Day 32:

Finding time to keep track of things is tricky between work and practicing.

After 1 month my fingertips are flatter and calloused. I downloaded a few songs from the Rock Band 3 store: Smells Like Teen Spirit, I Alone, and In The End.

I'm improving in terms of technique, although getting a high score is kinda a pain because the B and high E strings don't register on up-picks.

I'm far better at picking out the right string which is nice, but solos and riffs are still tough.

Day: 9 Picks and Lesson Progress

Lesson Progress

There are 18 different lessons for pro guitar - I've skipped around a little bit between medium and hard after finishing the easy lessons. I haven't tried any expert ones yet.

• Easy
• Note Basics - Done
• More Note Basics - Done
• Basic Finger Exercises - Done

• Medium
• Intervals and Octaves - 2/3s Done
• Power Chords - Done
• Some First Position Open Chords - Done
• Hammer Ons and Pull Offs - Done
• More Finger Exercises

• Hard
• More First Position Chords - Done
• 3 Note Power Chords and Barre Chords- 5/10s Done
• Strumming Patterns - Done (oddly enough they don't tell you the patterns, I was familiar with all 3 of them in the lesson Down, Down, Up, Up, Down, Up for example)
• Holding a Chord and arpeggetiation
• Scale Exercises

Pick Favoritism

You can start to see where pick scratches from playing. I've been using 4 different picks and my favorite by far is the Cool Pick Juratex (light). I only had two floating around and I'm waiting for some more to arrive. They have a sandpaper grip and the light one molded to my thumb with enough playing.

I've also tried .60mm and .80mm Dunlop Tortex picks - I like these for my other guitar, but I feel like I'm fighting the string dampener (the black foam thing right below the beck) when strumming.

Days 5-8: The familiar sensation of losing sensation in my fingertips

They burn!

Can't really tell from the picture, but my fingers are red and starting to callous up from practice.

I've finished the 'easy' lessons and I'm working my way through the medium lessons. They progress nicely and I hate/love the "100% 3 times in a section before letting you progress in a lesson"

Keeping up practice is really easy. I haven't had this much focused practice, well ever.



Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (92%)

I'm pretty happy with the progress in a week. I went from 80% on hard to 92% with Yoshimi.

The are three major improvements from Day 1.

• I'm staying in time with the beat. 
• Much faster at chord changes (especially barre ones)
• I'm using different fingering for chords depending on what is coming. Example: I'm playing a stretch of Emin (022000) and I know F is coming (133211). Instead of using my index and middle fingers for Emin I use my ring finger and pinky. I then slide down to (033000) and then place my middle finger on the G string and barre along the top.

Ground Control to Major Tom

Now that I've mastered Yoshimi, I'm working on David Bowie's Space Oddity. It has a lot more technical difficulty (for me at least). I'll write up a post tomorrow when I work through it again, but the song uses the entire fretboard whereas Yoshimi uses only the first 3 frets with no riffs.

Day 4: Not a whole lot of progress

Finally, headphones

The most exciting thing was buying a RCA -> headphone adapter so I can listen on headphones without going through an amp.

Was busy working on work things so I didn't have a lot of time on Day 4. Beowulf computer cluster ahoy!

I ran through Yoshimi twice and didn't do any better than prior runs. I'm going to work through the song on practice mode at 70% speed until I get 95%, then turn up to 80% and so on. I want to get 95% on hard before moving on to a new song.

In about a week I'll start recording. It'll be more interesting than text. Hopefully.

Day 3: Yo dawg, I heard you like amps...

Lets mount it!

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words.

I started today by mounting my guitar to the wall. I played much more when I had my guitars sitting around on stands. Any excuse to use an impact drill, a stud finder and a mallet is fun too!

The photo is a signed by Wayne who is awesome. I will %100 Yoshimi! Although Wayne might be the opposite of Asian Father...

I'll start at the beginning. I wanted to hook up the PS3 to my computer monitor and use headphones. Sounds simple, right? I do some research... okay, need either USB headphones or bluetooth headphones. I like technology so I order a pair of Sony bluetooth headphones from Amazon. They were well reviewed.

I'm not going to get into the details, but only the microphone in the bluetooth headphones hook up the PS3... I can hear myself in them, but not the PS3. After much googling I find that this this is a feature.

Givl...

What you see above is a PS3 using a HDMI -> DVI cable to my monitor. With the RCA (the white/red/yellow) connectors going to my amp. Which in turn is going to my regular old gaming headphones. This took some time as I had to dig around for the cabling. Oddly enough the amp volume does nothing. I'd say this might be a first. PS3 -> amp -> headphones. I tried PS3 -> amp -> speakers -> headphones but the distortion was way too much.

Oh, I would not recommend this at home. It is *loud*. The volume control on my headphones laughed at me. I'm grateful you can lower the volume in Rock Band 3. Even at the lowest setting my ears were ringing after playing more of Yoshimi. I feel  this just added to the experience!

Digging through wires took a long time. I played through Yoshimi 4 times on Hard, 84% accuracy was my highest. I'm getting faster at switching from barre to open chords and back again.

For fun I tried Walking on the Sun. Yeah... I need to practice that. I finished off another lesson as well. Wasn't too difficult but it was good practice by plucking strings that aren't adjacent to each other.

Day 2: Still not 100%

I didn't have as much time to play as I did the other night, but  I did get in 4 runs of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Once on Hard (84%) and 3 runs on Expert (74% was the highest). I was a little disappointed there weren't any riffs on Expert, but there isn't any riffing going on in a Yoshimi.

My index finger on my fretting hand has a small blister and the other fingers are starting to toughen up again.

I'm going to attempt to set up the guitar properly tonight to try and get the intonation correct as best I can up and down the fretboard so I can plug it into my amp along with the PS3 and play along with the song.

