Posts Tagged ‘rocksmith’

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…

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.