This weekend, Liesl and Miranda were out much of the day on Saturday, and I took the excuse to play a bunch of Pro Guitar; and I did a fair amount today as well. The result is my most productive weekend in ages: I went through 20 songs, finishing off the Moderate tier, completing all of Challenging, and starting on Nightmare.

The songs are fairly routine by now: I’m still going through training mode, but it’s been a while since I needed to play through a song more than twice after that to feel that I was doing a credible job at it, and there were a couple of songs this week that I only played through a single time. (Which, admittedly, had as much to do with my not liking those songs very much; still, I did a decent job on that single playthrough!) So I’ve learned most of what I’m going to get out of Medium, I think: two note chords don’t hold much fear for me, at least at the speeds that Medium has me play them at.

Most, but not everything, because some of the songs definitely had their twists. There were a few odd three-note chords that the game threw at me, and there were more two note chords on the same fret than I’d previously been used to, most of which I actually tried to play as barre chords instead of using separate fingers to hold down the two strings.

And then there was Killing Loneliness, which had one section (the first or second bit, I can’t remember) that was by far the hardest thing I’d seen in training mode. It was reasonably long, moved reasonably quickly, and while the chords were (almost?) all two-note chords, the progression was such that you basically no choice but to play them as barre chords, even when the two notes were on different frets. Plus a bit of moving between strings, just to keep you on your toes. I was floored by it when I first saw it, but after going through it four or five times, it was pretty clear what the best approach was—it just happened to be an approach that I wasn’t used to taking! After another 10 or so goes, though, I was playing through it fairly solidly, and when I hit that section in the full song (it occurred fairly often, as it turned out), I managed to play it correctly live as well.

That felt really good: a nice bridge to what Hard is going to be like, I imagine. I also see what people mean when they complain about their wrist aching when learning barre chords, because my wrist hurt some after that song. And my fingertips continue to hurt, but it was manageable even this weekend, and I don’t expect to play longer stretches for the foreseeable future, so I’m over the worst there, I think. My back also hurt some: I think I was keeping pretty good posture, but the guitar is heavy enough for me to notice it, and the sofa I’m playing on doesn’t offer good support.

Actually, my body positioning is something I’ve been wondering about: I suspect that, as I play barre chords more, I’ll want to have the neck angled up more than I have been, and maybe I should shorten the strap a bit. My next door neighbor is a guitar teacher: at some point, I may ask her for a one-off lesson, for body positioning help and also for suggestions of exercises to play. (Chords, scales, etc.)

Only 20 songs left, and then on to Hard! Despite my progress this week, I won’t make it through all those songs next weekend, because we have a guest in town, and it wouldn’t shock me if I had three more weeks of Medium ahead of me. But the end of Medium is in sight, and the beginning of what I imagine will feel a lot more like real guitar playing. (I’m planning to buy an amp soon after I hit Hard.)

I was wondering how many people had been diving into Pro Guitar. The answer, judging from the leaderboards, seems to be “not many”: I’m actually in 724th place right now, which seems shockingly high to me. And my scores are a lot higher on Medium than they were on Easy, so I imagine Hard will be a similar jump: in fact, it looks to me right now that doing a good job on most of the songs on Hard would be enough to put me in the top 1%. (There are 284 people in the top 1%, so I’m comfortably within the top 3% already.) I’m assuming that means that there are 25,000–30,000 Pro Guitar controllers out there, though maybe there’s a good-sized population that doesn’t show up on the leaderboards? (You don’t need an account to show up there, though.) Who knows, maybe I’ll end up monitoring the Pro Guitar leaderboards the way I monitored Pro Keys. (I’m a little surprised to see that I’m still in 40th place on the latter.)

Not too much to say today. I was worried I wouldn’t have a lot of time to play this weekend—yesterday was a bit busy, and I participated in a podcast recording today—but I got a decent amount in today, making it through most of the Moderate songs. And the guitar continues to work well, so the cable was definitely the problem.

Some of which were surprisingly easy—I guess Walk of Life must be a lot harder on the higher difficulties? Though I can’t quite hear how; also, I’d never noticed before that some of the early chords in that song come in a touch late, I was glad the game didn’t try to force me to do that. Other songs were rather more difficult: I’m having to jump around a bit more, and sometimes chords are coming a little closer on each other’s tails.

