Every Bunny Gets Drunk After Easter #14
Trailbreaker John Harwood weighs in this week with a change of course:Okay, so I've successfully pulled myself away from Grand Prix Story (My wife hates you, by the way. Again), LOTRO, iRacing, and the Hunger Games books for a whopping 4 hours this past week and managed to squeeze in some guitar time! Not all that much interesting to discuss progress-wise, other than my fingers do hurt a bit after a month+ of no play, but no blisters at least. I don't seem to have had much degredation in skill since I last played, which just confirms there wasn't any there to begin with. I played through a few things on bass in RB3 and realized that I'm really just using it as a controller that has strings instead of buttons (might as well be the Mustang) and not really learning to play guitar.
Which brings me to my next realization: RB3 and the Squier aren't going to teach you to play the guitar.
I know this has been mentioned before and isn't groundbreaking, but it finally struck me. The best I'm going to get is to play the Squier like it's the Mustang and work up some good callouses. It's possible that I could eventually get to where I can play bass semi-well, but I find the game actually encourages me *not* to expand my boundaries. Within the game that is. It does however continue to tease me with how cool it would be to actually learn to play guitar. RB3 provides all sorts of information, and it's a fantastic aide and checkpoint while learning via a proper method, but there's just not enough actual teaching going on in RB3. I think it'll continue to be a blast to play along with songs and as a tool to help me learn songs that I can then play on my own, but by itself, it's not going to get me there. So I am now re-motivated to learn by the failure of RB3 to help me learn.
To that end, I dropped off my Squier at Strait Music today to have it setup (only $20, thank you Strait!) and to the guy's credit, he didn't poo-poo it overly much, but he did point out that he doesn't know how well it's going to stay in tune due the lack of a deep anchor for the bridge. He took me over and showed me how a "real" real guitar goes all the way through to the back with a little plate covering it, but because of the need to make room for the electronics, the Squier's bridge is just surface mounted and he thinks that over time the string tension (aggravated by the mute, I'm going to try to keep that unmuted when not in use) coupled with the lack of deep anchor for the bridge is going to cause intonation issues. He doesn't think it'll need to be constantly worked on, but thought that it likely wouldn't stay in tune long and could need intonation adjustment every few months. So we'll see how that works out.
I should get the guitar back by the end of the day (thank you again, Strait!) and I then plan to pretend like it's just a guitar and go solely off of Justin's site and finally get my chords down and stop being afraid of them and see if I can make some progress. Good news is that's not as daunting of a prospect as it used to seem and getting my guitar setup has me very excited at sitting down with it and actually learning to play. 3 months after I got the silly thing.
Ignore that hurtful comment about his wife hating me. I am a highly positive influence on her husband. Sort of.
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