What with the job search and piano recital accompaniment, I haven’t found time to work on my Rock Band 3 pro keys skills for the last few weeks. And, as I feared, my rank has slipped: I’m now at rank 174:

I'm rank 174 as of February 5, 2011

I did put in an hour or two today, however, doing the first three apprentice songs. The Con was easy to get 100% on (I think I did it on my second try); Werewolves of London and Heart of Glass are both quite doable, but I haven’t yet managed either of them. I didn’t even get gold stars on Heart of Glass, but that’s because it’s graded way too hard: on my best run, I only missed one cluster of notes, got rank 129, and only reached five stars on the (admittedly quite long) final chord.

I’m not sure how much effort I’ll sink into the 100% goal. I’m enjoying putting in a good effort on songs, but playing Werewolves of London over and over again hoping to not get bored during the repetitive chord progression while staying focused enough to hit the flair at the end accurately got to be a bit much. So for now, I’m thinking that I might relax on that and just give each song a few solid runthroughs to work out the kinks and then move on.

Just doing well but not perfect on those three songs was good enough to get me another 100,000 points. Which is good, because the bar for rank 100 is now around 7,500,000 points, and I’m sure it will be higher by the time I get close.

Playing this and practicing for the recital has gotten me wondering more about the virtues of memorization. My daughter’s violin teacher uses the Suzuki method, which means that she’s had to memorize all of the pieces she’s been playing. And both experiences have made me wish that I were a bit better at translating directly from sounds to fingers: I have decent musical memory, I think, but I’m not using it enough.

When I bought Rock Band 3, I dived right into pro keys; here’s my current status. I’ve gone through all the songs (including the hall of fame setlist on hard); the only songs that I haven’t done on expert are Antibodies and Roundabout. Also, I’ve done all but one of the training lessons. Roundabout is its own special thing, but for Antibodies and the lesson, the main issue is that I have a hard time playing fast repetitive notes with a sufficiently accurate rhythm. I find it frustrating that I can’t hear my mistakes, but I don’t have any evidence that being able to hear them would actually help. (I should probably just try Antibodies and the lesson on a real piano, so I can better understand what my fingers are doing.)

I’m thinking that I should delve into the songs more deeply, though: see what it feels like to master them instead of being happy with completing them successfully. On a related note, the game brings out my competitive nature, so I am paying attention to the leaderboards a bit; when I first went through the songs, I was in around 100th place, but now I’ve dropped to 152nd.

I'm rank 152 with 6,505,853 points as of January 16, 2011

(This is for on-disc songs only – no sense measuring myself based on how much DLC people have bought.)

I’ve started going through the early songs trying to master them; I’ve gotten 100% on all the warmup songs but, well, they’re warmup songs for a reason. (Which isn’t to say that I didn’t have to go through several of them a bunch of times…) I’m vaguely curious how far I’ll be able to keep getting 100% without putting in hours of effort per song; I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to do some of the apprentice songs, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I couldn’t do all of them. Conversely, I’m also curious to see how well I’ll be able to learn the impossible songs: 100%ing any of them isn’t plausible, but maybe 5-starring most of them is a reasonable goal?

Right now, the person in 100th place is Bebedora with 7,207,975 points. Earning an extra 700,000 points seems eminently doable: even on the warmup songs, the difference in score between my first performance and my best performance was a few tens of thousands of points, and I’ve got a lot more room for potential improvement on the later songs. (Though of course maintaining long streaks is that much harder on the later songs; incidentally, I still haven’t earned the “Pro Keys Streak 500” goal, though I’m not sure what my longest streak is.) But the bar is getting continually raised—when I checked on this a couple of weeks ago, 7,000,000 points would have been enough to get 100th place. So, while I still imagine that I’ll be able to crack the top 100 again at some point, I don’t expect to be able to stay there indefinitely: I’m not a bad pianist, but there are many much better pianists than myself, and many people with a lot more time to devote to playing Rock Band.

Still, it will be fun trying to reach that goal, and hopefully I’ll learn something along the way.

The other main game that I’m playing now, is Rock Band 3. (Which, like Minecraft, is never-ending…) I won’t be able to capture pictures of it, but I will keep a diary of my progress in the game. (For all my groupies out there, I’m davidcarlton at rockband.com.)

I’ll leave pro keys to a separate post, but, that aside: I’ve gone through all the songs on guitar, including the hall of fame induction setlist. I did them on expert except for three songs at nightmare difficulty level and all but three of the songs at impossible difficulty level. I may go back and try to do more of the songs on expert, and I may try to finish off some of the other goals (e.g. 5-star all the songs, or get a 100% score on one of the songs), but it’s not a particularly high priority right now.

I’ve started going through the songs on bass; I haven’t made it very far (just the warmup and apprentice songs), but I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve been enjoying it. So clearly I should play bass more; though probably mostly in solo mode, since Liesl is our resident family bassist.

We’ve been playing some as a family, generally doing the road challenges; Liesl and I have made it through most of the bus road challenges, and Miranda has joined us for the subway challenges. Our typical lineup has Liesl on bass, me on guitar, and Miranda on keys, but sometimes we switch it up. Miranda is very fond of Werewolves of London. (And she rather likes I Love Rock N’ Roll, too.)

I imagine that eventually I’ll try going through all the songs on drums and vocals, but no guarantees; right now, I just want to finish the songs on bass and refine my pro keys skills.