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…
I was wondering how Rocksmith recommends songs today. I did a google around and it seems to be some kind of magic. At first I thought it might just be a formula based on difficulty and mastery but maybe not. It keeps recommending the new songs I have downloaded over and over again.
I am also taking exception to the difficulty setting on an Oasis song. I keep hitting all the chords (and most of the other stuff too) but then because I miss something else, it downgrades the entire song. Then I get a few 93% and 95% accuracies and it upgrades the difficulty. Then the cycle repeats. Very annoying.
I also tried connecting my guitar up to my Mac to see if I could use Garageband as an amp. It is far too quiet though. I have to max the gain on Garageband and my speaker volume just to get it heard above the sound of me strumming. I had a look at the input devices that let you connect it to iOS devices but they are well expensive.
Long term I would really like to run my guitar through one of my devices though. This way I can test out different amps and FX pedals before I buy them so that I know which ones I want.
Yesterday I finished playing all the songs on the rhythm path. The songs seem to vary in how different the two versions are. For some, the lead and rhythm are almost the same. In others they are very different. You also need strong hands when an entire song is basically the same chord over and over again.
Today I spent some time working on playing in position. This is where you keep your hand in the same place and use different fingers for the different frets. Of course this limits you to four frets, so it all goes tits up when it moves outside of this. However, I think I have made a good start.
I am still having problems with the E string not registering on Heart Shaped Box. I had a google around and at least one other person is having the same problem. The forums suggested that I try and strike the notes more softly, which seems to help.
More bitching about the Play Station Network. I tried to buy The Smashing Pumpkins pack, however it said my credit card was invalid. I logged on to try and edit it and it would only let me enter a 3 digit CV2. American Express has 4 digits and they clearly know this because they have a picture of an AMEX showing the 4 digits.
I tried deleting the card and re-add it. This time it left me enter a 4 digit CV2 but when I submitted the form it insisted the card number was invalid even though it was not. Irritating.
In the end I used my MasterCard and finally managed to add the credit. For my £9.69 I got five songs. However, when I went to play them I found that two did not have lead guitar parts. I guess the two songs are single guitar acoustics but I felt a little cheated as I did not see it mentioned.
As a positive consequence though I then had to switch to the rhythm guitar path which got me thinking I could do that more. When I get tired of not being able to do the flashy solos I can switch to rhythm and spend some time not being able to do all the chords.
Thinking about it, they come with a bass track too…
The game was definitely having a problem registering my E string today. I was playing Heart Shaped Box and it kept saying I missed the third fret. It was suspicious, so I stopped doing anything else and just played that note. Most of the time, even when I was playing it perfectly, I would say I missed it. I tried it on the forth fret too and one time it registered it correctly, then went back to saying miss.
I tried re-tuning to no affect. That adds up somewhat as I was playing Temple of Bends earlier and it kept failing to register my bends. Other strings were fine – I just got my bends wrong on those, but E did not even show up.
I also played some Harmonic Heist for the first time today, which seems fine.
Learning guitar seems a lot like learning to drive. At first everything moves so fast that you cannot really do anything but try and keep up. Then as you acclimatise to it, you can work on the finer points. So far it has been madly stabbing at different strings to try and get the right note. But as things seem to move a little slower, I have been able to think “maybe I could just use this other finger here for that one.â€
I have now reached the 60 hours that the 60-Day Challenge promised me I could play guitar by.
I still cannot play guitar. It is almost as if Ubisoft lied to me in order to get me to buy their product. I did complete one of my challenges today though. Reach master on a section of a song. I managed that thanks to Tom Petty’s “Last Dance With Mary Jane”. Part of the song is just E minor several times. That is the whole section. Apparently I am now an expert at that.
I am still finding the auto-difficulty a bit annoying at times. I spent ages practising a section in Black Magic. Then, when I went back to the song, it had made it even more difficult and basically everything I had practised was now useless. I did raise my mastery to 50% though, despite missing loads of the notes.
I spent a lot of time working on the fingering for R U Mine? I still have not managed it. Tricky thing I realised today. It is not just that you need to be focused enough to spend an hour doing a tiny thing over and over again. It is at the end of that hour you have to have the the self-control to stop, admit to yourself you cannot do it yet, take yourself out of the situation and move on. As Ms Adler would say, know when you are beaten. You have to be a perfectionist, but also turn that part of your personality off when it is not working. No easy feat. My guitar almost went through my TV. Calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean…