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Music A year or so ago, I decided that I’d feel better if I was spending more time with music; so I started practing piano on a decently regular basis. I’d already been occasionally sitting down at the piano, pulling out a book of music, and trying to play through a few pieces (show tunes, […]

I’ve been working part time (three days a week) for most of a year, so I figure that it’s about time for an update. My top-level take: definitely the right choice. I’m glad I’m not working full time (whether at my current employer or a different employer); but also I’m glad that I’m working a […]

As I mentioned a few months back, I’ve been spending a lot of my podcast listening time going through Friends at the Table, first their regular episodes and then their Patreon stuff. And now I’m done with those shows as well, or at least all of those shows that I’m interested in listening to. Which […]

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, iTunes lost track of most of my music in the transition to Catalina, so it was time for me to find some other way to store my music. (With the criteria being that I wanted archival storage on my Mac and an easy way to keep copies […]

I’d been thinking for a while that I should move away from iTunes: Apple’s music focus is now on streaming from a library that Apple controls, not on maintaining a library that you control. And, while they sort of support syncing your music with their cloud technology, they explicitly say that they feel free to […]

A year and a half back, I finally joined the modern world and signed up for a music streaming service. I did this for music discovery purposes: I wanted an easy way to try out artists and songs that I’d heard of but wasn’t familiar with, and I also wanted algorithm recommendations to point me […]

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Rocksmith, but I’m still happily putting time in on the guitar every weekend; so I figured it was time for another post about the game. And, this, time, I wanted to talk about what sorts of things I might like out of the next evolution of Rocksmith. […]

Rocksmith put out a two quite substantial free patches at the end of last year. I’ve been playing Rocksmith significantly more since the patches, and in different (and better!) ways. As I said in that post, I’ve switched my practice from being primarily based on browsing (leafing through my favorites and playing whatever catches my […]

A few months back, I decided that I should join the modern world and start using a music streaming service, instead of (largely) only listening to music from albums that I’ve bought. Not that I have anything against buying albums, and in fact, I planned to keep on buying albums (both for archival reasons and […]

Through this fall or winter, I’d been playing Rocksmith for a couple of hours every Saturday and Sunday, but I’d been falling off in the last few months: partly because Saturday Tai Chi ate into my time, partly because I felt like playing guitar was putting stress on my back, and partly because my playing […]

My tastes in music delivery mechanisms are conservative. My music listening habits were established at a time when music sharing meant passing around cassette tapes, and I was straightlaced enough to not even do much of that; CDs appeared when I started having enough money to buy albums, and I stuck with that for close […]

(This was originally going to be a followup comment in a Facebook discussion with Roger Travis and Joan Pepin, but it started getting long and I don’t blog nearly enough these days, so I figured make it still longer and stick it here instead.) A few weeks ago, I was rolling my eyes at Luck […]

There’s a game out now that has you play through Steve Reich’s composition Clapping Music. Pleasant to play through: it took me a couple of tries to figure out what they were asking for, but once I got the feel for it, I enjoyed the music, and I got a lot more out of the […]

One item that I forgot to add to my earlier list of requests for the next version of Rocksmith: help us get low-latency audio. The game strongly encourages you to use optical audio; and, when I switched over to that, it made a big difference. But there’s a reason why I didn’t switch to optical […]

One of the problems people have with Rocksmith is the audio delay, but it hadn’t been too bad for me in the past: I’m not sure if I’m less sensitive to audio delay than other people, or if my receiver has a little less audio latency than some people’s AV setup? When I switched over […]

This week’s Rocksmith DLC was a collection of classical music arranged for guitars / bass / drums; I wasn’t sure what I’d think about it in advance, but I gave it a try yesterday and it was a lot of fun! I was worried that it would be over the top, trying to turn classical […]

It’s been a couple of months since my first impressions of Rocksmith 2014, so time for some second impressions. First, my overall feeling about the game: my current feeling is that it’s a great game, and potentially an important one. Not necessarily important as a game so much: what I like about it so much […]

Just to preempt confusion: this blog post is about the song Love Hurts (by Incubus), as experienced through Rocksmith, it is not about any non-musical personal experience! So, if you’re a friend of mine, no need to worry: I won’t take a stand on to what extent love can be a painful experience, but I […]

I’ve had a weekend with Rocksmith 2014 now; and my initial take is that it’s subtly better than its predecessor in a few interesting ways. I spent most of my time in the original game going through the Events that it gives you: a collection of songs each of which has a target score, so […]

In the past, my habit has been to only write my main post about a game when I stop playing it. That makes sense for the vast majority of games that I play; but for games that I play for month after month, that I would play in perpetuity if a sequel wasn’t released, that […]