Day 1: "The Journey Begins" or "WHY NOT 100%?"

Day 1

The strat arrives in good shape from Newegg.com (Best Buy had an exclusive deal, but Fender stopped making the guitars after Best Buy didn't want to order any more). It is *really* light compared to my silver sister. It comes with a MIDI cable, 3 batteries, a guitar strap and a manual. WARNING: Do not restring it with anything thicker than 9s. Electric guitars usually come with 10s, but the hollow neck has a lot of flex in it. If you string 10s to it you also VOID  YOUR WARRANTY! All of this in small print somewhere in the manual (or so I'm told). Make sure you have some guitar picks - I like thin ones.

I hook it up to my amp and give it a good strum before tuning for fun.





Turn it up to 11!

As expected, it sounded terrible. I've seen people play along to the songs complaining that it doesn't sound like the song. They haven't tuned the guitar and you probably want at least a distortion pedal to get it to sound right.

Let the tuning begin!

I plug it into a chromatic tuner and start tuning. I also used gStrings on my droid phone as this tuner kinda sucks.

Here's where things get kinda ugly. Guitars when shipped are always sent with the strings slack so the neck doesn't break. As I tune each string it pulls the other strings out of tune. I'm not even touching the intonation yet...

I'm not worried as I know that Rock Band 3 will use the fancy electronics in the neck to figure out where I'm fretting. I get the open strings in tune and I'm saving the intonation for another day. I'd go so far that you might want to have the guitar set up by a professional when you're ready to plug it into an amp and play along.

Let the fun begin!

Not reading any of the manuals, I start plugging things in and begin the "tutorials" for pro mode. I haven't played any Rock Band 3, so I should be a perfect test subject for this.

The first tutorial is a video explaining how things work. I took advice that I read online and set the chords to show all the numbers rather than just the "root" of the chord and some wavy stuff.

Example: After setting on the numbering it'll look like a regular ole tab which is much easier to deciper with the chord letter off to the side.

Here's how a C chord will appear now.

|  |  |   |  |  |
|  3 2 0 1 0
|  |  |   |  |  |

After watching the first video (and getting 2,937,483 achievements) I got ready to play. Except it was telling me that I had the wrong controller plugged in... it took me a few minutes to find that there's a D K G switch on the midi converter. It was on K (keyboard) and I switched over to G (guitar). Huzzah! Time to rock!

First lesson is plucking away at the low E string open. I'm plucking away and nothing is happening... Then I remember there's a switch on the back of the guitar itself. Flick it on and on I go! Don't forget to turn on the foam string dampener.

Asian Dad time...


The lessons for pro guitar are *very* good. I was thrown a bit off because the guitar neck is wider than my Silver Sister.

It demands perfection. If you miss a single note you have to keep on practicing it til you get 100% to move on to the next lesson.

The good news is that it will loop the section over until you get it correct. Each section lasts about a minute and it teaches you some nice little riffs, switching strings and hints on chords (I turned this off, but beginners would like it).

The bad news is that the B and high E strings (the really thin ones) had trouble registering up picks which was a little annoying. I switched to a thicker pick so it would register better.

The first group of lessons for Intro to Pro Guitar took about an hour. What was really neat was I noticed that my individual string picking got much more precise thanks to the Asian Dad-esque perfection.

Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

Now I really wanted to play a song. The Flaming Lips are my favorite band, so I chose Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. I decided to play on Medium since I believe easy is only individual notes and I wanted chords tossed into the mix.

I failed the first run through which didn't surprise me. The chords they used were E minor (x02xxx), G (23003), C (x32010), F(kinda)(13xxxx) and D minor (xx0231).

Now, here's where it gets interesting. I'm not sure whether this is going to be a bad habit or not. When I learned my chords I learned to mute extra strings with my thumb wrapping around the guitar for C and D. The MIDI Strat sensors would pick up my 'muting' and it wouldn't register the strum and fingering as 'good'. I lightened up my muting to just a light touch and the problem went away.

The two chords that gave me the most trouble were D minor (since I hadn't played that in awhile) and the F(kinda). I'm calling it an F(kinda) because its an F and C (the F being the root of the chord and the C is the 5th - usually its a triad of the root, 3rd and 5th (whole notes), so its missing a piece just playing those two strings).

I played the song on medium in practice mode until I got the D minor and I decided to play the full barre F chord (133211) since I found that less awkward than (13xxxx). The game doesn't penalize you for strumming extraneous strings, but you can see the strings vibrate on the screen as you play. I'm paying careful attention to that as I want the song to sound right when I play it through an amp.

I was feeling pretty good so I decided to put the song on Hard and have a go. It wasn't much more difficult as it was all chords but it demands perfection for each chord. The chords became E minor (022000), G (23003), C (x32010), F(133211) D minor (xx0231) and A minor (x02210). A lot more strumming too. A *lot*. I switched from a thin pick to an even thinner pick.

After 3 runs I was able to beat the song on Hard. I played it through a few more times improving each time and left with an 80% accuracy and a score of 299,990.

Onward and final thoughts on Day 1!

I'm really happy with the setup. The cost of the setup is a bit on the expensive side but I feel the accuracy on fingering and timing that the game demands from you will be very beneficial. There are downsides (no hammer-ons or pick offs) in the game that some reviewers didn't like, but I'm not at that level of playing yet to really be annoyed at it.

The 'clunking' from the muting is a bit annoying. I bought a pair of bluetooth headphones to go with the PS3 and a HDMI to DVI adapter so I can play in another room so my wonderful girlfriend doesn't go insane.

Day 2 I will be trying to 90%-95% Yoshimi on Hard and try it on Expert. Maybe some riffs will be thrown in! I'll also find a way to record video/audio and get some things up on youtube.