This weekend was pretty busy, so I didn’t get to play Rock Band as much as I would have liked, but I did have time to make it through most of the Apprentice songs on Medium Pro Guitar. Which would have been awesome—Medium Pro Guitar continues to be fascinating—except that I had some quite annoying hardware problems.

It started on Saturday: Liesl decided to give Pro Guitar a try, and was getting (justifiably!) really frustrated because the game wasn’t picking up her strums. The high strings were a particular problem, and I’d had problems earlier with upstrums on those, so I looked up the instructions for adjusting the pickup to make that more sensitive. That helped, but not enough when she was plucking by hand; switching to the pick seems to have mostly fixed it, though.

Today, the game was acting funny for me, too, and Liesl suggested the batteries. I replaced those, and it started behaving better. In retrospect, then, that was probably much of the problem yesterday as well. (I probably accidentally left the guitar turned on last week: easy to forget that it needs to be turned off.) So most of the session today went well; but, towards the end of the session, I started getting really weird behavior, where the guitar would sporadically refuse to detect any strums or insist that a fret was held down when I wasn’t touching the fingerboard at all.

Eventually, the controller became almost completely unresponsive; also, the MIDI box was blinking in a strange way, which I didn’t remember seeing. Looking in the manual for the guitar, it looked like that was probably a sign that the guitar needed to be reset (I don’t remember if the box was actually blinking in an SOS pattern, but it might have been); I held down start and back on the guitar, and in the little bit of experimentation I did right then, it seemed to be behaving better. At the very least, it was no longer completely broken; I had to stop fairly soon anyways, and I was frustrated enough that it was hard to get back into the flow of things, so I didn’t test it out thoroughly.

I really hope that was the problem: if so, it’s annoying, but now I know what the signs are, and it’s easy to fix. I’m a little worried that I may have gotten the sensitivity wrong when fiddling around with it yesterday, and I’m also worried that the hardware may just not be working well at a more fundamental level; we’ll see what happens next week, I guess.

I didn’t work on Pro Guitar last weekend, because I was too busy. Though part of the reason why I was too busy involved Rock Band: I spent Saturday evening hanging out with Kirk Hamilton, Dan Apczynski, Jorge Albor, and Scott Juster, eating and playing Rock Band. Which was a lot of fun! Kirk is rather good on (Pro) Drums, as it turns out; and I’m much less good on Pro Keys on other people’s TVs than I am on my own. (Though part of that was because the game wasn’t calibrated at all to the TV we were using all at the start; I got to an acceptable but not great level once we fixed that.)

I did get back to Pro Guitar today, though, working on my journey through the Medium songs. And they’re super interesting, even the easiest ones. Well, maybe not the very easiest ones, but today was a lot of fun even when I was going through the later Warmup songs.

In the easiest Medium songs, you play a lot of two-note chords: as far as I can tell, these would be barre chords on a real guitar, but the game didn’t want to make us deal with that on Medium. So that’s a little boring; but even the two-note chords were interesting when I was playing Rehab, because it had me picking out the two notes of the chord instead of strumming them together. So I got to translate the individual notes that the game showed me into (a stripped down version of) the underlying chords, which was fun to think about.

And then I hit Yoshimi, and all of a sudden the game got hugely more interesting: I had to play full G, D, and C chords! Which I failed at miserably the first time: but that’s what training mode is for, and I eventually got it. (After that, I decided to just start with training mode on new songs by default, though it wouldn’t surprise me if eventually my sight reading catches up and I don’t have to do that any more.) That was a real change of pace: for the first time, I came out of a piece feeling like I could play it on a real guitar and it would actually sound like the real song.

I saw those same chords in some later songs, too. Which is kind of interesting, actually: full E and A chords aren’t any harder to play than those chords, but the game doesn’t seem to throw those at me in Medium. Not sure if they wanted to restrict themselves to only three different chords to learn in Medium or if they wanted to reserve E and A for when we had to grapple with barre chords; I’m not complaining either way, it will certainly give me something to look forward to when I get to Hard.

The other interesting song for today was Good Vibrations. Most of the song is pretty straightforward, but at the start of the song (and in one or two places in the middle), there are sequences of individual notes, going between a couple of the strings in different ways. They were complex enough that I decided to spend a little bit of time thinking about how best to finger them, in order to minimize the amount of shifting that I’d have to do with my hand, and I really enjoyed that process. In a weird way (maybe I’ve been reading Steven O’Dell too much), it felt kind of like playing a technical racer: it’s analogous to the process of analyzing a turn on a race track, experimenting with different lines to see which one is most efficient, and then practicing over and over until you can hit it reliably.

