My Guitar Journey (so far)

I'm on threads a fair bit these days and I see a lot of people talk about guitar or learning to play guitar and I figured I'd drop my own guitar path down in case it helped anyone.  I didn't learn particularly fast or easily but maybe that can help also.

Once upon a time in the late 90s, my best friend and roommate took off in the middle of the night to move to New York.  We'd been trying to make a game together unsuccessfully for something like a year and I think he just got fed up.  We hadn't been making much progress.  Anyway I was stuck with the lease and in exchange for leaving me in that rough situation he left a bunch of stuff for me, including an old Peavy Amp.  

Some months go by and I decided to learn how to play guitar.  I thought it would be fun and cool, so I bought a book and video that professed to teach how to play guitar, and I bought a cheap electric guitar to plug into the amp.

Right away the first thing I need to do is a C Chord.  The video guy shows me how to do it, and I go to try it and it's a weird stretch but I kind of have it and I can kind of make it sound out.  Then they tell me they want me to play another chord.  I can't remember what it was but it definitely wasn't A Minor or E.  And this transition is impossible.  Like I physically just can't do it.  I put the guitar down and never pick it up again.

Years go by, Guitar Hero comes out, I learn to separate my hands by "strumming" with my right and "fretting" with my left.  It's not a real guitar but some of these skills are new and it's pretty fun.  Rock band comes out and I try my hand at drums.  I don't know how many people remember this but Rock Band ended up going pretty far.  They released a keyboard peripheral and two "pro guitar" controllers.  One was a toy guitar with fifty-some buttons, which I still have.  The other was a Fender Squier Stratocaster with a MIDI controller where one of the pickups should be.

This guitar can be plugged into Rock band and you can play "pro guitar" along with the songs.  This... was terrible.  Extremely hard, and I couldn't hear what I was doing wrong.  Just a generic "twang" sound.  Eventually I gave up on this, too.

I am still interested in guitar and at some point, I tell my wife that I really want a guitar for a gift.  She asks around her office and buys me a Takamine G series guitar.  I take it into a guitar shop to set up, and my stepmother buys me some guitar lessons.  I meet with an older fellow who always drinks a coke and smokes cigarettes.  His hands shake a little when he smokes but they're steady on his guitar.  he shows me how to hold it, how to strum it, and how to play my first few chords.  He also has songs that only use two chords that are easy to go between, and.. what do you know, I'm really playing!

Then something new came out.  Rocksmith.  You plugged an actual guitar cable into your guitar and the other end could plug into an X box 360. With my newfound knowledge, I take my Rock Band Fender Squier and plug it into my Xbox 360.  It tunes it up for me, and I start trying to play songs, and.. what do you know?  I can correct my mistakes, and even better, I'm actually playing the thing!

It turns out, this is a pretty good tool for practice.  The stuff my guitar teacher gives me, I play slowly, picking it out, the stuff I'm playing in rocksmith, I'm making a bunch of mistakes but I'm doing it full speed.  So I'm getting better at bluffing my way through mistakes.

Due to several factors I end up quitting my guitar lessons, but I still play Rocksmith pretty regularly for a while.  But eventually my interest in it fades a bit. 

And.. stays faded, for... years.  Until at some point I decide to find some new music.  I decide all the music I listen to is too sad. I had a spotify playlist called "Laying in bed and feeling feelings" which is pretty great, but super sad. I decide to try Power Metal because I somewhat liked Through the Fire and Flames by Dragonforce.  This leads me to a Japanes Power Metal band called Aldious, which reminds me of a band I'd seen once called Band Maid.  I decide to check them out (thinking they were metal, like Aldious or Babymetal).  Surprisingly.. their music was good.  Like.  Really good.  Like the best rock and roll I'd heard in a while good.

Eventually the best rock and roll I'd heard ever good.

And listening to them rock a bunch of power chords and play cool solos made me think about making those sounds myself.

I dug out my guitars, I plugged in my rocksmith cable and I started playing again.  I bought the PC version of Rocksmith so I could download community created versions of BAND-MAID songs.  And I absolutely hit a wall.

I just couldn't get any better.  Plus at some point I realized I was just getting better at Rocksmith, not actually at playing guitar.  Like it had turned into an ultra-hard version of Guitar Hero, it wasn't really playing the instrument.  But BAND-MAID had inspired me to get a new amp and a new PRS Custom 24.  I wanted to get better.  I looked up a few things online, I got a book on learning guitar.

The book talked about the pentatonic scale, and wanted me to memorize all the pentatonic scale shapes like.. before I did anything.

I tried for a while, and I got the kind of "standard" CAGED E shape down pretty well, but I started to get discouraged and felt a little lost.

