Chris Worfolk's Blog

I did a couple of extra hours yesterday evening while my enthusiasm is still high. I can’t decide how much extra time to put in or not. On one hand I should get the practice in while I still want to. But on the other maybe it will be less frustrating and I’ll get fed up less quickly if I just stick to the one hour per day.

I spent quite a lot of time on the “guitarcade” stuff, which are arcade games that teach you basic skills like getting the right string and navigating the fretboard. These are brilliant for making repetitive learning fun but you can end up losing on them quite fast and then you have to go through two stats screens, the start screen and the little intro animation before you get back to the game. It feels like I spend more time waiting for the game to restart than I do playing it a lot of the time.

I’m also struggling with some of the basics even though I’m doing okay on the harder stuff. For example I’ve completed the chords lesson to 100% but I’m finding it really hard to hold the pick without gripping it and I really have to focus to do alternative picking (where you go up and down). Maybe this will be easier when I actually know which string is which without looking.

Today I had some problems with the String Skip Saloon game. It isn’t registering a lot of my low-E strums. I thought it might be my guitar at first , especially as it fell apart today. However I had soon had that fixed with my trusty screwdriver and yet the problem continued. This meant I kept losing games because I was strumming E to shoot the bandits but they weren’t being shot.

Sometimes it would just buffer a little and then you would strum again before it caught up with you – sending two shots, one bouncing off the wall and moving all the other bandits forward. Other times it just wouldn’t register no matter how many times I tried and the bandits got to the bar. I had to give up playing the game in the end because it just wasn’t working at all. I tried calibrating my guitar but no solution there either. I might need to fiddle with my pickups as noted on their official forums.

I’ve started playing the ninja slide game too, but I don’t think I will get very far on that until I have mastered navigating the fretboard. I set a new high score on ducks redux though, so hopefully that point isn’t too far away.

What do you do when your Business Analyst spends all his time working from home? Individually wrap everything on his desk and put it under the office Christmas tree of course.

Still enjoying it, still making some measurable process. The automatic difficulty level is pretty cool. I will play the same song and it will start throwing new things that me. Not that I hit them, but when you miss them all Rocksmith then goes off and recommends some lessons.

Hit my first two-string note today. Took a while but eventually I got there. I think with chords it is just going to be a case of learning the hand positions until it is second nature. It also really hurts my fingers.

One of my criticisms of Rocksmith was that it doesn’t teach you what fingers to use so I was just using my index finger for everything. However it turns out that that is just to get beginners going and as you improve it adds what finder you should be using for each string onto the display!

I almost got stuck in a loop on the slides tutorial as it kept slowing the track down and then I could do it, but when it went at full speed I couldn’t. So we went round in circles with “let’s slow it down a little” and then “you’re ready for this at full speed now” for quite a while. Eventually I mastered it though.

Rocksmith is a game that teaches you to play guitar. It is similar to Guitar Hero, but you play with an actual guitar. They claim it is the fastest way to learn. They also boast of the “60-day challenge” – play for one hour per day, for 60 days, and you will learn guitar.

I’ve had a guitar for ten years but I never took formal lessons because I didn’t want it to become a chore. I was still in education at the time and didn’t want another round of boring homework to do every night. I just had fun strumming it and learning a few basic notes without any real plan. Now I’m older and my cost benefit analysis says it is probably worth trying for two months, so I’m taking Ubisoft up on their challenge. As an added incentive, I’ve told myself that if I make it to the end of the 60-day challenge, I can buy myself a new guitar.

I started yesterday and will be trying to keep a diary of my progress on here. Everything will be filed under a new category “Music” on my blog. Hopefully it won’t get too annoying.

As I’ve covered already, my starting point is zero. I can’t play any musical instrument and I wouldn’t describe myself as having any music talent. I really enjoying singing, but nobody else enjoys it when I do. If Rocksmith can teach me to play, there is hope for basically anyone.

Day 1 entry

Managed to get everything set up. The tuning was a bit frustrating as I thought I kept getting it right but the game insisted I didn’t until I continued to very slightly tweak it for a few minutes per string. Once this was done though I got into the game, watched a few of the videos on strumming and stuff like that then tried a song.

The time flew by; I had done an hour before I knew it. I then set my timer to give me another half an hour which I spent playing a game where you have to shoot ducks by playing the right note and before I knew it this extra half an hour had gone too. I went back to play X-Kid one final time and actually managed to hit some of the notes despite fret and string changes. Sounds simple, but I could not have done that when I started today.

I bought the HP Laserjet p1102w because it was rated by Which magazine as a best buy. I have no idea how. It is a truly appalling piece of kit.

• After 5 minutes it turns itself off. The documentation claims it goes to sleep, but sending something to print doesn’t wake it up. You have to turn it on by pressing the on button on the printer. Then send something else to print. Then it prints both the original document and the new document.
• The firewire doesn’t work with Mac so you are unable to adjust any of the settings.
• The paper jams frequently.
• There is no “go” button so when you fix the jam the only button you can press is the cancel print button that cancels your job.
• There is only one error light so you have no idea what is wrong.

I’m sending it back and replacing it with a Brother.

Rinsewind. Two Flower. The Counterweight Continent? What more could you really want from a Discworld novel? There was even a Dibbler-style character, not to mention a great horde of rather ageing hero barbarians! Good read.

Hope you all have a great holiday season. If not, at least the days are getting longer now ;).

This could well be a lot less funny to people who haven’t worked in a design agency. But I nearly fell of my chair laughing at the Santa brand book.

Thank you to all you wonderful people that contributed to the Humanist Action Group‘s 2013 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters! As we round things to a close we are pleased to announced so far we have raised in-kind donations worth…

The donations went to three local homeless shelters and will benefit all of their residents. Thanks to your kind contributions a hundred people that would have woken up with nothing over the holidays will now receive much needed food, clothing and toiletries.

You can see all the photos from the event on our Flickr page.