Also, one of the songs made me play barre chords: while it only gave me two notes at a time, it alternated between the lowest two and highest two strings, so treating that as part of a single barre chord was clearly the way to go. Which didn’t go too badly, actually, but clearly it’s something I need to work on: by the end of that song, I wasn’t reliably holding down the notes in the middle of the chord, and I got the feeling that my left hand was working too hard.

My other random observation of the day: so far, I’m finding big rock endings super unsatisfying on the pro guitar—for whatever reason, the realism of the instrument rather destroys the illusion for me. Maybe that will get better as my guitar skills improve, however.

Anyways, I certainly have challenges waiting for me when I reach Hard, judging from how the barre chords and faster sections went today. Which is a good thing! And if Medium holds my interest through the higher difficulty tiers better than Easy did, that’s all to the good as well.

After last week, I was really frustrated at my guitar’s flaking out. I did have one hypothesis that was easy to test, however, namely that I had a bad MIDI cable. So I went out yesterday, bought a new one, plugged it in, and held my breath.

And it worked! The guitar performed flawlessly yesterday; today there was one instance where it thought that the lower strings were still strumming, but that went away the next time I actually strummed. And I’d seen that happen occasionally even before my old MIDI cable went south, so I’m not worried about that symptom.

And when the guitar works, it really works well: I was messing up fairly often, and it was doing a very nice job of informing me! But I had a great time going through songs this weekend; yesterday, I felt that I was making real progress, and in particular my right hand is noticeably better at finding strings than it was a couple of weeks ago.

Today, I finished off the last few Solid songs and moved on to the Moderate songs: they were quite a bit harder than yesterday’s songs, with faster movements between chords on different strings and with more unusual chords thrown into the mix. (And, alas, I was less disciplined today than I had been about not looking at my hands: too many large leaps for me to make.) When I was playing on Easy, the songs leveled off in difficulty part of the way through, and I was curious if the same thing would happen on Medium; maybe it will, but it hasn’t happened yet.

My fingers felt a little odd yesterday: they weren’t hurting, but my calluses felt strangely soft, to the extent that the strings almost got stuck in them at times. I’m choosing to interpret that as meaning that I haven’t been playing Rock Band enough; I was certainly glad to get in practice both days this weekend. Especially because it’s taking a lot longer to go through each song on Medium than it did on Easy: if I put in enough time, I can barely make it through through a tier over a weekend, but often recently I haven’t managed that. Admittedly, that had as much to do with hardware problems as anything, but still: I need to focus if I’m going to make it to Hard in the first half of the summer. (Which is where, I assume, I’m going to start feeling like I’m really playing music; I’m planning to buy an amp when I get to that level to hear what I sound like.)

Good times.

Last week, I started running into some very annoying controller problems. I thought the issue was at least partly due to battery problems, but the guitar flaked out again a few songs later. Right as I was giving up in frustration, I noticed the MIDI reset command, so I tried that, but I was too frazzled to see what effect it had had.

And when I started playing this week, the guitar worked great! I finished off the Apprentice-level songs at Medium difficulty; I’m sure you’re tired of hearing this, but this mode in this game is the most fascinating thing I’ve ever played. My main accomplishment this week is that my right hand seems to have gotten a lot better at selecting the correct strings: a couple of the songs had be alternating between strings that were two apart, and that went quite well, and even when there were less regular patterns, my right hand was doing surprisingly well at jumping to the correct string, even for the middle strings.

Unfortunately, when I started on the Solid songs, the guitar started flaking out again. It would claim frets were perpetually held down, or it wouldn’t register frets that I was pressing down, or it would refuse to register any strums at all. The MIDI adapter was flashing an SOS pattern, so clearly it was also pretty confused as to what was going on, but doing a MIDI reset on the guitar didn’t work.

So I’m pretty frustrated. Up until now, I’d been really impressed by the Squier: what it’s doing seems to me to be quite complicated, but it works amazingly well. And much of the time this weekend, it was also working amazingly well! But when it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work.

