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!

On Saturday, I mostly played through Pro Keys stuff: going through the keyboard parts of a bunch of random DLC (of which the highlight was Take On Me) and several Billy Joel songs. I’m playing each of the latter songs a few times (including going through training mode on them), but I’m not treating them nearly as seriously as the on-disc content, so in particular I have quite a lot of room for improvement on The Entertainer. Still, fun stuff, and (unsurprisingly) Piano Man is great.

I also did a bit of Pro Guitar training: going through a few of the most complex Hard lessons again (I got 100% on the hardest barre chord lesson the first time through!), and doing the Expert lesson on seventh chords for the first time. Which I’m glad I did, even though seventh chords aren’t showing up in game for me yet, I expect I’ll try out more of the Expert lessons.

Today, I went through four songs on Pro Guitar. (All Hard Apprentice.) I would have done more, but I’m not feeling so great, and playing guitar requires a fair amount of concentration. Also, one of the ways in which I’m not feeling great is that I wrenched my back earlier this week; the down side of playing guitar is that I need to sit upright, which makes it hard to keep the heating pad against it, but the up side is that it means that I have to sit in a good posture, which is useful!

Fun stuff, generally. I enjoyed playing Whip It, and did a good job on it. Rock Lobster had way too many fast notes for me to do well on it: clearly that’s something I need to work on. It doesn’t help that I’m still very bad at upstrumming; now that my playing of barre chords isn’t a complete disaster, maybe I should spend time out-of-game working on alternating picking?

Fly Like an Eagle was interesting because it had some hammer-ons in it and, unlike last time, they sounded great! Well, at least some of them did, but any progress is welcome. And I enjoyed playing Walking on the Sun with the mute on, but when I unmuted and plugged it in, it sounded awful, I’m pretty sure Hard is leaving out some important notes.

Not as much progress as I would have liked; then again, given how I’m feeling this weekend, I’m glad I managed to practice at all.

Whenever new Rock Band DLC comes out, I give it a listen, and buy it if it looks like fun to play. The problem is that I don’t actually get around to playing it, so I had a bunch stacked up. So on Saturday night, Liesl and I went through that (on regular guitar/bass respectively); not much to report, though I am a bit embarrassed to report that the two songs that I got 100% on were Paparazzi and Tubthumping…

Today, I put in my Pro Guitar practice. I went through some of the harder training sections again: it’s no longer a surprise when I make it through those, but it’s not yet so routine that I’m not learning something. I may dip into the Expert lessons in an upcoming week: I’m sure that many of those are beyond me, but there might be some that are worth trying, and I would like to learn about alternate tunings.

After that I went through three songs. The main takeaway from Good Vibrations is that I can’t strum nearly fast enough: I could mostly keep up with that one, but I got the impression that Expert will be noticeably harder on that song, and it’s only Apprentice level!

Outer Space was rather interesting: like Yoshimi, it has a lot of chord strumming, with a bit less repetition of individual chords this time but with more variations in the chords themselves. In particular, G chords in the song had you playing the third fret on the B string, which I’m a little less used to but which makes for a pleasant transition coming out of a D chord, since you can leave your ring finger in the same place. Also, in the last of a sequence of G chords, they frequently dropped the bottom string down to an F#, which took a while to get used to but which sounded good once I got it right. (I appreciate the hint of polyphony instead of chords or single notes.) Eventually, I got to where I could get to a 4x multiplier on that song, which I was rather proud of; coming out of that chord success, I went back to try Yoshimi again, and I’m still not very good on that song, though.

The third song I went through was Break on Through (To the Other Side). That’s the first song with Hammer On / Pull Offs; I could play them reliably with the mute on, but when I plugged in the guitar, they were barely audible. So clearly I need to work on my technique there, to make them a lot crisper.

Playing through my DLC backlog reminded me that I had a bunch of Billy Joel DLC that I hadn’t gone through seriously on Pro Keys, so I decided to start chipping away on that instead of continuing with Pro Guitar. Which was a good idea: I’d forgotten how big his first DLC pack was, and I had 18 songs waiting for me!

Of which I made it through a grand total of two. In Captain Jack, I scored over 700,000 points, which wasn’t enough to put me in the top 1%; lots of chords in that song! I made enough mistakes that it looked like it’s possible to make over a million points on that song, which a look at the leaderboard confirms; the leaderboard also shows that I’m in 42nd place, I guess not that many people have played it. The other one I tried was I Go to Extremes, which was rather harder, I spent more than an hour on that song alone and there was still room for improvement at the end.

I don’t think my Pro Keys skills have slipped too much, at least, but I have another 16 Billy Joel songs to go, and there’s some non-Billy Joel DLC with keyboard parts that I should give a try on as well. So I’ll probably be trying to find time for both Pro Guitar and Pro Keys for the next month or two.

I only got in one Rock Band session this week, but it was a good one. I repeated the hardest of the barre chord lessons and all of the scale lessons, this time trying to use hopos on the chromatic scale one, and they went well. And I managed to make it through the remaining of the Hard lessons, on arpeggiation within chords, which was another fun one. (I’m sure I could have made it through it earlier, I was just tired when I’d tried it before. Though my increased fluency in shifting between chords certainly helped.)

