Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Quite a frustrating day. I am stuck on the boss on level 6 of Scale Warriors. Between the time I spent yesterday and the 45 minutes straight I spent today, I have now been trying to beat him for an hour. I had to give up in the end before I became too stressed out.

There are also some bugs in the game. Sometimes it does not clear the highlighted box for the note you are supposed to play, so when it pops up the next one there are then two boxes. There is also the possibility that it is highlighting the same box it already had highlighted, and thus you could miss it while waiting for another box to light up.

I could go and play Return to Castle Chordead, but I am stuck on a boss on that too.

I then went and played Cold Company and realised that basically I need to do the entire song on Riff Repeater in slow motion. It quickly jumps between E and B, so right now I am just aiming to pluck the B string in the time I have between the sections of E strings. It also has hammer-ons on different strings to the notes I am currently playing. Luckily, it cannot tell the difference between a regular note and a tap, so it does not pick me up on that.

Finally my session finished when the game crashed on the results screen.

One thing I have noticed is that Rocksmith cannot tell the difference between certain things. Take accents for example. It does not know, or at least does not call you on, whether you have played a note extra hard. So when I did the practice track I pretty much did all the notes the same and it gave me 100%.

I have also noticed that in the videos, they tend to finger the string as low down the fret as possible. Indeed, when you are on the first fret, if you do not finger it at the very bottom, Rocksmith will think you are playing an open string and say you missed the note.

Another unfortunate reality of Rocksmith is that you get worse before you get better. At first you sound okay, because it is just giving you one note at a time. Then, as you move on, it gives you chords that you invariably miss at first, sounding like a cat being strangled.

The skin on the end of my fretting hand is starting to build up, which I suppose is a good thing, but it makes my fingers more slippery on the strings.

My last thing to moan about is the automatic difficultly adjustment. When you start it replaces the chords with a single note. I can do this. Then as you get better it replaces them with the actual chords. These I have not mastered yet.

The problem is that when I miss all the chords it replaces them with the single notes again. So I then have to do the song a few times and nail it to get the chords back. Or go into riff repeater and manually set it to a higher difficultly level.

The fingers on my fretting hand are starting to show the scars of war.

I played Scale Racer for the first time today. It is an okay game, but I think I prefer Scale Warriors. I played that too and managed to complete level three, as well as another level on Return to Castle Chordead. Now I am stuck on a boss that looks suspiciously like the Devil in Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny.

Following Jan’s recent comments on my posts, I decided to give Blitzkrieg Bop a go on score attack. I managed to complete it on both easy and medium. I cannot quite finger the chords in time yet though, so I have not been able to complete it on hard. Will have to keep working.

Two weeks in.

I played Temple of Bends today, which is a technique game for bending strings (surprisingly). I find bends quite hard. I normally need to get three fingers on a string to make it work.

I made some good progress on the other games too. I set several new high scores on Ninja Slide and completed the second level of Return to Castle Chordead. I think that is probably a better game than Star Chords. The problem with Star Chords is that as you level up it gives you new chords, but not much chance to learn them. So now I am on level 3 or something, but I cannot remember, or go back to level 1 chords. With Castle Chordead, once you complete a level you can always go back to it and each level builds on your existing chords anyway.

There are still a few symbols I don’t really understand. I am going to try asking on the Ubisoft forums to see if anyone can tell me what lesson it is that I need to look at for them.

I finally did that bends lesson!

I have also been working on score attacks and managed to complete at least two – Knights of Cydonia and R U Mine? I failed a lot too. The difference between them is surprisingly though. Just on easy, I found Knights of Cydonia really difficult whereas R U Mine was essentially just 2, 2, 5 all the way through.

I also tried out the shop to buy more songs. The selection is pretty poor. There was a huge list of good songs somewhere so I’ll have to look up if/how to access them. A lot of bands are missing from the in-game store and also some of the songs mention packs, which are not listed on the packs page.

Also the Playstation Store seems pretty shitty. The integration is good – I just buy the song and it downloads and installs into the game. However you cannot just buy it. You have to preload money into your wallet. This can only be done in £5 increments and is non-refundable. So to buy a £2.39 song actually costs you £5 because that is the minimum you can load onto the store.

I was also a little worried about the content of the additional songs. I downloaded “Bring Me To Life” which will probably be okay anyway as I think it is by the Rocksmith team (I am not sure they all are). It turns out to be a really straight forward tab but I suspect that it actually just how the song is.

Another interesting milestone today was that I have now been practicing for 30 hours. So although I am only on day 12, and will continue for the 60 days, if I had spaced out my practice I would be at the mid-point today.

Am I half way to learning the guitar? It does not feel like it. Most of the songs I am about 20-30% master on. I have completed four or five score attacks but only on easy. It could be that a lot of time is spent learning the fundamentals and then it all comes quite fast but the amount of chords I have to do make me think otherwise. I guess time will tell.

The lessons need improving. The way they work is that you watch a video and then get a quick riff to practice on. You also get a practice track. The practice track is good because it lets you use Riff Repeater to slow it down to a pace you can manage and built up. Unfortunately the lesson examples don’t and these are often harder.

