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Rocksmith 2014 - Improve your guitar and bass playing

Started by Neil, October 31, 2013, 09:46:47 PM

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Twed

Would this be playable with a shitty 100 quid electric guitar like the Squire of my youth? Just wondering if I can get into this without a huge overhead.

Probably shouldn't, TBH. I'll end up getting into it and spending $4000 on gear.

Barry Admin

It would work like a charm, and sound brilliant through their modelling. Get stuck in mate!

Twed

Thanks, I might check it out :-)

There would be something quite satisfying about plugging in a piece of crap guitar and getting something satisfying out of the other end. I spent most of my teenage years failing to do that. This has to be an upgrade on using my Amiga as an amp! :-D

BeardFaceMan

If you get Rocksmith you wont need to spend 4 grand on gear,  the tones are that good. They emulate every rack and pedal you can think of, I think this game is an essential purchase for anyone with a pc, some speakers and a guitar, just for use as an amp more than anything else.

easytarget

Really gotten back into this in the last couple of lockdown months. It's still brilliant. I also followed the steps on http://customsforge.com/ to get my mac version to play the free DLC on their site, so instead of just five Iron Maiden songs I now have fucking ALL OF THEM (quality is variable, but they're all a joy). Also Slayer. Also Skeletonwitch.
It's brilliant and it's making my clumsy middle aged fingers better at the guitar.

BeardFaceMan

I've been trying to get back into this too and gave myself tennis elbow by not warming up and jumping right in to playing Pantera and Slayer songs. Lovely fucking grub. They've stopped doing the official DLC now as they have something new planned instead but they've not announced what yet.

easytarget

I hope they somehow come up with something better, but it's so brilliant I don't even know how you'd refine it - maybe officially allow users to develop their own files for songs but that would probably be a rights nightmare.

There's a few bands that will fuck up your picking hand if you don't warm up - trying to do palm-muted, all downstrokes riffs for a fucking Blink 182 song is *much harder* than I expected.

BeardFaceMan

Quote from: easytarget on July 28, 2020, 04:49:48 AM
I hope they somehow come up with something better, but it's so brilliant I don't even know how you'd refine it - maybe officially allow users to develop their own files for songs but that would probably be a rights nightmare.

There's a few bands that will fuck up your picking hand if you don't warm up - trying to do palm-muted, all downstrokes riffs for a fucking Blink 182 song is *much harder* than I expected.

I thought the first Rocksmith game was so good they couldn't top it, then they excelled themselves with Rocksmith2014, genuinely curious now to see what they're coming up with next, it should be great. You're right, they could never allow people to do their own DLC because of rights issues, the whole issue of custom DLC has been a bit murky. Obviously Ubisoft can't condone it and say it's ok, but not long after the game launched and people were making customs they released a patch for the game that stopped the custom DLCs from working. There was such a shitstorm from users and people saying they'd never play the game again that they quietly unpatched it. Ubisoft know they can't say using custom DLC is ok but they're also aware it's a big reason why the game is as popular as it is.

Yeah that was my main playing style when I was in my 20s, played a lot of punk (mainly NOFX, fuck, those guys are fast) so lots of palm-muting and playing all downstrokes (because as Scott Ian says "upstrokes are for girls"), and while my left hand was still pretty ropey on the fretboard my right hand was solid. Can't play like that anymore now though, I'm trying to relearn how to do power chords using my little finger instead of my third finger to make things a bit easier on my hands and I'm starting to use upstrokes a bit more but it's nowhere near as fun. Need a lot of stamina to play like that though, it is deceptively difficult.


Hand Solo

I've just watched a few videos of this and don't understand interface, they seem to have the guitar layed out horizontally. Wouldn't it be simpler to have a Guitar Hero style visual where it's layed out vertically with 6 lanes coming towards you and the fret numbers appearing on each lane/string? Or is that copyrighted or something? Found it confusing the way it's done.

BeardFaceMan

Quote from: Hand Solo on July 28, 2020, 10:14:23 AM
I've just watched a few videos of this and don't understand interface, they seem to have the guitar layed out horizontally. Wouldn't it be simpler to have a Guitar Hero style visual where it's layed out vertically with 6 lanes coming towards you and the fret numbers appearing on each lane/string? Or is that copyrighted or something? Found it confusing the way it's done.

