Posts Tagged ‘guitar’

I went some time today trying to play the F chord.

Turns out it is completely impossible. Most chords you can easily make the shape with your fingers, it is just a case of practising and getting there fast enough. Not the F chord. It is not even possible when you take your time and carefully position your fingers. It just cannot be done.

I spent most of the time playing songs and made some progress. Some of them were at around the 20-25% mark and I have now got them up to 40%. This is probably because I have reorganised the list by difficulty and have not played them for a while. I did not move up on my old favourites. But progress none the less.

I have started to hit more two finger jobs. Things that I would just miss entirely before. I even hit the C chord when that was thrown at me. Time is running out though. Ubisoft promised me I would be able to play guitar with four hours more practice.

I finally beat the boss on Scale Warriors! I think this only proves my point that the boss is proportionally too hard though. After beating him, I went onto scale set 2. I completed the first two levels, straight through, in one go. I have not even tried level 3 yet, I could have gone on. It seems very odd that it would take 2-3 hours to beat a boss, then you can just whizz through the next two levels straight away. Maybe it is designed like that though and starts easy again on each scale set.

On Danny’s suggestion I am going to spend more time doing the songs. I am still finding the automatically adjusting difficulty a little annoying. It adds extra stuff, and then when I miss everything as I try and hit the new stuff as well, takes it away again. Still, will press on.

I spent most of last night’s NFL game working on my fingering for the chords to Losing My Religion and Blitzkrieg Bop.

Today I spent an hour and a half trying to beat the boss on Scale Warriors. I still haven’t. Fed up.

I was about to come on and bitch about how it is impossible to complete any of the bosses and you just get stuck for hours. Then I beat the boss on Return of Castle Chordead. Good times. I am still stuck on the boss on Scale Warriors though. I was a little disappointed to see the Castle Chordead scales just re-use the same virtual world for the other scales too.

I reached 50 hours today, which is not too far off the level required to complete the 60-day challenge. Of course I have been doing it for 18 days, but one hour a day for 60 days equals 60 hours. So I should effectively be nearing the end of the challenge in equivalent hours.

I still cannot play the guitar. Of course there is always the chance it will all fall into place at the last minute, but this seems very unlikely. I still struggle to pick out the right note (without looking) and chords are hit and miss. Even though I feel I am making progress, and I might be, I have seen what is to come and I am a million miles away from it.

That is not even the song I wanted to learn. I was looking for information on Cold Company by Minus the Bear, which is way harder.

I actually ended up on that video because I wanted to know how you were able to play fret 19 and then hammer-on on fret 12. My hand simply is not big enough to do that. Turns out that you have to use both hands. That makes sense now because the notes are taps. But as I have not got to the taps lesson yet that did not occur to me. I do not know why it gives me taps if it does not explain them.

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.