Posts Tagged ‘chords’

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 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.

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.

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.