Take the lesson on hammer-ons and pull-offs for example. The practice track is easy because it is all on one string. However the riff for the hammer-on video is really hard because you have to quick switch between two strings. So even though I can do the practice track, I can’t do the lesson on hammer-ons and therefore don’t even get to find out what a pull-off is.

The bends lesson has a similar problem. It assumes you’ve mastered navigating the fretboard and so doesn’t really teach you anything until you are really good at this, even though you’re learning about something totally different.

I had a bad day on Scale Warriors too. I re-committed to not looking at the fretboard. This meant I took loads of damage and died really quickly. Also once you miss a string you pretty much have to look anyway unless you can work out what string you are on by the sound it makes and adjust. I’m learning to do this, but it is a skill you have to re-learn every time the game changes the scale so is slow progress.

I’m also convinced that the game is missing a few of my notes as a couple of times I have looked down to check why my guy is not attacking and spotted my fingers are on the correct string and fret.

I also experienced my second crash. This time it happened on the guitarcade games menu.

On a more positive note however I finally managed to do the hammer-ons lesson. It took ages trying to do the lesson, then an evening working on the fingering while talking to friends followed by another age trying to do the lesson, but I managed it in the end (possibly by luck). Then I got stuck on the combining hammer-ons and pull-offs, but at least that is further on.

I haven’t written anything in a few days as I didn’t see the point when I had nothing to say. Things are going well though. I beat the third boss on Scale Warriors. Not sure how. Mainly just luck I think lol.

Today I did All I Want To Do on score attack (easy) and completed it! That was cool. Of course there are four or five difficulty settings before you have master the song but it is still cool to know I’m making some progress. I tried it a few days ago and totally failed it.

Some negatives too. The guitar tuner crashed on me and nothing would respond. I couldn’t see a reset button the PS3, so in the end I just used the eject button and that exited back to the PS3 start page. Then the controller started responding again and I was able to reload the page.

I’ve now played every song but one. That one is locked and it says go to Uplay to unlock it. However, when I went into there it isn’t clear how I unlock it. I probably just need to play around with it some more.

Also the pricing for extra songs isn’t cheap. I went into the shop today and individual songs are £2.39. You can also get song packs which vary in price. For example Alice in Chains which contains 5 songs is £9.69. The Green Day song pack contains three songs and is priced at £6.49. Those seem to be the two price points for the amount of songs you get.

Feeling a bit more positive today. I’m still unable to set a new high score in guitarade. I can’t even set a score on scale warriors because I can’t get passed the first boss. I think I’m getting closer though. Every now and then, I’m actually hitting the right note for the scales. Just need to keep making progress on it.

Came back to it this afternoon and finally managed to get past the first boss on scale warriors! I had quite a few sneaky looks at the strings but it’s a start. I also managed to beat the second boss and get all the way to level 3. Then lost spectacularly.

I don’t feel like I’ve made much progress today. I played some ducks redux, which is the game where you move up and down the fretboard and once again failed to get anywhere near my high score. This is despite levelling up twice.

I did get better on some of the songs though. I played Sweet Mountain River and got 87% accuracy followed by a 92% accuracy. That is from looking down at the fretboard and strings though. That being said, at least I know what extra to look at now, whereas when I started I couldn’t even do that, so maybe I am making some very slow progress.

I’ve been pretty much playing the guitarcade games all the time because it doesn’t seem to be able to move on with anything until I have mastered getting the right fret and string. However I think it probably is important to keep going back and playing songs as it might be you don’t really see any progress on the games but when you go back and do a song it is more noticeable.

I’ve changed the pick-ups on my guitar and am now getting much better results on String Skip Saloon. I had it set to the lowest setting, bottom pick-up only, but I strum near the top one, so I changed the switch to use the top and middle one.

A lot of guitars will have three pick-ups and five switch positions – these translate to top only, top and middle, middle only, bottom and middle, bottom only.

I’m still finding the amount of time it takes to reload the game frustrating though. I’m just not very good at it and so often lose very quickly. Then it takes ages to get back to the game. Here is a video showing what I mean.

Of course it would help if I wasn’t terrible at the game. But we have to deal with the reality of the situation.

I started playing the power chords game last night though and that is a lot better. It gets you to play a chord, then you have to use it to shoot zombies. Add more chords are added you have to switch between them to shoot at the zombies before they kill you. If you die, you can just continue. This affects you score, but I’m more interested in learning than getting on the scoreboard.

I’m still unable to set a new top score on string skip saloon. I set 4,697,000 ages ago and haven’t been able to get anywhere near it since, even though I set that at a fairly low level and now I’m on level 10, so all my scores have a x10 multiplier on them. I’m having to fight the voice in my head that is saying “you’ll never master this”.

I started playing scale warriors today as well. This seems quite a good game as you have to move around the fret and strings at the same time. I have encountered a weird bug where one of the enemies walks off the screen and then walks on a few minutes later though.