I had been assuming this meant that my guitar is a lemon. And that may well be the case; a few forum posts suggest that I might have a bad MIDI cable, however. (Which does seem consistent with my symptoms.) Fortunately, I have a spare one of those around, so I’ll try that next weekend. If that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll have to figure out where my nearest Fender repair center is? Which I’m not looking forward to, because of the intermittent nature of the problem: that kind of thing can easily lead to multiple rounds of guitars being returned as allegedly fixed with the problem continuing to crop up at home…

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.

After last week, I only had one song left to play on Expert Pro Keys, namely Roundabout; today, I finished it.

I finished Roundabout!

It was one of two songs that I hadn’t successfully played on Expert at all before I started this project; and there’s definitely a reason why it’s the last song in the track listing. When I first gave it a try today, I failed out somewhere around the 20% mark, when I hit some fast arpeggios; I then went into training mode and found that, the last time I’d trained on that piece, I’d successfully completed a grand total of one of the fifteen sections. I did better in training mode this time, but still: there’s a lot of hard stuff in that piece.

Still, I do seem to be getting better: after playing them a few times, I could actually manage the arpeggios in question reliably enough that my health bar increased when I was done with them rather than decreased, and I frequently hit a 4x multiplier at some point in the middle of them. I haven’t gone back and checked, but I’m pretty sure that those arpeggios are noticeably slower than the ones in Antibodies; still, they’re plenty fast, and I also get the feeling that my hand is getting better at maintaining an even rhythm in sections like that, meaning that I’m less scared of fast arpeggios than I used to be.

So I was feeling pretty happy with myself: I made it through the first 40% of the piece, and then a nice easy bit hits, where I can build up overdrive. And then, at around 53% into the piece, I hit another section of arpeggios: these ones were a lot harder than the previous ones, and, adding insult to injury, they hadn’t showed up at all in training mode! I’m not sure why they were omitted from training mode: while it is admittedly the case that you could include almost every measure of this piece in training mode, and at 15 sections, training mode was already long enough, it still seems a bit odd to leave out the hardest section of the entire piece.

I was almost ready to give up when that happened: I’d done well so far, but I was hitting my limit. Still, I figured I’d go through the piece a few times on no fail mode, just to see what it was like. And, with a bit of practice, I could make it to the hard spot with full health and full overdrive quite reliably; unfortunately, even full overdrive wasn’t long enough to make it through the hard section. But, when I turned off no-fail mode and then continued when I failed out, I was tantalizingly close to making it through that section!

And, after giving it a few more tries, it was pretty clear how to proceed. That section in question was difficult, but not evenly so: the early parts were merely super hard (as hard or harder than anything else on the disc!) while the latter parts were almost impossible without quite a bit more detailed study (and I’d have to master them without the help of training mode). So my best strategy was to survive as long as possible without overdrive: if I could make it a third of the way into the section in question before turning on overdrive, I’d have a fighting chance of making it through the whole thing with overdrive. The part after the crazy arpeggios ended was no picnic, either, but it was clearly within my capabilities, and I could use training mode to help me there.

So I went with that; after another couple of playthroughs, I could feel myself getting a bit better, and a few more attempts after that, I made it through the hard section. I was nervous / hyped up enough that I didn’t make it all the way through the piece—like I said, it’s no walk in the park even after that section—but at that point it was clear to me that I could make it through, with the appropriate strategic overdrive usage. (This is the only piece that I have to pick my overdrive spots based on survival rather than points!) And, a lunch break and several more attempts later, I finally succeeded.

At which point I declared victory, rather than trying to refine my score further. I like the piece, and I’m actually really hoping that more Yes appears as DLC, but I’d been playing it over and over again for the last several hours: enough is enough.

So now my tour through the on-disc content is done. I’ve actually slipped a few spots since last time: my score only went up a bit (from 10,620,581 points to 10,654,949 points), but other people have improved more than I have. So I guess 30th place was my high-water mark; I’m happy with that.

I'm at rank 33 with 10,654,959 points

I still plan to spend a little more time with Pro Keys: I haven’t put serious effort into the Billy Joel DLC yet, and apparently we’ll be getting more of his songs next week! There’s probably other keyboard DLC worth playing as well, I’ll give it a spin. But clearly I want to focus on Pro Guitar now: getting done with the Pro Keys on-disc content now is very good timing.

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.