Archive for January, 2014

The game was definitely having a problem registering my E string today. I was playing Heart Shaped Box and it kept saying I missed the third fret. It was suspicious, so I stopped doing anything else and just played that note. Most of the time, even when I was playing it perfectly, I would say I missed it. I tried it on the forth fret too and one time it registered it correctly, then went back to saying miss.

I tried re-tuning to no affect. That adds up somewhat as I was playing Temple of Bends earlier and it kept failing to register my bends. Other strings were fine – I just got my bends wrong on those, but E did not even show up.

I also played some Harmonic Heist for the first time today, which seems fine.

Learning guitar seems a lot like learning to drive. At first everything moves so fast that you cannot really do anything but try and keep up. Then as you acclimatise to it, you can work on the finer points. So far it has been madly stabbing at different strings to try and get the right note. But as things seem to move a little slower, I have been able to think “maybe I could just use this other finger here for that one.”

I’m really enjoying my Sonos system. Being able to play music throughout the whole house is amazing as I regularly move from room to room.

However the support for Audible audiobooks is not very good. The way it works is that you link your Audible account to your Sonos. Then, every time you buy an audiobook, you have to download it, load it into your music library and then you can play it. It then just treats it like a song so it does not remember your place or understand any of the meta data.

Compared to the Audible software, where new books just appear on the list and download and playing with one click, it is just an unusably bad experience. Audible also has chapter and marker supports and remembers your place in each audiobook that you are listening to.

Luckily, there is a solution. If you have a line-in on one of your components, such as the Sonos PLAY:5, and an Apple AirPort Express, you can take the line-out from your AirPort Express and then feed it into your Sonos.

Once this is done, you can use AirPlay to direct the output from your iPhone, iPad or Mac and it goes into your Sonos and plays through all of your Sonos system – not just the one you fed it into. This means you can use the Audible software and still play it across your entire Sonos.

There is a definitely delay added by the latency of the two systems combined. It takes a few seconds between me pressing play or stop on my iPhone for it to actually happen. But that seems to be the only drawback, and is not really much of one.

Using AirPort Utility, you can name the AirPort Express line-out anything you want. I have now renamed it to Sonos, so that is what I get on the list on AirPlay.

I have now reached the 60 hours that the 60-Day Challenge promised me I could play guitar by.

I still cannot play guitar. It is almost as if Ubisoft lied to me in order to get me to buy their product. I did complete one of my challenges today though. Reach master on a section of a song. I managed that thanks to Tom Petty’s “Last Dance With Mary Jane”. Part of the song is just E minor several times. That is the whole section. Apparently I am now an expert at that.

I am still finding the auto-difficulty a bit annoying at times. I spent ages practising a section in Black Magic. Then, when I went back to the song, it had made it even more difficult and basically everything I had practised was now useless. I did raise my mastery to 50% though, despite missing loads of the notes.

I spent a lot of time working on the fingering for R U Mine? I still have not managed it. Tricky thing I realised today. It is not just that you need to be focused enough to spend an hour doing a tiny thing over and over again. It is at the end of that hour you have to have the the self-control to stop, admit to yourself you cannot do it yet, take yourself out of the situation and move on. As Ms Adler would say, know when you are beaten. You have to be a perfectionist, but also turn that part of your personality off when it is not working. No easy feat. My guitar almost went through my TV. Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean…

I went some time today trying to play the F chord.

Turns out it is completely impossible. Most chords you can easily make the shape with your fingers, it is just a case of practising and getting there fast enough. Not the F chord. It is not even possible when you take your time and carefully position your fingers. It just cannot be done.

I spent most of the time playing songs and made some progress. Some of them were at around the 20-25% mark and I have now got them up to 40%. This is probably because I have reorganised the list by difficulty and have not played them for a while. I did not move up on my old favourites. But progress none the less.

I have started to hit more two finger jobs. Things that I would just miss entirely before. I even hit the C chord when that was thrown at me. Time is running out though. Ubisoft promised me I would be able to play guitar with four hours more practice.

I finally beat the boss on Scale Warriors! I think this only proves my point that the boss is proportionally too hard though. After beating him, I went onto scale set 2. I completed the first two levels, straight through, in one go. I have not even tried level 3 yet, I could have gone on. It seems very odd that it would take 2-3 hours to beat a boss, then you can just whizz through the next two levels straight away. Maybe it is designed like that though and starts easy again on each scale set.

On Danny’s suggestion I am going to spend more time doing the songs. I am still finding the automatically adjusting difficulty a little annoying. It adds extra stuff, and then when I miss everything as I try and hit the new stuff as well, takes it away again. Still, will press on.

I spent most of last night’s NFL game working on my fingering for the chords to Losing My Religion and Blitzkrieg Bop.

Today I spent an hour and a half trying to beat the boss on Scale Warriors. I still haven’t. Fed up.

Google is now displaying the star ratings of reviews from the Leeds Restaurant Guide.

I was about to come on and bitch about how it is impossible to complete any of the bosses and you just get stuck for hours. Then I beat the boss on Return of Castle Chordead. Good times. I am still stuck on the boss on Scale Warriors though. I was a little disappointed to see the Castle Chordead scales just re-use the same virtual world for the other scales too.

I reached 50 hours today, which is not too far off the level required to complete the 60-day challenge. Of course I have been doing it for 18 days, but one hour a day for 60 days equals 60 hours. So I should effectively be nearing the end of the challenge in equivalent hours.

I still cannot play the guitar. Of course there is always the chance it will all fall into place at the last minute, but this seems very unlikely. I still struggle to pick out the right note (without looking) and chords are hit and miss. Even though I feel I am making progress, and I might be, I have seen what is to come and I am a million miles away from it.

That is not even the song I wanted to learn. I was looking for information on Cold Company by Minus the Bear, which is way harder.

I actually ended up on that video because I wanted to know how you were able to play fret 19 and then hammer-on on fret 12. My hand simply is not big enough to do that. Turns out that you have to use both hands. That makes sense now because the notes are taps. But as I have not got to the taps lesson yet that did not occur to me. I do not know why it gives me taps if it does not explain them.