I didn’t do a lot of songs today: I finished the Warmup songs and did two of the Apprentice songs. But my hand is feeling it a bit (and I was getting remarkably sloppy on my D chords as the session went on), and I want to play some Minecraft, too! So that’s enough for this weekend; I hope I’ll be able to finish the Apprentice songs next weekend.

After finishing the songs on Easy last week, I started Medium this week. And I can attest to the fact that Medium is harder than Easy: I felt a lot more at sea on the easiest Medium songs than I did on the hardest Easy songs. Also, I’m super glad that I’d started training myself to not look at my left hand, otherwise Medium would have been even worse. (And I’m also glad to have built up calluses, they’re definitely helping a lot.)

Fortunately, Medium is also significantly more interesting than Easy! Even with the easiest songs (I’ve only done six songs so far, though I have gone through all of the Medium lessons), I’m having to go through them several times, but it’s worth it: I’m enjoying the process of understanding the chord progressions and getting to where I can play them with some small, I hesitate to say competence, but perhaps a small lack of total incompetence?

In fact, saying that “I’m having to go through them several times” is not accurate: I’m generally not failing out, and I’m (barely) managing three stars on the songs during my first try; it’s just that I don’t feel at all satisfied with the way I play a new song the first time. (At the very least, I don’t feel satisfied with the way I play the first half of it: sometimes I learn the chord progressions well enough to do okay in the second half.) So I dive right back into it, playing it another time or two until I don’t feel actively embarrassed. I’m getting the same sort of pleasure as I was from working out bits in my Pro Keys playthrough, though I’m not applying nearly the same standards: my goals now are not to do a great job, they’re to do well enough that I’ll be able to make it through all the songs on Medium and be prepared for Hard when the time comes for that.

Though I am toying with the idea of trying to do Medium and Hard in parallel to some extent: playing two note chords feels a little odd, and is probably building up some bad habits. I don’t have to actually play barre chords, for example; sometimes I try (and generally fail to hold down all the strings), but sometimes I don’t, even when that’s clearly what’s going on. So maybe I should try harder to make my fingering more realistic; but maybe that would be an easier habit to maintain if I had to play more than two strings? (Probably not, I’d probably just end up even more at sea.)

Coming from a piano background, it’s also a little weird that a given interval doesn’t correspond to a fixed distance between fingers of my left hand. I had to deal with that a little bit on Easy, but it’s much more of an issue when I’m sliding up and down with chords.

The Medium lessons had some bits where you were playing bass lines, and those were quite fun in a different way. So I’ll probably want to give Pro Bass a try at some point, either after Pro Guitar or as a break from it, if some of the difficulty jumps end up a bit daunting.

It’ll definitely be slower going on Medium than it was on Easy. The half a tier this week was an aberration caused by going through training, and if I’d had a bit more free time, finishing it would have been fine, so hopefully next week I’ll be able to finish a tier and a half. Maybe not, though, and in general one tier a week seems more realistic than anything more strenuous; if the difficulty curve is steep enough on Medium, and in particular if they throw enough more hand positions at me during the harder songs, then even that could be optimistic. Maybe not, though: maybe there’s only a small fixed set of hand positions that I’ll see during Medium. If that’s the case, I hope I’ll be able to make steady, if not particularly rapid, progress through it.

This weekend, I finished the last three tiers on Easy Pro Guitar. It felt pretty similar to last week: I stuck with my discipline of not looking at my hands, and I fumbled a fair amount, but not as much as I’d feared. Even the hardest tier wasn’t all that hard—not that I came anywhere close to perfect or anything, but getting four stars wasn’t surprising. I’m not sure how much of that is me improving (it’d be interesting to try the tiers in reverse difficulty order!) and how much of that is that, if the game spreads out the notes enough, you’ll be able to hit a decent percentage of them no matter what.

36 songs was enough that my left hand is feeling it; here’s what it looked like after today’s practice.

My hand after playing pro guitar

Most of the darkness is smudging rather than bruises, but I think there’s a little bit of bruising as well. Still, I haven’t yet come particularly close since the first week to having to stop because of my hands: they’re toughening up a bit, and I’m not playing for that long at a stretch.

I’m really glad to be done with Easy: it’s been interesting, but I’m very much looking forward to playing actual chords. And I hope the developers push out a patch soon for the problem with your scores not registering: it’s a little ridiculous that the game thinks that I’ve only completed two of the twelve songs on the hardest tier.

