I’m all over the place lately. And, now that certain
networks and/or browsers don’t seem to support Blogspot, it’s a little harder
for me to make regular posts. But, I’m still playing RS almost every night for
an hour or three. For the most part, my elbow injury hasn’t hurt my playing any
(but since I’ve never been that good . . . that’s not saying much). Sometimes
it’s a little difficult to play certain chords high on the neck. My wrist just
doesn’t want to bend quite as much as it used to.
A week or two ago I brought home the “new” used Schecter
Elite S-1 and Peavey bass. The bass has a bad buzz which I’m sure can be easily
adjusted out by raising the saddles, adjusting the neck, or possibly putting on
a new nut. I’ll get to that soon enough. Should do it myself, I suppose. I took
the little Carvin Vintage 16 back to GC. Hated to let it go, but I needed the
money more than I needed another amp. Plus, as a great comedian once noted,
“You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”
Anyway, before I got the Schecter all tuned up, I decided to
sort my song list by “Tuning” and then play through all the songs with
non-standard tunings at least once each. So, I tuned the S-1 to D standard,
played all the D-standard songs, worked my way up through the E-flats and
E-flat/Drop-D-flats, and finally back to standard E tuning. That way I wasn’t
tuning up and down; for each new tuning I just raised the pitch a little bit
until I got back up to standard E (A-440) tuning.
This gave me a chance to see which new RS2014 songs I liked
and which ones I’d never bother de-tuning my guitar to play again. No point
boring you with my list of likes and dislikes because yours will almost surely
be different. But, I will give you a brief summary of the odd-ball tuned songs
from RS14. Here goes:
[insert song summaries for odd-tunings here]
D-Standard
Mountain River – Easy and fun jam. This is one of those rare
songs that will make even a marginal beginner feel like a rock star. Easy to
play but still sounds cool. Mostly on the top three strings with a reasonable
solo.
E-flat, Drop D-flat
Heart-Shaped Box – Classic Nirvana. Somewhat challenging. Not
that Nirvana’s stuff is all that hard, but because there are several variations
on the riff it would be damn tricky for normal people to memorize this one and pass
“master” level on Score Attack. I’m sure plenty of guitar-gods have already
done it, but if I ever pull it off it’ll be pure luck. The riff itself isn’t
that tough; it’s just trying to remember which variation on the riff goes where
(if you played it live, you could mix them up or just play the same riff every
time and nobody would notice). Not much of a solo, which helps. The chorus has
a pronounced bend on the G-string which is a little hard to get; I found that
bending down instead of up helped.
Once I got through all the odd-ball songs on the regular
RS14 song list, I was in a “try everything once” mood and just continued
playing everything on the new song list that I hadn’t played yet. This was
partly motivated by the fact that there is an XBox Achievement for trying all
the songs at least once. But, I’ve got to tell you – I like this approach. I
just started at the top of the alphabetically sorted song list and started
working my way down. There have been some pleasant surprises, songs that I’d
never heard of by groups that I’ve never heard of, which I really like. These
are the ones I’ll go back and work on mastering. Others I’ll probably never
play again (I wish there were a way to delete some of them from my XBox . . .)
Except for the songs which I totally hated, I played just
about everything 2 or 3 times just to level them up enough to get an honest
feel for the song.
Blitzkrieg Bop
Dead easy. 4-chord basic rocker. Not even full-blown chords.
Just double-stop power 5ths. Maxed out all phrases in 2 plays with a 98%
overall. Almost anyone could probably play from memory in less than a dozen
tries.
Taken for a Fool
Slow rock, 70s-style. This reminds me of Hall and Oates kind
of stuff from when I was a kid. Not real flashy guitar stuff, but sort of nice,
mellow fills and solo work.
All I Wanna Do
Peace of Mind (Boston)
Full disclosure: I love Boston and always have. I like
Scholz’s guitar tones. I like his solos. I like the instrumentation and overall
production. There’s pretty much nothing about Boston’s music that I don’t like.
And, since this is classic Boston, naturally I love this song. And, it’s not
impossibly hard to play. Not super easy but the lead part is a lot easier to
play than I would have guessed. It’s reasonable but challenging. Important to
note that much of the guitar work on this song is rhythm guitar. The signature
intro, for example, is an acoustic chord strum. Lead also has quite a bit of
chord strumming.