On Threads someone was asking if anyone wanted guitar lessons and I, on a total whim, answered.  He offered my my first lesson for free, so I took him up on it.  Right away he asked what my goal for guitar was.  Unwilling to explain that I was trying to get better at Rocksmith, I told him I wanted to be able to make my own sounds, express myself with the instrument.  

Over the next four months or so there was a series of breakthroughs.  I could already play chords decently well from Rocksmith.  So I could do chord transitions with no problem so we focused on lead playing.  I mastered the pentatonic shapes.  I had excersizes to improve my finger dexterity and to help me know where the strings were, and eventually we unlocked the uiltimate ability.  Playing to backing tracks.  

Finding which key a backing track was in and playing the pentatonic scale against it was like crack cocaine.  I didn't want to do anything else.  I wasn't good at it.  My timing was off (honestly still is), I didn't know which notes to play when.  I'm sure it sounded like mindless noodling, but I was CLEARLY GETTING THERE.  I could make sounds that made sense with what I was hearing, and sometimes, a small melody or riff would come out.  And my teacher helped with this process too, listening to me, giving me constructive criticism and pointers, teaching me his own solo so I had a better idea of how a solo should be structured.

Eventually my teacher quit teaching guitar (or I'd have mentioned his name, he was fantastic).  But he gave me the tools I needed to carry on myself and now with that plus youtube tutorials I'm unlocking the rest of the things I need.  

Anyway, that was my journey, If you got this far I hope it was interesting!  If you had a similar or totally different journey I'd love to read about it in the comments or on Threads!  I'm @pinotorious there.  

Checking back in on Japanese Music, 2 years later

So it's been a couple years since I've updated and in that time I dived deep into the rabbit hole of Japanese Music. BAND-MAID was my gateway drug and I've only become more impressed by these women as I've listened to them more and learned more about them. There is abundant information out there about the members and how they've arrived where they are, so I won't go into that too much. Suffice it to say that I have a guitar teacher and an extra two guitars due entirely to Kanami Tono and her incredible ability to create riffs. The most inspiring guitarist I've ever heard. I'm not going to say anything about her technical skill aside from it's something more than I honestly ever aspire to reach, but she also makes songs that I could one day play and I honestly think she's a genius. Maybe the greatest rock songwriter since the 90s. Everything BAND-MAID has released I honestly like. I don't love every song but there's nothing I really dislike. BAND-MAID is the only band I can say that about. They've raised the bar so high that when I hear another band and they have a song I don't like I'm way more disappointed than I probably should be. So BAND-MAID still reigns supreme as my favorite band. A band that rose from the ashes this year to become a powerhouse is HAGANE. I'd heard Hagane before, but three out of five members left, and it seemed the band was over. I liked their music but I wouldn't have rated it that hightly. This year's Top of the Tower absolutely blew me away. It's probably my favorite metal album of all time, and if it weren't for Epic Narratives it'd be my album of the year, and honestly it gives Epic Narratives (BAND-MAID) a run for its money. Sakura is Hagane's guitarist and main songwriter and she is also quite skilled at creating catchy riffs, and with the new Hagane lineup, she's paired with Junna, a youtube sensation and incredible powerhouse of drumming energy and together they're unstoppable. Add in a dependable bassist and a fantastic singer they found seemingly out of nowhere and you have the biggest surprise for me since I discovered BAND-MAID. They've risen to the top and become my favorite metal band. NEMOPHIA, my former favorites, released an album this year also. While I liked it, I didn't like all of it, and I'm slightly afraid they've lost a step without their guitar virtuoso SAKI. Their current guitarist Hazuki is honestly great, and extremely skilled, but I'm just not sure if the band is the same. They did an amazing 4 hour concert this year where they played all of the music they've ever released, and while it was an impressive feat, it definitely didn't sound good the entire time. All of that said, NEMOPHILA is still an absolutely fantastic band. Their new album has some really great songs. G.O.D. and Beautiful Days are absoltutely incredible, and Mayu has shown herself to be quite a solid songwriter as well as a rhythm guitarist, and she still has some of the most unique and wonderful vocals I've ever heard, both her clean and harsh vocals are appealing to me. The last band I'll talk about at length (this time) is MUTANT MONSTER. Unfortunately they stopped releasing new music a while ago, though they did go on tour this year so maybe there's hope? They're just an absolutely incredible punk band with a long discography of absolutely great songs. They sound like they should be in the indie rock scene from the late 80s/early 90s, though maybe they're a bit more skilled at playing their instruments than those bands were. It's an incredible trio with a guitarist and bassist who both sing and have great voices that work well together. At times they're both playing and singing harmonies and it's honestly very impressive, even if the guitar and bass parts are pretty simple. MUTANT MONSTER is my saddest entry here because they're honestly one of my favorite bands and they have fewer than 5000 youtube subscribers. So that's four great bands that I've fallen in love with. Crazy thing? Here's a list of bands I could talk about but won't because I'm running out of time. Maybe future updates if I think about it: TRIDENT LOVEBITES LAURELS SAWAGI BRATS BRIDEAR MARY'S BLOOD ALDIOUS STEROPONY NEK! EAST OF EDEN GACHARIC SPIN DOLL$BOX TELECIDE And these are just ones with multiple songs that I really like, there are actually quite a few more! So lucky to have fallen into this Japanese music rabbit hole!

