Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Over at Sunday Assembly Leeds, we’re putting together a band. Actually, by the time this blog post is published, we will have hopefully already done our first gig. We ran our first practice session recently and things went rather well.

I did not get any action shots but here is one after we had just finished.

Recently I was looking for a pedal board and settled on the Pedaltrain Jr. If you are not familiar with a pedal board, it is exactly what it sounds like – a board that you put effects pedals on so that you can wire them in to your power supply and transport them around easier when you’re going to jam sessions, gigs, etc.

I went for the Pedaltrain Jr because everyone seems to be recommending. However, I have found the build quality rather poor.

It comes with two holes to connect the power cables through. However, the wholes are slightly too far apart. In the photo above, you can see that you can barely get the power cables through.

Of course you can argue that it is not their fault because my power supply is made by Voodoo Labs which is a separate company. However, the runners are another matter.

You get two braces that you screw into the side of your power supply and then you screw those braces into the frame. However, they do not fit properly. This is Pedltrain’s own braces screwing into Pedaltrain’s own frame, there does not seem to be any reason why these would not fit without having to bang them into place.

Finally, after only a few days, the velcro has begun pealing off the top of the board.

I was in a pub last week when I heard a song Snowy White – Bird In Paradise. Here it is:

If you are a Dire Straits fan, you might notice it sounds uncomfortably similar to Brothers in Arms:

Bird In Paradise came out in 1983, beating Brothers In Arms by two years.

When I started the Rocksmith Challenge I put some money aside and told myself that if I reached the end of the challenge successfully, I could treat myself to a new guitar. The motivation worked well.

Having played a couple of guitars in the shop I spent a week thinking about it only to decide I was equally in love with the Stratocaster, Telecaster and Les Paul Junior. They are all super guitars. In the end though, I opted for the Telecaster. It looks beautiful and plays like a dream.

It really is a nice step up from my Squier Stratocaster. That has been a great guitar too, and I intend to keep playing it. But the Telecaster is so much easier to play. Of course, I could have paid for setup on my Squier and it would have been probably a lot better, but also cost as much as the guitar.

Very happy with my choice so far.

Now that I have never to play Rocksmith again (I have been doing anyway, but I do not have to which is a big psychological difference), it is probably time to express my overall thoughts on the game. As Sherlock Holmes would suggest, it might be best to know the worst of each other and see if that is tolerable than being sold on the shiny veneer.

Here is what I found annoying:

Automatic difficulty
This is not perfect. Take American Idiot. I did it with the full chords and got 58% mastery. But then the next time I played it, it had downgraded me to single notes. Not even the two note in-between stage, just all the way down. I hit 95% accuracy, but only got 28% mastery. Why would it do this?

At the end of a song a voice tells you how you did. But it is a bit silly. For example, if you do something really easy it will say “brilliant performance” even though you have not improved your skill. Fine I guess, it was pretty accurate. But when the game makes it harder and your accuracy drops to 70%, even though you might move your mastery of the song up 10% it will still say something far less encouraging like “needs more practice”. Again, true, but you have just got to the higher difficultly, what does it expect?

Learning
The lessons are of very little use. They are just too difficult. I cannot do the riffs they introduce – even if it is about something else. For example it might be a hammer-on lesson, but you have to jump around the fret board at the same time. This would be fine except the game is throwing me this stuff in the songs, so I have to go look it up elsewhere.

It cannot tell you what you are doing wrong. Take bends for example. I almost always miss my bends (apparently). But I do not know what I am doing wrong. Too much? Too little? Wrong pattern? Wrong speed? Oddly, on some songs I get “miss” followed immediately by “late” and these only come up after I have finished playing my bend.

Documentation
The chord book included in game is not much use. Nine times of out ten, I cannot find the chord I am looking for. I am fairly sure it is not in there. Of course there are a huge variety of chords, but it is not difficult to include lots of them. If you can build an entire game, you can stick a few more chord diagrams in there – indeed they must be in the same somewhere.

Bugs
It crashes from time to time.

The recommended song list is strange. At first, once I played a song it would move down the queue and give me some different recommendations. Then, 45 days in, it started making me play a song twice before it would move it down the list. No indication as to why.

Also the R.E.M. song pack appeared in my list, even though I had not bought it. This could be a commercial feature rather than a bug, but it only appears randomly. One time I turn it on and they are there, the next time they are gone, the next time they are back, etc.

Conclusion
I would totally recommend Rocksmith. It has its problems, but there is nothing else out there like it to compare to so they might be really difficult issues to overcome. Ultimately, it kept me engaged for the whole two months. The hardest part of learning an instrument, indeed some research suggests the only part, is committing the time to learning. Rocksmith managed to get me to do that.

Recently I started guitar lessons in an attempt to improve the speed I am progressing at.

My teacher, Chris, who spookily has the exact same initials as me, was immediately able to start improving my playing. For example, I can now get to the end of Green Day’s Oh Love without my hand falling off in pain. That is nice.

Time will tell if it is worth the investment but after my first two lessons I am feeling reasonably positive.

I’m done! Check it out:

More of a review is coming up later.

Ubisoft have just released the R.E.M. song pack. Irritatingly, rather than just posting the news when you load up the screen, they have also put the songs in my song list. They are right at the top when I order it by recommended songs. But selecting them just takes you to the store and asks you for money. Shameless.

Also I continue to be angry at Mark Knopfler. He has no respect for his fans. Look at this:

Green Day are a band that respect their fans. You learn one shape and you can pretty much play their entire discography. But look at this video! No guitar pick. Not even just strumming, but random flicks as well as plucks! How is anyone who is not a guitar-playing robot supposed to do that?

Yesterday I rocked so hard that one of my guitar strings exploded.

Luckily I had another set of strings ready so thanks to a few YouTube videos, and a bit of help from Chris when I one of the balls got jammed in the bridge, I managed to re-string it.

Here is the video:

And part 2:

The new strings are pretty cool. They feel about the same as the old one, but they produce a slightly different sound. In the case of the low E string, it really produces a notably different sound.

Also they are far more visible. When people said that strings dulled over time, I was assuming they meant sound-wise. But the new strings are are clearly much easier to see when I am looking at them than they were before, probably because they have more of a shine to them.

I have a new found respect for Green Day. Yes, their songs are composed almost entirely of power chords. But have you ever tried to hold the power chord shape for five minutes straight? Oh my god it hurts so much! Barre chords hurt a bit. But not like this. I physically do not have the strength in my hands to get all the way through Oh Love.

I start missing chords by the end of the song because my hands just are not strong enough to keep going. I have tried to end every session with the song to build up my strength.

Speaking of barre chords, I had a fucking F today! I am still missing a lot of Cs and I do not think I have managed to hit an A yet. But F is very slightly in the bag.

I really knocked my mastery percentage in some songs today. I do not know how. I started with My Own Summer by Deftones and apparently got an accuracy of 69%. There is no way that happened. I think I hit about 10% of notes. I am not convinced the game can tell the difference between a wrong note on Eb tuning…