Sixty Days of Rocksmith 2014

Posted by Rampant Coyote on January 10, 2014

I didn’t exactly sign up for the Rocksmith 60-day challenge or anything like that. But it’s been a little over 60 days since I first started playing with Rocksmith 2014. If I was truly disciplined, and learning to really play the guitar was of greater importance to me, I’d have been playing 4+ hours per day. But I have other priorities. Like making games. I haven’t quite clocked in an hour a day, though I have been supplementing my experience with some offline practicing (often with an acoustic guitar) – although half the time I’m offline I am practicing riffs from the game.  So given that I haven’t been the model student for two months, have I improved since November 4th?

Yes. Big time.

It’s not like I am ready to take the stage or anything. But I can look back at some of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles and plateaus that I had been unable to clear for months (or in some cases, years – even decades), and they seem kind of trivial now. The boost to confidence alone has been a big deal. Most of what I’m going to say here may be a reiteration from my “Quick Take” post after I’d only been playing with it a couple of days. My opinions haven’t changed much (having experience with the original Rocksmith and Rock Band 3 Pro Mode probably helped me make an informed one), but I thought some of you might appreciate an update from a couple of months of hindsight.

Planning for this post, I went back and played the original Rocksmith – something I haven’t done even once since getting the 2014 edition. It crashed the first time I tried to run it. Typical. But I finally got the thing running, and went through the painful menu navigation, and “rehearsed” a song. It’s hard to tell how much something has improved when you only look forward — looking back gives you a better perspective.

In just over two months, I have clocked almost as much time on the successor as I did the original game over the course of slightly more than a year. It was fascinating to see how I’d become dependent upon many of Rocksmith 2014‘s new features to help me understand what is going on in the song, how well I’m doing, and what I should be doing next. The more primitive guidance in the original was annoying to me at this stage. In fact, it was bad enough that it convinced me to shelled out $10 for the “Disc Import Tool” on Steam to move all the songs from the original game to the sequel, and prepared to delete the old Rocksmith from my hard drive.  I have no reason to ever go back. I should note that all the DLC purchased for the first game was already available for the sequel, automatically.

Now, two months later, I have nice calluses and improved skills. There are some favorite songs that I thought (for years) were far beyond me. Now, I’m playing them – in some cases at 100% difficulty across all sections. I’m still not up to full speed, I still make mistakes, and if I play the songs outside of the game I frequently mess up on timing or forget parts. But note the important phrase here: When I play the songs outside of the game.

That is the point of Rocksmith 2014. And that has worked.  Maybe in a couple more months, I’ll have them down perfectly (the easier ones are getting pretty close – at least playing rhythm), but in the meantime, I’m still playing guitar. People are jumping in and singing when I’m trying to play “Don’t Fear the Reaper” on my acoustic (sans solo, ‘cuz the fretboard doesn’t go that high). It’s recognizable, and it’s paying off. After a couple of decades of being stuck as a “perma-beginner” (well, somewhere between beginner and intermediate), I feel like I’m back to doing some real playing. I haven’t felt like that since I was seventeen years old.

Just as interesting as being able to play full-fledged versions of songs is discovering how quickly I can pick up new songs now. For simpler songs – particularly songs I’m familiar with – I only need a couple of play-throughs before the game has ramped up the difficulty in certain less-technical sections to maximum – the full note-for-note rendition.  I make plenty of mistakes and may have trouble keeping up, but it’s still cool to know that I’m no longer working on a simplified “beginner” version of the accompaniment.

The “Riff Repeater” has definitely become an awesome tool to help learn a song. It’s kind of amazing to me now how useless and inconvenient the equivalent tools in Rocksmith and Rock Band 3 Pro were by comparison. It’s still not perfect. If I’m just trying to get a very short riff down, it’s often best to just go back to the main menu (which kind of acts like an amp) and practice it – or bits of it – over and over at my own pace. But as a tool to help learn a section of a song and get it up to speed, it’s been my number one tool.