Holy shit. Japanese Metal Bands (featuring mostly women)

I haven't really listened to much "new" music in years.  And by "new" I don't mean the "latest greatest", I just mean "new to me".  I discovered The National a few years ago thanks to my friend Bert, and prior to that I think it was The Decemberists or maybe Bon Iver.  So I am pretty set in my ways when it comes to music.  I'm also extremely picky.  For whatever reason, most music just doesn't connect to me that well.

So a few weeks ago I was looking for some music that was like powerful, inspirational, and like... violent?  I dunno... I was thinking something.... metal?  I'd never really been into metal before despite an old internet friend trying his damndest to get me into it. I mean Stratovarius was OK and Bal-Sagoth was.. at least interesting, but I never really got into it.  The one metal song that really grabbed me was Through the Fire and Flames by Dragonforce, which I heard for the first time as the "bonus" track on Guitar Hero 3.  And that was SORT OF like what was looking for.  

I searched up Dragon Force to see what genre of music it was (there are innumerable metal genres).  Turns out it was Power Metal.  Wikpiedia had a handy list of Power Metal bands and on the list was the name Aldious, which was an all-woman power metal band.  I didn't listen to Aldious right then, but it reminded me of a band I'd seen an article on years ago called BAND-MAID.

The article was in Kotaku or something and it was about a Japanese metal band where all the members were women and wore maid outfits.  I remember watching the video at the time and being impressed that all the members seemed to be good at their instruments, but for whatever reason it didn't quite grab me at that time. But I remembered the article when I saw Aldious and I decided to give them another try, and I found this song:

https://youtu.be/Uds7g3M-4lQ?feature=shared (sorry, apparently they don't allow embedding)

For whatever reason, this time, it really clicked with me. Like it went beyond "oh cool, they can play their instruments" to "holy shit... this is... really... good?".  I ended up listening to a ton of their stuff and there were... many.. good songs.  Domination, Dice, Don't let me Down, Daydreaming, From Now On...

I was totally hooked, but I saw a blurb about a late 2000's/early 2010's Japanese Female Metal scene.  So I looked up "Japanese Female Metal Bands", and holy shit.

There were.... many.  I listened to Aldious and I liked it but it didn't totally connect at first.  Then I heard LOVEBITES.  Holy shit.   What a band.  Like an all-woman Japanese Dragon Force, and incredible live:

This led me to BRIDEAR, Mary's Blood, TRiDENT, Telecide, NEMOPHILA, and even bands like BRATS.

Overall this is probably the most bands I've discovered I liked since I was in my early 20s.  It's really amazing, and a bunch of it is the exact type of thing I was looking for when I started, inspirational metal.  BAND-MAID is really more hard rock than metal, but it still has face-melting solos and incredible drumming.  I don't really know the point of this blog post, except to share this amazing discovery with whoever might see it.

I'll leave you with one more video from NEMOPHILA, a song which cemented my love of the band and Japanese Women-led heavy metal.

Games of the 7th Generation: Bioshock

I don't expect this to be much of a controversial choice, but I will say this might be the game on my list wherein I had the least fun.  The combat was functional but nothing special, the entire key to this game was its story, and more particularly, it's plot. 

My friend and former co-worker Tom Abernathy gave a talk wherein he claimed plot wasn't as important as characters in video games and that gamers could rarely remember plots but could frequently remember characters.  I assume this is accurate as he has great amounts of research data to back it up.  Bioshock is one of maybe 3 or 4 games to buck this trend.

The plot of Bioshock was completely unexpected and the twist in the middle was amazing and questioned the very nature of video games. It was a brilliant moment and the build up to that moment was possibly one of the best examples of plot in a game I have ever seen.  There are characters, to be sure, but the characters are all extremes, larger than life.  The character for whom the plot has such a huge impact is nothing but a cipher; it's you. 

