Chris Worfolk's Blog

I have a new found respect for Green Day. Yes, their songs are composed almost entirely of power chords. But have you ever tried to hold the power chord shape for five minutes straight? Oh my god it hurts so much! Barre chords hurt a bit. But not like this. I physically do not have the strength in my hands to get all the way through Oh Love.

I start missing chords by the end of the song because my hands just are not strong enough to keep going. I have tried to end every session with the song to build up my strength.

Speaking of barre chords, I had a fucking F today! I am still missing a lot of Cs and I do not think I have managed to hit an A yet. But F is very slightly in the bag.

I really knocked my mastery percentage in some songs today. I do not know how. I started with My Own Summer by Deftones and apparently got an accuracy of 69%. There is no way that happened. I think I hit about 10% of notes. I am not convinced the game can tell the difference between a wrong note on Eb tuning…

I’m not actually going to comment on any issues in this short piece. I just wanted to point a link over to this blog post where Chris H has catalogued a few interesting research papers showing clear evidence for sexism.

I was wondering how Rocksmith recommends songs today. I did a google around and it seems to be some kind of magic. At first I thought it might just be a formula based on difficulty and mastery but maybe not. It keeps recommending the new songs I have downloaded over and over again.

I am also taking exception to the difficulty setting on an Oasis song. I keep hitting all the chords (and most of the other stuff too) but then because I miss something else, it downgrades the entire song. Then I get a few 93% and 95% accuracies and it upgrades the difficulty. Then the cycle repeats. Very annoying.

I also tried connecting my guitar up to my Mac to see if I could use Garageband as an amp. It is far too quiet though. I have to max the gain on Garageband and my speaker volume just to get it heard above the sound of me strumming. I had a look at the input devices that let you connect it to iOS devices but they are well expensive.

Long term I would really like to run my guitar through one of my devices though. This way I can test out different amps and FX pedals before I buy them so that I know which ones I want.

Yesterday I finished playing all the songs on the rhythm path. The songs seem to vary in how different the two versions are. For some, the lead and rhythm are almost the same. In others they are very different. You also need strong hands when an entire song is basically the same chord over and over again.

Today I spent some time working on playing in position. This is where you keep your hand in the same place and use different fingers for the different frets. Of course this limits you to four frets, so it all goes tits up when it moves outside of this. However, I think I have made a good start.

I am still having problems with the E string not registering on Heart Shaped Box. I had a google around and at least one other person is having the same problem. The forums suggested that I try and strike the notes more softly, which seems to help.

More bitching about the Play Station Network. I tried to buy The Smashing Pumpkins pack, however it said my credit card was invalid. I logged on to try and edit it and it would only let me enter a 3 digit CV2. American Express has 4 digits and they clearly know this because they have a picture of an AMEX showing the 4 digits.

I tried deleting the card and re-add it. This time it left me enter a 4 digit CV2 but when I submitted the form it insisted the card number was invalid even though it was not. Irritating.

In the end I used my MasterCard and finally managed to add the credit. For my £9.69 I got five songs. However, when I went to play them I found that two did not have lead guitar parts. I guess the two songs are single guitar acoustics but I felt a little cheated as I did not see it mentioned.

As a positive consequence though I then had to switch to the rhythm guitar path which got me thinking I could do that more. When I get tired of not being able to do the flashy solos I can switch to rhythm and spend some time not being able to do all the chords.

Thinking about it, they come with a bass track too…

In a recent article in The Guardian, it could be easily to interpret that councillor David Silvester was suspended for his anti-gay comments that suggested gay marriage caused the recent flooding.

He wasn’t.

As BBC News reports, Nigel Farage said he was suspended for refusing to shut up…

UKIP leader Nigel Farage said he was entitled to his “strong Baptist view of the world”, but had defied a request not to do further media interviews.

Mr Farage said: “So we suspended him, quite rightly.”

I think there is a critical difference. He was suspended because he refused to stop talking about it. UKIP have not spoken out against the statement. They have just said he should not be talking about. This fits with the original statement that UKIP gave to The Telegraph.

If the media are expecting Ukip to either condemn or condone someone’s personal religious views they will get absolutely no response.

So UKIP are fine with people being a bigot, as long as it is religious bigotry.

It is worth noting however that UKIP does not share Silvester’s views on gay marriage. Their, very different hatred of gay marriage, is outlined explicitly on their website.

I have started reading Sherlock Holmes to see if Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss had many any changes when they developed their TV series.

I think I prefer the TV series. The novel is straight forward. Sure, Sherlock Holmes is a very clever man. But it is almost believable. Where I quite like the TV series because it is escapism – nobody could be that brilliant, or that much of an arsehole.

I also found the structure of the novel rather strange. In the middle it changes to a story set in Utah for “The Country of the Saints”. I understand why it was there, but it goes on for ages and ages. It is like a mini-novel inside another.

The problem with Terry Pratchett novels is that I often have not read the book that it is a satire of. This is true of Maskerade. I have not read Phantom of the Opera. So when I do, I imagine I will spend the whole time thinking “ha, they have just stolen that from Discworld”. Good read, but nothing amazing.

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.