Rocksmith Goal – Achieved. Next Goal?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 3, 2017

In October, I set a goal to get good enough to play “Don’t Fear the Reaper” on guitar. I’m using Rocksmith Remastered, and it’s an old Rocksmith 1 (2012) song with a mix of parts (“Alternate Lead” in Remastered). October got a little crazy, so I didn’t put in quite as much time as I’d like, but I internally set my goal at being able to hit 95% success at full difficulty. To me, that means I’ve got the song more-or-less down and can keep up, but I’ve still got a ways to go to master it.

I’m happy to report that I hit my goal. Barely, but I hit it. I’m not consistent (I range from 92% to 95%), my timing could use work, I don’t have the whole song memorized, I don’t nail all of the string bends perfectly, there’s a relatively simple riff that I still have trouble playing at speed, etc., etc., etc. But I can play the whole song in Score Attack without a strike (which happens if you make too many mistakes in one section), hit an x50 multiplier, and hey, I’m #8 in the whole world on the leaderboard! (We will pretend not to notice that there are only 10 people on the entire leaderboard for this easily-forgotten arrangement for a song that’s only available as DLC to –I think– owners of the original game).

For me, that feels like a milestone. I’ve had the song in my library for a long time. It was one of the first songs I really tried to play, and I fell woefully short back then. I was not ready to tackle it. Not that it’s a super-hard song or anything. There are plenty of harder songs in the library.  I just didn’t have the muscle memory and the speed. I quit in frustration, assumed it was beyond my abilities, and forgot about really practicing it.

This time around, I realized there was nothing really outside my capabilities in it anymore, but I still had to overcome a mental block about it being “too hard” from my efforts almost four years ago. I had to spend some time in the riff repeater mode playing the same section over and over and gradually increasing the speed. It was interesting how some of the sections I could nail easily at 96% of full speed, but collapsed on at 97%.

Anyway, I’ll be giving it a break for a while … not a complete break, just a break from trying to practice it several times a day. I haven’t decided which one I’m going to try to improve on next. It’s just nice to feel I’m making progress.

Filed Under: General, Guitar Games - Comments: Read the First Comment



top