No, that's pretty much what happens with Rocksmith. You have the strings and frets layed out horizontally and then the notes you need to play come at you vertically and when the notes hit the strings, that's when you play them.

Hand Solo

Quote from: BeardFaceMan on July 28, 2020, 11:19:01 AM
No, that's pretty much what happens with Rocksmith. You have the strings and frets layed out horizontally and then the notes you need to play come at you vertically and when the notes hit the strings, that's when you play them.

That's exactly what I said, it's not a easy to read format is the point. The actual entire fretboard of 12 frets and above is coming at you where everything is spaced out unevenly, it looks really weird and hard to read to me. It seems to use different colours to diffentiate strings when they could just use actual strings or 6 lanes in front of you - actually using spatial awareness which is what you need to maneuver strings on a fretboard. It would just look a lot simpler to interpret with 6 lines and then each fret number appearing on each line to crossreference string/note. The fact they haven't gone that way means either Guitar Hero have it copyrighted or something (though didn't that just have coloured buttons appear rather than fret numbers?), or this is some crazy way of visualising the fretboard that works for novices/some people but makes no sense to me. I'm used to reading tab which some programs and sites scroll through live so you can play along, but would prob be easier to play along with live in that Guitar Hero format

This video shows a 'pro' apparently using it and doesn't do very well, they show he gets better but I think it's only because he's just playing songs he knows from memory by that point rather than following the game, the other games he tries later aren't the same format as the other one either.

Fair enough if it works for some people, just looks like a very counter-intuitive mechanic to me when it could be much simpler.

BeardFaceMan

Quote from: Hand Solo on July 28, 2020, 12:36:22 PM
That's exactly what I said, it's not a easy to read format is the point. The actual entire fretboard of 12 frets and above is coming at you where everything is spaced out unevenly, it looks really weird and hard to read to me. It seems to use different colours to diffentiate strings when they could just use actual strings or 6 lanes in front of you - actually using spatial awareness which is what you need to maneuver strings on a fretboard. It would just look a lot simpler to interpret with 6 lines and then each fret number appearing on each line to crossreference string/note. The fact they haven't gone that way means either Guitar Hero have it copyrighted or something (though didn't that just have coloured buttons appear rather than fret numbers?), or this is some crazy way of visualising the fretboard that works for novices/some people but makes no sense to me. I'm used to reading tab which some programs and sites scroll through live so you can play along, but would prob be easier to play along with live in that Guitar Hero format

This video shows a 'pro' apparently using it and doesn't do very well, they show he gets better but I think it's only because he's just playing songs he knows from memory by that point rather than following the game, the other games he tries later aren't the same format as the other one either.

Fair enough if it works for some people, just looks like a very counter-intuitive mechanic to me when it could be much simpler.

No, it's pretty easy to read. The point is to help you learn to play the guitar, that's why the entire fretboard is represented, it wouldn't make any sense if it did the Guitar Hero method of only using 5 or 6 frets. And if it did only show 6 frets, say, and used numbers to tell you what frets to use instead, that wouldn't be a very good visual representation of what you need to do. You can see the notes coming towards and you can see where on the neck you need to place your hand to play them, it's not like GH where your left hand stays in the same place throughout the song. It's very intuitive, it just takes a minute to get used to reading it, the same way you need to get used to sight-reading guitar tab or sheet music.

Hand Solo

Quote from: BeardFaceMan on July 28, 2020, 12:44:25 PM
No, it's pretty easy to read. The point is to help you learn to play the guitar, that's why the entire fretboard is represented, it wouldn't make any sense if it did the Guitar Hero method of only using 5 or 6 frets.