The plot is able to pull you in through a combination of atmosphere and fantasy fulfillment.  The very idea of rapture is so engaging.  The way the game is set up it feels like the whole world is a 1940's nightclub after some horrible event and you're picking through the remains.  It's impossible to play the game and not imagine Rapture at its best though, people drinking and dancing, and everyone somehow special. 

The world looks like an underwater city and the opening moments suck you in like few other games (Half Life 2 comes to mind).  The bathysphere dive, and the first time you see the great underwater structures are forever burned into my gamer memory, incredible moments.  The world itself has a fantastic sense of place.  It doesn't feel like you're progressing through video game levels, it feels as though you're going through a real place.  Areas you go through seem to have utility, and yes, there is backtracking, but that helped me appreciate the "realness" of the place.

The game also manages to set up some intensely creepy moments, the time you meet a "doctor" splicer in the hospital, and there was a particular "treasure chest" in Sander Cohen's level that was in a room with a bunch of mannequin splicers that only moved when you didn't look at them.  Really brilliant stuff.

The storytelling could be a little clumsy, and the dialogue wasn't as natural and easy as Naughty Dog has managed to pull off in their last few efforts, but it was quite impactful and occasionally brilliant.

The game completely fell apart after the twist, unfortunately, and the less said about the remainder is better.  Despite its failings, I still find this to be one of the best games of the seventh generation.

Games of the 7th Generation: Mass Effect

I no longer possess the memory nor the industriousness to sort this list by correct date, so from now on, the games will be in basically random order.  The next game on the list?  Mass Effect. 

Mass Effect was, for me, the first great RPG of this generation.  By this point in my gaming career I was getting tired of Japanese role playing games, mainly because I tend to feel like the story loses something in translation.  I also didn't happen to be a very big Oblivion fan. I played the game for like 60 hours and wondered why the hell I'd wasted all that time (sorry, I realize I'm probably in the minority here)

Mass Effect was something else though.  The hype for the game was unbelievable, I have to admit I was something of a Microsoft fan prior to the release of the X box 360, partly because I had so much fun with the original X box, partly because of Microsoft coming out of the gate first, and Mass Effect was one of those Next Gen titles that made me go "holy shit" with its first few trailers. To be fair at the time I was working for Pandemic, and Bioware had actually merged with Pandemic not too long after announcing Mass Effect, so we got to see some stuff early before the audience.  That only served to whet my appetite. 

Mass Effect was a sprawling space opera, the likes of which hadn't really been seen since Star Wars.  Halo scratched some of the space opera itch, but as a series it tended to focus on one location at a time.  In Mass Effect, I had a ship and a crew and a galaxy to explore.  Star Wars isn't a great comparison for Mass Effect because in practice, it's much more like Star Trek.  Shepard is a hero, to be sure, and is able to perform many heroic deeds, but he still seems limited to normal human standards, much like Captain Kirk from Star Trek.  There can be an element of the Han Solo to him if you choose the renegade path, but Shepard and his crew reminds me much more of an updated Star Trek.

Most of the action takes place on foot or in your rover.  The ship mainly serves as a place to get to know your crew, no amazing space battles, but I never felt like it was missing.  As my friend pointed out, Mass Effect isn't really hard Science Fiction due to The Mass Effect, but given the Mass Effect, Bioware does a great job of explaining the rest of the science in the game. 

The first Mass Effect had somewhat janky combat.  Bioware hadn't mastered how to make RPG combat make sense with a progression curve while still feeling like a fun shooter.  Despite this, once you got the knack of the combat, it rarely got in the way of fun, and I still managed to have some epic moments running with my pistol and mowing down enemies.

The key to Mass Effect was the story.  The game started with a simple premise, Shepard is the first human S.P.E.C.T.R.E and Humanity's chance to enter the galactic conversation in a big way.  He is paired with people who don't necessarily trust him or humanity.  Along the way he learns of the Galaxy's dark secret, the Reapers.  The cast of characters is fantastic, and the side stories are equally amazing.  The Genophage, the Quarian mistake with the Geth.  All of these side stories make the universe feel far larger than most game worlds.  Shepard may not have really had much character growth, but the surrounding characters go through pretty great arcs.  I feel like the original Mass Effect is Bioware at the height of their narrative powers.  I don't feel like the next two games hit this same mark.

Graphically, Mass Effect was, to my eyes, the first really great looking Bioware game.  Baldur's gate looked decent, but not really impressive.  Knights of the Old Republic actually looked somewhat rough, but Mass Effect really sparkles.  They create a fantastic 70's SF Novel style, and everything is clean lines, and idealized future.  Really great art direction, paired with Unreal, arguably the most powerful engine available at the time.  This combination ended up being a visual Tour-de-force, with some of the best video game faces up to that point. 

