Still here? Good. It’s been a couple months since we last talked shop about the keyboard; I hope you’ve been practicing. You have been practicing, haven’t you? Because you know what happens if you don’t practice.

If you don’t practice, you don’t get a lolly.

On this second installment of our keyboard study, we’ll be talking about strategies for aspiring pianists — no snickering! —who are just now getting to know their way around the ivories.

Prelude: Getting situated

First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page.

You’re playing on No Fail mode, right? You can still progress through your career and earn achievements with failing disabled, and it’ll save you the heartache of facing a fail screen every couple minutes.

Where’s your keyboard? Positioning it in a solid, comfortable location is essential. With dozens of keys to learn and hours of playing ahead, you’ve already got your work cut out for you, so the fewer variables you have to worry about, the faster you’ll improve. Keyboard stands are pretty cheap and are available at just about any music store, although a coffee table or desk works just as well.

If you’ve got no choice but to play with the keyboard in your lap, make sure you’re sitting up and not hunching over the keys. And while I understand the temptation to throw on a guitar strap and take the keytar approach, it makes things exponentially tougher to play. Maybe you’ll eventually rise to that highest echelon of nerd-rock badassery, but remember: baby steps.

Are we good to go? Excellent. Make some tea, check your email, set your phone to vibrate and get ready to play some music.

Overture: Easier said than done

Something to bear in mind: You’re learning a real instrument. Congratulations! It’s a significant accomplishment. But nothing worth doing is ever easy.

Now, I’m no expert on mastering an instrument. When I consider that I’ve been playing music for two decades, my paltry skills are, frankly, embarrassing. But as an expert on not practicing enough, I think I’m pretty well-qualified to talk about some surefire strategies for improving with a minimal amount of effort.

• Choose a few songs you like and stick with them. When you really love a song, you’re personally invested in learning how to play it. Mastering a song often takes dozens, if not hundreds, of playthroughs, and you’ll probably want to build your fundamental skills on songs you can stand to listen to ad nauseam.
• Don’t be afraid to bounce between all the difficulty levels. While enabling No Fail mode removes any negative reinforcement from the game, you’re still likely to be discouraged when you can’t nail a single phrase in a song. And despite each of the songs being accurately rated for difficulty, there’s still a world of difference between “Need You Tonight” on expert pro keys — literally just a one-chord song — and “Antibodies” on medium. Don’t be afraid to drop down a notch or two mid-song and re-evaluate.
• Check out the song-specific tutorials. In addition to the general pro keys training mode, each song has a pro instruments trainer that breaks some of the trickier sections down into easily digestible segments. You can slow them down, repeat them, and take the time to develop the muscle memory required to master those sections.

Coda

If there’s one fundamental difference that sets pro keys apart from the rest of the game, it’s that you’ll eventually be able to play songs with your eyes closed — and play them well. Don’t believe me? Here’s why:

Your keyboard has 25 keys, but those keys always correspond to the same notes: your middle C is always a C, a B-flat is always a B-flat, and so on. And as you play more, you’ll probably find that you begin to match those pitches to the corresponding keys intuitively.

That’s no accident. Your brain is learning to associate individual notes and chord shapes with distinct pitches and various sounds: major, minor, diminished, etc. While not everyone has the same natural tendency to pick up on those tones easily, most people will find that the logic of music reveals itself naturally over time as they spend more time learning an instrument.

My best piece of advice: Don’t get discouraged. If a song is too difficult to pick up quickly, drop the difficulty or try a more familiar song. If you’re not making any progress, take a break for the day. One of the funny things about learning an instrument is how you’ll be unable to play a tricky riff or nail a four-note chord one day but it’ll come naturally to you the next morning. For months I wasn’t able to reliably play a barre chord on my guitar, but one day it just clicked. Never underestimate the power of your subconscious mind.

As a child, there was nothing I dreaded more than my weekly piano lessons. My teacher, a doting, grandmotherly old lady who smelled like candy and cried whenever I said “thank you,” did her best to impress upon me the importance of mastering scales and the beauty of perfecting a large-note, simplified Chopin piece, but I would have none of it.

