GuitarCade and Day 05

There's always a tipping point for me to be enthusiastic about something.  Rocksmith 2014 is not the first Rocksmith.  A few other games tried to do this whole "really learn" guitar thing while playing videogames.  I'm a skeptic of almost anything, its just how I am.  It wasn't until I saw this demo on the Guitardcade that I finally said "you know, I think I want to do this"

The Guitarcade is not needed.  On a spec sheet to CEO's, the devs could have just added in a bunch of video lessons, included the "learn a song" feature and called it a day.  They could have also just included in a couple of junky, half-assed games.  The guys and gals that made Rocksmith went the extra mile on these games.  Each one has its own set of achievements and challenges.  The Guitarcade is set up to look like an 80's/90's arcade with a retro feel to the art.  The art is not just mechanical, whoever worked on these had a real love for arcades.  Scale Warriors even has a start menu like the classic beat'em ups.

I know my weakness.  I get bored of one thing I"m doing, and I move on to something else.  I do not mean in the long term, I have remarkable long term attention retention.  I get bored walking on a treadmill, I have to walk outside so the scenery changes.  I get bored practicing scales.  So the Guitarcade, I hope, is my answer.  I feel like the Guitarcade will give me direction in practicing, and will give me something to focus on even after the 60 day challenge.  If it were not for the Guitarcade and the Session sections, I would not be having as much fun and learning as much practical application of theory.

Day 05

With Day 05 I finally finished all the pedal missions.  I messed around and gave myself a new tone afterward.  I put a super fuzzy pedal in front of a low chorus.  I then put that into a clean Fender style amp.  In the effects loop I put another fuzz, this one with lots of low end.  What this accomplished was a super distorted ultra fuzz with a slight throat fuzz on the chorus effect.  Its pretty fun to play around with, almost gets that American Woman fuzz going on.

I had some Guitarcade challenges come through.  For some reason I really dislike the string set up on the cowboy shooting saloon game, and the Scale Warriors game.  I know it makes sense to have them that way, but for me it feels terribly backward.  I need to get used to it and force myself to play them, but it is discouraging.

Something encouraging though, I went ahead and tried Return to Castle Chordead.  Apparently this was a favorite from the last game.  It is an on rails shooter sort of like Sega's "House of the Dead" games.  Sega famously created "Typing of the Dead" where you kill zombies by typing phrases instead of using a light gun.  Rocksmith copies this, except you play chords to shoot the zombies.  The zombie in front may be one chord, while the zombie in the back is another.  Now, I suck at chords.  Its my main block from "knowing" guitar.  I did not think I was ready for this game.  You know what?  I did not do half bad.  It starts slow and by the end of it I was reliable killing zombies with 3 different chords.  I know I"m still not ready for it, but its fun and I don't see the harm in repeating the first level a few times.

Finished out by playing in a blues band session.  I did not make any real breakthroughs today, but it felt good doing some easy chord changes.  Also, I did my warm up practice track with no mistakes first try.

Gibson SG History and Day 04

I grew up around 80's hair metal because I had older sisters in the 80's.  My bathroom constantly smelled like hairspray(I can't drink anything with too much vodka in it because it reminds me of hairspray smell).  The music I found obnoxious was full of pointy, neon guitars, but the stuff I ended up liking was many times played on a Les Paul.  By all standards, I should have grown up loving the classic Les Paul guitar made famous by Slash, Joe Perry(Aerosmith), Steve Clark(Def Leppard).

However, there was another influence on my musical tastes: my uncle.  It was my uncle who introduced me to Highway To Hell, by ACDC.  Later, it was Black Sabbath that firmly established me in the heavy riff-verse that fueled my teenage years.  Both Angus Young of ACDC, and Toni Iommi of Black Sabbath, played the Gibson SG, and later when I wanted my own guitar, it was the practicality and styling of the SG that endeared me to it.

The history of the SG is pretty strange.  In the late 1950's, the Les Paul was seen as old fashioned.  It was a tree trunk around your neck, unlike the hip, new Fender Stratocasters that the new rock legends were playing, particularly Buddy Holly.  In 1961, the Les Paul got a new look.  It got a slab, double cutaway body.  The extra "old fashioned" accents like the body binding and flame top were done away with.  You had what we call "The SG" body, but at the time it was only called a "Les Paul".  The outdated Les Paul, of the original styles, were being sold cheap in pawn shops.  A lot of the new guitarists of the time bought these cheap Les Pauls before they got famous, and continued using them after.  This brought the popularity back, and in 1968 the Les Paul was re-introduced, and the SG finally got its real name.  As you can see, its hard to divorce the SG from the Les Paul when you're talking about history.

Some people that are associated with other guitars actually have had SG's in their stable.  Clapton and Hendrix are known Fender faithfuls, but both had SG's too.  Clapton has the famous "Fool" SG he used while in Cream, and Hendrix played a White "Les Paul" SG with 3 pickups in his last few years, during many of his television appearances.

Day 04

Ok, today I started on the Tone Sculptor missions.  If you read about the first day, I pretty much went into and started messing with that from the beginning.  With these missions they basically just have you put effects pedals into your tone settings so that you can get familiar with what they all do.  The descriptions are short and I generally agree with what they say about them.  I think they did the overdrive, distortion, and fuzz lessons out of order.  Many effects are tweaks to other effects or are related closely to them.  I would have liked to have seen this explained.  Still, for a beginner it is a good way to check through all the effects styles.  In the pre-game era I had to do this by going to the big rack of Boss pedals and just trying everything while wearing dinky head phones at a Guitar Center.