All in all, a fantastic story wed to fantastic graphics made for a truly amazing experience, and one of my games of the generation.

Games of the 7th Generation: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

So this is the "big one".  This is the game that re-refined the first person shooter genre.  To my mind, the history of first person shooters goes something like this:

Id basically invents the genre with Catacomb Abyss and Wolfenstein 3d.  They make the definitive FPS with Doom, and then they pull it into the 3rd dimension with Quake.  Meanwhile, in Chicago, a company called Bungie is following closely building shooters with their own Bungie twist, the Marathon series, it's not quite as recognized as Id's stuff, partly due to being on Macintosh instead of DOS.

Enter Halo.  Halo basically re-defines the genre by introducing huge refinements.  The player can only carry two weapons at a time, mostly due to the fact that she's playing on a controller.  This means you can't easily scroll a mouse wheel or hit a number to change weapons.  They also introduced the idea of a regenerating shield which means you no longer needed to run around finding health packs, if you made a mistake you weren't screwed, you just had to take cover until your shield regenerated.  Halo was an interesting and innovative game in many other ways, but these are the key refinements to FPS games. 

Then Call of Duty 4 came out.  It was highly anticipated.  Call of Duty on PC released in 2003, was a new standard of polish. Call of Duty 2 was, in most people's opinion, the best X Box 360 launch title.  The studio behind these games, Infinity Ward, hadn't worked on Call of Duty 3, and this was the much anticipated follow up to Call of Duty 2.  Previous Call of Duties had covered World War II, but mainly, they'd covered World War II movies.  Nearly every memorable scene from Call of Duty or Call of Duty 2 could be directly traced back to some World War II move.

With Call of Duty 4, Infinity Ward was stepping away from World War 2 and entering the realm of modern combat.  At the time, this was considered a highly risky move.  It was well known that players loved World War II games, and most modern combat games had been comparative flops (Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon).  The general wisdom was that Modern warfare just wasn't that interesting.  Turns out the general wisdom was completely wrong.

Call of Duty 4 possibly pulled one of the best tricks ever in gaming.  They made an action-movie game that everyone thought was a war-movie game.  Call of Duty 4 was the first time in gaming where I felt like I was controlling the protagonist of an interactive action movie.  Incredible moments from my favorite movies were re-created and I was the hero.  The stealth mission, the sniper shot, the one final shot with a pistol.  A bunch of action movie clichés in playable form.  It also brought Iron Sights to the masses.  A feature that drastically changed the way gunplay in a first person shooter felt. The game was about creating huge moments and letting the player experience them, almost the antithesis of previous games that were more about giving the player tools to create his own moments.

I still remember finishing the game, thinking to myself that there was a new top-tier first person shooter studio now, and then hearing the credits song and just having my mind blown.  It was a really professional sounding rap song and it was playing over the credits like a movie, and it was made for the game (by the development team), just like many 80s movies credits songs.  Then when the credits were done rolling, I noticed that in the "message of the day" area there was a snarky comment from Infinity Ward about hiring (EA had just had lay offs), and I could tell they knew they'd built something really special. 

For the impact this game had on first person shooters for the rest of the generation, this is probably the most likely choice for THE game of the generation if I had to choose one.  All this, and it was only about six hours long, which, at the time was considered way too short for a $60 game.  The developers understood something, though.  For 6 hours, nonstop action is an incredibly fun experience, for much more than six hours, it starts to actually get kind of tedious.  A very interesting insight I didn't have until much later.  Overall an incredible experience.

Year of the 7th generation

I decided to take a break from the "Games of the Generation" because I realized as I was compiling the list, that there was a year the 7th generation really came into its own, and that year was 2007.  That was the year that:

Halo 3

Mass Effect

Assassin's Creed

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Crackdown

Bioshock

The Orange Box

Uncharted: Drake's Fortune,

and Rock Band came out.

Not all of these games are in my "games of the generation", but they were all major releases that really served to kick the generation off and give some hint as to what was to come in the generation.  Call of Duty heralded in a generation of realistic military shooters, The Orange Box was valve's move to console gaming, Uncharted wasn't quite there, but was the beginning of cementing Naughty Dog as a force in gaming.  Rock band was the bright flare in an ultimately doomed game genre, Mass Effect was the beginning of a generation defining RPG Trilogy, Assassin's Creed is probably the biggest IP created this generation, sales wise, and Bioshock was a commercial and critical smash that introduced the world to Irrational.  

Some of these games will be on my list, some won't, but there's no doubt that 2007 is when the 7th generation really began to shine.