I dabbled in piano lessons again in my early teens, but the routine was only more tedious than before. When I came home from a day at high school, I wanted to put on a Linkin Park CD and feel sorry for myself, dammit, not familiarize myself with the sustain pedal while trudging through my teacher’s favorite new-age song of the week.

Generic teenage angst aside, there’s a very good reason why kids don’t want to practice their instruments: It’s just not very much fun.

Enter Rock Band 3. Combining the tried-and-true gameplay the series is renowned for with a set of real-world instruments, Rock Band 3 might be the first videogame that can actually teach a person how to play an instrument. But just how much of a commitment will that take from the average person? And just how much can you learn from a game?

Well, that’s where I come in. I put up the money to get Rock Band 3 on October 26th along with the keyboard peripheral, and I’ll be chronicling my progression through Rock Band 3′s Pro Keys mode.

Regular vs. Pro Mode

But first, it’s important to clarify that the Rock Band keyboard can be used in both regular mode and pro mode. Regular mode is similar to the traditional Guitar Hero or Rock Band style of guitar gameplay, where you have five lanes of notes to contend with. These correspond to the first five white keys on each octave (C, D, E, F, G) and while you won’t be playing the actual notes in regular mode, it can be a good way to build up finger strength and to develop some muscle memory for playing patterns with different combinations of fingers.

Regular mode is a great starting point for anybody with little to no musical experience. But for those of you who have played an instrument before, even if it wasn’t a piano, I’d strongly urge starting out with pro keys on easy. To be fair, it’s a little daunting to move to a 25-key instrument from the simplified five-key mode. But the sooner you get used to playing a note-for-note version of the music, the sooner you’ll pick up on basic skills, such as recognizing what each note sounds like and what major or minor chord shapes look like.

Training — “Learn an instrument” mode and individual song trainers

Fortunately, Rock Band 3 was designed with the added challenge of playing a real, complicated instrument in mind. To help give players a leg up, Harmonix included a robust instrument trainer mode. Composed of more than a dozen specific lessons ranging in difficulty from easy to extraordinarily difficult, these trainers focus on skills like forming and moving within chords, arpeggios and note patterns, and even a special lesson on soloing on keys. Each lesson includes several short, original songs to help illustrate and reinforce the topic at hand.

And, in case you were wondering, the answer is yes: You will learn how to play the Keyboard Cat song in the keyboard trainer.

While the training mode is indispensable, it’s not meant to be a primary focus for a keyboard player. Instead, it’s the sort of tool that’s best revisited from time to time as you work your way up from the easiest songs to increasingly more complicated ones.

Unfortunately, learning how to chart your own course through Rock Band 3′s song selection isn’t as simple as just working your way up from the easiest-ranked to most difficult songs in order. Because keyboard parts are sometimes sparse or altogether absent in a number of songs, it helps to have an idea of which songs feature robust keyboard parts and which ones emphasize specific skills. In the next entry in this series, I’ll discuss my first couple weeks with pro keys and provide a selection of good songs for the budding virtuoso.

On the next episode…

• Starting out: Easy and medium pro keys
• Good songs to start with
• Tips to keep in mind
• How to use the individual song trainers
• Tackling more challenging songs

Pictured above: The Village People.

There’s just no place for a street fighting man.

Well, that may have been true in 1968, but anyone who’s old enough to remember the Clinton era remembers Street Fighter II. Its unprecedented console game sales numbers, the lines of wannabe world warriors amassing at the local arcade machine, the combos, chains and cancels — they put Capcom on the map and gave birth to a brilliant new game genre, but the phenomenon faded with time. An obscure series of sequels and offshoots largely served to refine the game’s brilliant core mechanics, but did so at the cost of accessibility.