An update on the bug I mentioned last week: according to this forum thread, it looks like songs that have different note charts on the Squier and the Mustang aren’t registering your high scores when played with the Squier. (So far I’ve run into the problem with Outer Space and Sister Christian.) Hopefully it will be patched soon, now that Squiers are out in the wild and people are running into it.

I didn’t play at all from Monday through Thursday. I was worried that that might impede my progress in toughening up my fingers, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case: probably if I were playing more, I would be building up calluses more, but I had noticeably calluses and tenderness on Monday, and I still had both on Friday. (Don’t get me wrong, the tenderness wasn’t painful or anything, I was just aware when I pressed on my fingers that I’d been doing something unusual with them.) And the playing that I did this weekend didn’t hurt, so my guess is that the calluses are helping at least a little bit.

Though it’s not like I played much this weekend: I only went through two tiers of songs, Solid and Moderate. (Both still on Easy, I’m sticking for now with my plan of going through them all on Easy before starting any on Medium.) But the Moderate songs in particular were fascinating to play. I’d been consciously avoiding looking at my right hand since I started; and, when I got to The Con, basically the whole song had me shifting on a single string between the fifth, seventh, and twelfth frets. So I thought: this is a perfect opportunity for me to start building up muscle memory by avoiding looking at my left hand.

And it worked great! Yes, I fumbled, but not as much as I feared. The visual feedback that the game provided was super useful: once I got used to looking at the screen, I could tell immediately if I was on the correct fret or not, and I could adjust my hand almost as quickly while looking at the screen as I could while looking at my left hand. This honestly looks to me like a way in which playing the game might actually help you learn certain aspects of playing guitar faster than learning normally would: it’s a great combination of focusing on muscle memory while getting feedback that doesn’t interfere with that learning.

Also, the selection of frets that that particular piece requires was very useful. Moving between the seventh and twelfth fret required a jump, so I had to get used to letting my hand move; while moving between the fifth and seventh fret was best done by putting my first finger on the fifth fret and my third on the seventh, meaning that I had to think about hand positions that would let different fingers work well together.

Also, from a musical point of view, they’re very useful frets to know: the fifth fret is a fourth up from the open string, the seventh is a fifth up, and the twelfth is an octave up. So, once I finished that song, I decided to try to play the remaining songs without looking at my left hand, and of course those same frets came over and over again. I certainly stumbled during the remaining pieces, but not nearly as much as I’d feared; and actually I stumbled almost as much with finding the correct string (both with my left hand and my right hand) as I did searching for the correct fret.

I’m really looking forward to playing through the remaining three tiers of music: there’s so much to think about here, in terms of training both my hands and figuring out how to select my hand positions. And I’m looking forward even more to moving on to Medium: I feel like I’m playing blind by not knowing what the underlying chords are. In fact, as much as I’m enjoying thinking about hand positions while playing a note at a time, that work may be almost counterproductive, in that I’m going to have to completely rework it when shifting between chords instead of using multiple fingers on a single string.

I hope I’ll be able to make it through the Easy songs next week, so I’ll be able to move on to Medium the week after that. Who knows how hard the Impossible songs will be, though, even on Easy; if they’re particularly difficult, I may end up overlapping those with the early Medium songs.

I spent most of my Rock Band time Sunday playing Pro Keys, but I figured I should put in a little more Pro Guitar time: among other things, my fingers were aching a bit after Saturday’s practice but not actively hurting, so if I’m going to toughen them up, I should keep at it. Maybe I’ll even find time to play some evenings this week; actually, it’s possible a blister is starting to develop on one of them, so I might need to hold off a bit.

I made it through the single-note lessons; pretty straightforward, and nothing else was nearly as painful as the one where I had to slide, though many required multiple attempts. The upstrum one was interesting: I’m not in the habit of upstrumming much on regular Rock Band guitar, but it felt a lot more natural with a pick in my hand. Though the guitar didn’t seem to detect it reliably when I was playing on the highest string, which is unfortunate if it persists. At any rate, I’ll want to work on that when playing.

My hands were pretty lost again today. Both of them felt out of place, and I was constantly moving my head in a triangle between the screen, my right hand, and my left hand. Which is ridiculous, and I really need to learn where various parts of the instrument are: so after a bit I decided to stop looking at my right hand and just guess at where my hand is supposed to be to strum each of the strings. Which worked surprisingly well, so I’ll definitely want to keep that up! Though I am developing a bit of a bad habit of resting my pick against the string while I’m feeling out where the string is: that wouldn’t work if I were playing for real or if I were playing at a normal speed, so I’ll want to break myself of that at some point.

