I’ll be out tomorrow, but I made sure to get some Pro Guitar practice in today. Nothing huge to report; I did another one of the Expert instrument lessons (two down, I think four to go?) and played through four songs on Hard.

I did the last two Apprentice level songs; they’re probably my two least favorite songs in the game, both to listen to and to play on Pro Keys, but they’re not so bad to play on Pro Guitar. Well, maybe they would be once I got used to them, because they’re repetitive, but right now the repetitive bits are things that I could stand to work on. Antibodies had the surprise that I ended up with not only a higher score than Dan Bruno but a score almost ten times as high as his; I’m used to that happening in the other direction! (I assume he was having very much an off day and that it’s much harder to get a long streak on Expert on that song than on Hard.) And Du Hast had one short repeated alternating strumming bit, which was useful reinforcement for that. (And reminded me that I’ve been lax about practicing outside of game…)

I then moved up to the next tier of songs (I forget the name of that tier, Solid maybe?), and did Centerfold and Twentieth Century Boy. Both of which were pleasant enough to play both muted and plugged in; I still have a lot of work to go on my fast chord shifting, but it could have been a lot worse.

So: slow progress this weekend, but that’s better than no progress. Next weekend will be busy, too, but I should have more free weekends in September, I hope.

I took a couple of weeks off from practice: I was busy playing board games two weeks ago, and I was at Def Con last week. (I did play once at work, which was a helpful reminder that I should give Pro Bass more of a try as well.) I was busy this weekend, too, but I really need to put in the time to avoid backsliding, so I went through four songs on Saturday.

Last time, it became clear that I needed to work on my alternating strumming; I’d put in a bit of time on that with the guitar unplugged, and it started going better almost immediately. I wanted to find out how much of an effect that had had in game, so I went back through Rock Lobster; before, I’d only managed to successfully finish one of the training segments, but this time I managed to finish all but one of them! So clearly my practice had had an effect; I still don’t feel particularly comfortable with alternating strumming, but I’m at least capable of doing it not completely incompetently, and I’m sure I’ll get better as I keep going. (Especially if I continue to practice it outside of game; incidentally, the string mute really does interfere with alternating strumming, I think.)

I can’t remember too many other details of my experience this week, other than that Get Free was a good match for my current skills. I didn’t make it through quite as many songs as I would have liked; and it’s a bit unfortunate that the two Apprentice songs I have left, Antibodies and Du Hast, are probably my least favorite songs on the disc. Though the mercy there is that the reasons why I dislike them aren’t because of their Pro Guitar parts…

I’m looking forward to moving up a tier of songs next week!