Fortunately, that ends with Street Fighter IV. The game’s back with the entire original cast of fighters from Super Street Fighter II Turbo (minus T. Hawk and Dee Jay, but nobody misses them) along with some fresh and inspired new faces. It’s endlessly replayable, packed to the brim with style and tempered with disciplined balance — a hallmark of the series and the result of months of in-depth public testing with the arcade version. But if you’re like me,  you can barely remember how to throw a Hadoken or block Sagat’s knee attack. That’s where this guide comes in! I’ve taken my thirty hours’ experience of getting my ass handed to me by tweens named xXDeathstrykeXx and yourgonnalose (sic) on Xbox Live and coupled it with the best advice I’ve found for learning the ropes in Street Fighter in the hopes that new players can get the hang of a game whose only real flaw is the lack of a beginner’s mode. So dust off your gloves, dry-clean your most fashionable gi and get ready to throw hands with the best of ‘em.

1. Play Online

This is the single most important piece of advice I can provide. One thing to bear in mind:  You’re going to get your ass kicked — a lot. But it’s a fighting game, so any different sort of preconceived notions you might’ve had should be thrown out the door.

Street Fighter’s enduring value has always come from its player-versus-player component, and thanks to Xbox Live/PSN and some pretty impressive netcode, thousands of players are waiting at the floodgates to duke it out with you. I’ve fought around 150 online battles, and only a half dozen were plagued by any noticeable lag; fortunately, no games ended in a total disconnection. Players from around the world ranging from fragile beginners to arcade-hardened masters contend in the online arena, so it’s a bit of a grab bag to say the least. But the quickest way to learn is to fight real people who are making real risk-versus-reward decisions at the same time as you.

2. Listen to Capcom

Straight from the horse’s mouth comes a bevy of information that helps shed some light on the intricacies of SFIV. Capcom’s Unity blog features tips on unlocking characters, insights into the game’s design choices, and all sorts of useful information and snippets of trivia. Seth Killian, in particular, has been the voice of wisdom when it comes to Street Fighter IV — and it doesn’t hurt that he’s the namesake for SFIV’s bald, blue, glowing final boss, Dr. Manhattan Seth. Check out the latest Kotaku podcast, which features Killian, here.

3. Try Every Character

We’ve all been there: a character selection screen full of bizarre fighters, each with dozens of moves to memorize. It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?

Actually, not really. While each character plays slightly different from any other one, many share the same basic framework. Characters usually depend on rotational movements on the directional buttons or analog stick followed by a button push or two, e.g. Ryu’s fireball, Zangief’s piledriver, Ken’s shoryuken. Other characters are called charge characters because they require the player to hold one direction, then quickly move to the opposite direction while pushing a button. Super moves are (almost) all the same as basic special moves except you input the movement twice before pushing an attack button, and Ultra moves are just super moves with all three punch or kick buttons at the same time.

It probably still sounds daunting, but trust me: with a few hours under your belt, you’ll start to pick up on the similarities. You’ll find that Ken is like Ryu but with a stronger uppercut; E. Honda is a slower but stronger Blanka; Guile is a less frenzied M. Bison. Admittedly, those are all generalizations, but the concept works. Before long, you’ll find that you’re more than competent with any character after just a few minutes of practice.

4. Play Trial Mode

The trial mode is not for everyone, but players who invest the time to learn each character’s intricacies will find themselves with a significant advantage over almost every opponent they encounter online. Trial mode consists of several rounds of training for each character. While the first round is a relatively simplistic walkthrough of each character’s unique maneuvers and throws, the difficulty quickly ramps up by forcing the player to learn which special moves cancel into others. It’s challenging and often frustrating, but the sense of satisfaction attained by laying into Dan with a devastating combo is immeasurable.

5. Stay Focused

Make no mistake: Street Fighter is not a button-masher. It’s an immensely strategic game about controlling space, pure and simple. Through a combination of pressing the offensive and defending when necessary, you and your opponent each try to deal the most damage to the opponent and be the last fighter standing. It’s easy to get frustrated when an opponent locks you into a corner and tears you apart in seconds, but almost every dire situation can be transformed into you gaining the upper hand. Be patient, be persistent, and be alert — an eleventh-hour victory, and an opponent’s subsequent angry tirade, is a reward unto itself.