After that, I went back into the songs, continuing through the Warmup songs. Which I was expecting to have to spend a fair amount of time on, but so far that hasn’t materialized: quite to my surprise, I made it through the remaining nine Warmup songs! I’m sure the time I’ve spent on barre chord lessons helped, as did the fact that many of the Warmup songs don’t actually use barre chords (preferring instead power chords or single notes), but for whatever reason, I went through each song at most twice with the mute on and once plugged into the amp (except for one or two songs using an alternate tuning, which I haven’t yet tried to figure out), and felt satisfied enough to move on at the end of that.

I’d been thinking that I’d want to spend a lot of time going through the Hard lessons over and over again. And while I’m still planning to return to them, it’s also looking like the difficulty curve even on Hard might be shallow enough that I can improve my barre chord skills by spending most of my time playing through actual songs. That would be pleasant if it remains true (which may well not be the case!): the lessons are well done, but playing through real songs is more fun.

I still sound pretty bad on the real songs, though. Some of that is because there is (copious!) room for improvement in my skills, but some is that playing a stripped down version of an easy song doesn’t sound that great. We’ll see how that changes when the songs get harder, maybe I’ll get inspired to put in more time on individual songs then.

And there was one song that was a total outlier, namely Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. When I got to it in the menu, I noted that Dan Bruno‘s score was over 600,000 points, which is extremely high for any song, let alone a warmup song! What turns out to be going on there is that it’s full of chords, and you have to play them pretty quickly; the chords are all easy ones to play (though you shift between five or six different ones, three-chord music it isn’t), but there’s a lot of notes to play (if you’re Dan) or to miss a fair portion of (if you’re me).

It’s also the first song where I haven’t been able to do the training sections accurately. They’re long, they both have multiple chord changes and individual chords that are repeated a lot, and that adds up to something that I am so far unable to hit 100% on. (Or, I seem to recall, get particularly close to.) It’s also a song where I’m feeling more dubious than normal about the strum detection and the string mute; the flip side is that it’s a song that’s relatively rewarding to try to play well plugged in, I think. I’m not currently planning to return to it to try to get better, but that would be worth considering.

The main bit of Pro Guitar excitement this week: I bought an amp! At the recommendation of a guitarist friend of mine, I went for a Fender Vibro Champ XD, and I have no regrets so far: I like the way it sounds, and it allows for what seems to me a decent amount of experimentation, which will help me get a better idea of the possibilities that are out there when/if I decide to move up to something fancier.

And it turns out that, indeed, playing Pro Guitar on Hard is good preparation for the real thing! I’ve only gone through three songs on Hard so far, but in all cases, when I played them plugged in I could definitely hear the music. Flourishes were missing, so I clearly have something to look forward to when I learn those songs on Expert, but buying the amp when I hit Hard was definitely the right choice. (And, conversely, I tried out a few songs on Medium with the amp on, and it just wasn’t the same.)

It was also very educational from a musical point of view. Most notably in learning how notes sustain on an electric guitar: when you’re playing in game, the game is in complete control of that, and when you play unmuted but not plugged in, notes don’t sustain very well. When I’m plugged in, though, notes sustain for a quite long time. In particular, it was quickly clear that I need to mute notes that I don’t want to sustain; for now, I’m doing that with the pick, but I should play around with other possible ways to mute.

That also raises the question: what should I do when the game gives me notes that are marked as muted? The game doesn’t really care, though it gives me advice to not hold down the strings very much; I’ll need to experiment with the different sounds I can produce with that. And hammers-on and pull-offs are much more real to me now: I’d been playing them for years without really believing that they could work (at some subconscious level, of course I trust Harmonix to represent music accurately within the game’s constraints), but it turns out that, yup, they work well! Though that is very much an area which I need to explore more, in order to figure out how to get notes to sustain best across transitions.

The amp aside, though, I’ve only played very little this week. We have guests in town (summer being when grandparents come to visit their granddaughter), and yesterday in particular was quite busy with brunch, a musical, and dinner. So I didn’t have time to learn any new songs; I did manage to put in most of an hour on practice mode, though.

And I would seem to be making progress. There are 10 barre chord lessons; the first four went rather smoothly, which isn’t something I’ve been able to say in the past, and I made it through the last of them for the first time. The open chord lessons also went well, so probably I’ll soon reduce my frequency of practicing those. (Or maybe not, it’s core muscle memory and the better I get the less time it will take for me to go through them!) I also finished the strumming pattern lessons for the first time; those, I wasn’t so impressed by (it wasn’t even clear which strings I was supposed to strum when or what mistake I had made in a given attempt), and I don’t plan to return to them particularly often. I didn’t have time to go through the arpeggiation lessons (which I haven’t yet finished) or the scale lessons (which I have finished but plan to return to frequently).

I’ll happily dive in full force next weekend, though. My current plan is to go through songs like I have been and then play each song a couple of times unmuted and plugged in to see what it sounds like. And I have no idea what my rate of progress will be; I’m sure it will be slower than on Medium (both because of the difficulty and because I’ll be wanting to listen to myself), but how much has yet to be determined.