I'm not talking about frets though, I'm talking about strings. You show 6 strings, and each thing that appears on it represents the note by using a number from 0 to 22 or whatever. So for instance the Sweet Child O' Mine riff would look like this, if you imagine it from the bottom coming towards you like the Star Wars text in reverse:


|     |      |       |  14 |      |      |
|     |      |       |       |      | 14 |
|     |      |       |  14 |      |      |
|     |      |       |       |      | 15 |
|     |      |       |  12 |      |      |
|     |      |       |  14 |      |      |
|     |      |       |       | 15 |      |
|     |      | 12  |       |      |      |
   E     A     D       G      B     e

There'll prob be a spacing problem with it being text but you get the idea, to me that's infinitely simpler and you can visualise the entire fretboard spatially from 0 to any arbitrary number with just 6 lines. Using colours and all sorts just complicates matters.

BeardFaceMan

All that's doing is showing you numbers though, you're not learning anything, just getting a load of numbers thrown at you. With the strings horizontally, it shows you where on the neck to put your hand, for example. The other thing that's missing if it was done your way is chord shapes and names, again, your way it just shows you a load of numbers but with Rocksmith you get a better visual representation and you know the names of the chords you are playing. The Rocksmith way also tells you which fingers to put on which string, which is missing in your version. Also, you don't hold a guitar vertically so it wouldn't make much sense to have the strings vertically. Your method is just guitar tab read vertically not horizontally which doesn't work in a game, there's a reason the guitar is laid out horizontally in all of them (reading it vertically doesn't work with guitar tab read on a website either). Honestly, it's a lot better, you just need to learn how to read it, it's a bit odd if you're coming at from only reading tab, I can see why you'd think your way would work best. The only thing they've done to complicate it from standard guitar tab is give each string a colour and you read from the top and not left to right, but that just makes it easier to prepare when you see a note coming and gives you extra info like chord shapes, chord names, finger placement, hand position etc. If you look down at your fretboard to see what youre doing when you're playing it's easy to lose your place in the tab when you look at the screen again and think numbers are on the wrong strings, that's another reason the colours are there.

easytarget

You get used to how the notes appear. I imagine it's like reading music (except I can't read music).

kngen

I definitely found Rocksmith's fret layout easier to read than straight guitar tabs. As I mentioned at the time (not in this thread, though), the weird thing for me is that - unlike chappy in that video - it didn't teach me to play the songs away from the game. I can't play The Trooper all the way through without the visual cues for some reason, whereas I can still probably remember some ludicrously technical riffs from my old band that I haven't played live for 20-odd years. Seems to reside in a different part of my brain, despite the muscle memory being there. This was pretty much why I stopped playing with it (also, latency issues and then switching from Xbox to PS4).[nb]Does the adapter work on both platforms, or is it console-specific?[/nb]

However, as I'm trying to learn proper finger-picking after bodging it for three decades, are there any lessons of that kind in Rocksmith? I pretty much ignored everything that wasn't 100mph metal first time round, but anything that can trick me into learning, and which gets my technique on track, would be pretty cool, even if I forget the songs as soon as the game is turned off.

BeardFaceMan

I have that problem too with Rocksmith. With guitar tab I'd look at a chunk of it, memorize it, try and play it, then move on to the next bit, i think that was because you can't fit an entire songs worth of tab in one screen, you have to keep stopping playing to scroll down. Doing it that way I could learn a song to play from memory pretty quickly. And while you can use the riff repeater to isolate bits of songs and loop them to practice them etc, I find I get more enjoyment from  just sight-reading the Rocksmith tab so I can play a song all the way through pretty quickly, I can quickly pick up playing a song I've  never heard on the first run through too, but I don't remember any of it because I'm just sight reading.

They made it so you can use a mic to use your acoustic guitar with Rocksmith so there must be some acoustic stuff there, I'm sure they did an acoustic DLC pack. I can't fingerpick myself so not sure what the options are, the string-skipping arcade game might be good for fingerpicking though.

And yes, the USB adaptor is universal, I bought mine for the 360 with the original Rocksmith and then I switched to the PC because the latency was too bad and custom DLC was easier to use, everything works fine.

kngen

Good to know, thanks! Think I'll get the PC version then. I have an acoustic/electric (a recent treat to myself) so just need to dig out the adapter. Even if there's no real fingerpicking stuff, it'll be good to just learn some new stuff on that guitar and build up some callouses etc, as my dainty digits have been pampered by electrics for far too long.