At Christmas, I pulled out the guitar, tuned it to the piano being played by my daughter, and we both played accompaniment for the family singing Christmas songs. Now, many of the chords were simple ones that I’ve been able to play for years, and I had to simplify in some cases where the changes were still too fast, but I had the confidence to play along – without ever having practiced playing the song before. Yes, I figure this is kind of basic guitar playing 101 kind of stuff here, but it’s just not something I’ve ever felt confident enough to do before. Now I wonder why I didn’t try earlier. It seems so simple now…

For some of this stuff, I’m becoming more and more fond of the Guitarcade section of the game – particularly the technique games. Learning some songs can be great for motivation and for some skill development. But for general skill – like just learning to react quickly and make those chord changes, or to have the scales just come naturally to your fingers, or to perform slides or control the volume with absolute precision – the Guitarcade is about making those practice drills fun. Some are more fun than others, but they’ve gone all out, with worldwide leaderboards and everything else to try and make it as interesting as possible. I kind of ignored these in the original Rocksmith, and didn’t mess around with them too much at first with RS 2014 (although they are much improved), but the more I play, the more I’m finding them valuable.

There are a few other features which I feel I should note:

Rocksmith 2014 offers a lot of songs with non-standard tuning… either different tunings (Drop D, E Flat, etc.) or slightly sharp or flat versions of standard E tunings. In a game like Rock Band with a midi guitar, this didn’t matter. But when you are playing along with the actual song, you need to be in tune with the other instruments. It’s really cool that they did this, but I find myself avoiding songs that don’t have E Standard tuning. If I do decide to tackle a song in a different tuning, I’ll stick with other songs in the same tuning for a while, just to avoid having to re-tune my guitar. I think the point they wanted to drive home was for players to get used to re-tuning their guitar so that it is no big deal. While I’m glad that the songs are there (some of my favorite songs are in a different tuning!), I still don’t like retuning my guitar, especially if I don’t want to skip a song in “Nonstop Play” mode.

I don’t feel like I’m really taking full advantage of “Session Mode” yet, though the experienced guitarists who play this game often swear by it, from what I’ve seen. I still feel like I am “working up to it,” though it’s so open-ended that it’s really nothing a beginner can’t use. If nothing else, you can just set up a metronome and practice your scales here. But at it’s best, it’s a really cool multi-instrument virtual improvisational jam session.

“Score attacks” are a lot of fun (they can be accessed via a song, or in the Guitarcade section) if you want some “old-school” Guitar Hero type fun. It gives you three skill levels you can play a song (plus a “master” skill level where there are no notes on the screen, and you must accompany the music completely from memory).  This can give you a better idea of how much you are improving on a song than the percentage score from the main “Learn a song” menu – and also a chance of failure. When you get to the point where you are just practicing a song over and over, this can be a fun way to keep it interesting. I don’t use it often, but I do get a kick out of it when I do (assuming I don’t screw up so bad that I fail out of a song).

Another thing that’s really worth mentioning (again) is the list of suggestions generated by the game before you practice any song. Some are just goals for you to work on – new targets to strive for. Others suggest reviewing a chord or a lesson. There are also suggestions that take you directly to a Guitarcade game to work on a technique, or the Riff Repeater to work on a problem section until you nail it. While this initially interested me, for most of the last two months I ignored it. It was pretty obvious to me what I needed to work on. Now that I’m hitting performance levels in the high 80s and 90s, however, this section has become useful again. It’s no longer as obvious where I’m struggling, and it’s cool that the game can point out the places where I need more work. Personalized instruction!

So… yeah. While it’s still relatively early (maybe I should check back in with another report in 2-4 months?), I can say that even with a fairly casual commitment, the game *works* as a training tool. Quite well, particularly in comparison to its predecessors – which, in spite of their flaws, were still helpful.

In fact, I actually brought up Rock Band 3 the other day, with my Pro guitar. I hadn’t used it in months. There are still a lot of songs I bought for the game that I never really tried! Emboldened by my success in Rocksmith 2014, I brought up one of the easier songs at the highest difficulty level (something I never felt capable of handling a couple of years ago), and began to practice a section. Fifteen minutes later, I was able to play the section at full speed with no mistakes (at least once). Then I pulled out a regular guitar, and played it without accompaniment.

I thought it sounded pretty respectable.

Filed Under: Geek Life, Guitar Games - Comments: 13 Comments to Read



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