I’m also looking at my left hand more than I’d like. Some of that is inevitable: for now, I’m more or less incapable of making large jumps up or down without looking. (Though I will say, the on-screen feedback is really good, so I might actually be able to correct just by looking at the screen.) I tried to force myself not to look other than that, though, with reasonable success. There are still times where I know that my fingers are in the wrong place but don’t quite know how (generally if my fingers are on a fret and don’t know if I should move my hand up or down), but that should improve soon, I imagine. There are also situations where my ring finger is on one string while my index finger is unintentionally on a different string: I find that somewhat embarrassing, actually, but I’m sure I’ll learn the angle to hold my hand in soon!

I finished the Apprentice songs today, though I ran into a strange bug where the game obstinately refuses to credit me with having finished one of them; I hope that goes away after a reboot! They’re still pretty straightforward. My current plan is to go through them all on Easy before trying any on Medium: certainly I can use a lot more practice in playing individual notes. Though the songs are so stripped down that I sometimes feel that having the context that chords would provide would be useful in understanding the music, so I may start playing through the early songs on Medium while going through the late songs on Easy; who knows. It may also be the case that picking out the notes in the late songs on Easy will be hard enough that I’ll find simple chords to be easier: I haven’t looked ahead to see what the difficulty curve looks like.

I was planning to hold off on Rock Band 3 Pro Guitar until I was done with my Pro Keys playthrough. But then the guitar arrived, so of course I had to take it out of the box, tune it up, and do the ceremonial picking out of Alice’s Restaurant. And then the MIDI adapter arrived, and I read a few reports from people saying how much their left hand hurts when they’re starting out on Pro Guitar; that suggests that, when I do dive into it, I won’t be able to spend hours at a stretch on it. And, conveniently, it’s your left hand that hurts, while when playing Pro Keys, I only use my right hand. So I can work on them both at once! (Well, not literally both at once. But both in the same afternoon.)

Some background: I have played guitar a bit in the past. Specifically, I spent the summer after my sophomore year at college at a math research program, and I brought along a guitar. I learned a few chords, and two or three songs (the only one of which that has stuck being the aforementioned Alice’s Restaurant), but I didn’t get at all good at the instrument, and I haven’t picked it up much in the intervening two decades. There are even basic mechanics that I didn’t learn back then: e.g. I used my fingers instead of a pick, and I was really awful at barre chords. So, while I’m not coming at this completely from scratch, I’m coming at it from a quite different position than I was with Pro Keys. (And I’m fairly sure that Pro Guitar is quite a bit more realistic than Pro Keys, too, so it will be harder in that way as well!)

Anyways, I fired it up late this morning. (And I was pleased that the game noticed that I’d plugged in a real guitar for the first time, and offered to send me over to the appropriate tutorial!) I went through the first lesson, and started the second one; my hand started to hurt pretty badly when I was doing the part that involved sliding up and down the neck while holding down a string, though, so I stopped. (I might want to adjust the neck of the guitar so I don’t have to press down quite as far.) As the game suggested, I also played The Hardest Button to Button on Easy—thinking back, this may actually literally be the first time I’ve ever played something in Rock Band on Easy (I know I did some of the songs on Easy way back on the original Guitar Hero, but since then I think I’ve always started on Medium even when learning a new instrument), but yeah, that’s the right difficulty level for me right now.

I went through all the Warmup songs on Easy. Mostly went pretty well, I even managed to hit 100% on one of them on my first try, but it’s also clearly just the start of a long learning curve. It will be a while before I can even reliably play an arbitrary string without looking down at my right hand—that’s one way in which playing with a pick feels really different to me from playing with my fingers. And my left hand has quite a bit more room to get lost in! (Actually, my left hand was doing better than I feared it would, given the range of frets that you have to hit. But it’s still doing quite badly.) The whole experience has given me renewed appreciation for all those piano and harpsichord lessons I took: I can’t really imagine what it would be like to try Pro Keys on Hard or Expert without your hand just knowing what a 1-3-5 chord or a 1-4-6 chord feels like.

Just a start, and I hope I’ll have more time this weekend to work on it. Also, one pleasant side effect of starting a new instrument in the game: there are a lot of really easy goals to pass, giving a nice boost to your fan count!

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