I took a break mid-session to have dinner, and I found something out that was pretty cool.  The sign that I should take a break was that I got a "play the Guitarcade game" as the next mission.  I was ok "oh, I guess that's all the pedal stuff for now", and I went and ate.  I had turned off the game, watched some youtube, and came back to the game ready to play the Guitarcade... only that mission was replaced by the next pedal mission.  It turns out, the game doesn't think you should just power through a lot of missions in one particular area, it is going to divert you and slow you down.  I actually think this is pretty cool.  For a beginner, going through all the pedals quickly is just going to get you confused and not commit stuff to memory.  So far it has always defaulted to the Guitarcade, because after about 3 or 4 more pedal missions, I got a suggestion to go to the Guitarcade as a mission again.  All work and no play makes jack a dull guitarist.

I played the Shooter game...  I feel like I want the strings in reverse order.  Did not have much fun in it till I put the pick down and used my fingers... but that's kind of cheating because I need to force myself to use the pick... I'll get to this game again later.  The Duck shooting game that I next tried was super fun.  I'll do more thoughts on the games and the Guitarcade as a topic later.

I decided not to power through all the pedal missions.  For about 30 minutes I went back to the jam session.  I got into the 8-bit Nintendo style bands, put some super fuzz on my guitar, and tried to copy some old Ninja Gaiden/Mega Man songs in riff form.  It was very fun.  Learning songs is still not fun for me at this point, and I've learned more in the jam sessions than I have in years of playing solo or reading theory.  I highly recommend new players to ignore the songs till you have your feet... unless of course its fun for you to learn the songs, then by all means do it.

TIP OF THE DAY

At the main menu, hit select.  At your path screen, if you click "X" on your path, your mission list will come up.  They don't really spell that one out for you in game in an easy to find area.

Bass cheat and Day 03

I have mentioned that I am much more of a bass player than a guitar player.  I can play several genres of music in bass, and a bass in my hand feels natural.  In Rocksmith 2014, there are 3 career paths you can choose from: Rhythm, Lead and Bass.  At any time you can switch between them easily on the main menu.  I did find a flaw with this... your missions are not career specific.  This kind of sucks because Missions are sort of your road map of how to learn.  Also, this means I can essentially cheat.  If there's a mission that is hard for me to get correct with Lead guitar, I can switch over to bass and fly through it(at least now at the beginning).  I will have to keep myself in check, and also I will need to make more accounts so I can learn the others separately later...

So the bass is pretty awesome.  I recognize the amps that they have modeled for bass.  They do not have my particular amp(Thunderfunk), but they do have Eden, SWR, and a few others that are descended from the amp mine is descended from.  I was able to dial in a close enough tone to what I generally play with, and was able to jam pretty successfully with an in game band.  Really fun, and only a few issues.  The audio lag is more noticeable for me on bass, but that's because my amp is one of the quickest response amps ever made, so I feel the lag much more on bass(I really need to get my cable situation set up to reduce this lag).  Also the tracking of my note playing is behind, and this could be a software issue, because I don't think I play all that super fast on bass.

Still, bass was fun, and they do have some fun bass songs available for DLC.  If you want to do more than chug your E string to the rock offerings of the original set, then download the Soul Classics pack.

Day 03

I decided to warm up with jamming in the Session menu, and ended up going through a lot of the missions.  They showed me what I had already discovered, that the scale shape can stay the same moving up and down the neck, and you just change the key you play in.  Next they had me choose several types of bands to play with.  I really liked the Electronic Campfire whatever band, I can't remember the name, but campfire will get you there.  Its sort of a folksy/electronic band with a clean sound from the guitar, I had a lot of fun with it.  I sounded like crap with the Grunge band.

They keep giving me missions to play for 10 minutes with various bands, and at first you might think "omg, I just came in here to warm up" but then you remember, you're memorizing the scale shape, and also learning how the notes in each key sound and what works.  They had me play with the tempo, and change keys while jamming.  Once it started having me play with the Vintage Rock band, I started having a blast.  I liked what I came up with in the sessions so much, that I played well over the 10 minutes, and even grabbed my phone.

Yes, I recorded myself.  No, I'm not prepared to have them on the blog yet... unless for some reason I get the request from those on my G+ and Facebook account.  Anyway.

Anti-boredom and Day 02

Anti-boredom

The jury is out on if this game IS genius, but it does have a few brilliant ideas.  I'm not a complete beginner, so there's a few things in the lessons and videos that I already know.  The genius thing that Rocksmith 2014 does is they never turn off your guitar.  While your points are being totaled up, while you are watching videos, while you're waiting for something else to begin, you can be playing.  I don't feel bored at all, because I can always be noodling around while things are happening inside the game.  Not that the wait times are long for loading screens, they are very tolerable.  While I was watching how to work a strap... I was practicing my E minor scale.  While I was waiting for my score to total in a mini-game, I was practicing Brain Stew(song not included in game).

There is hardly a time where I'm not making noise.  I really think I'd be appreciating the game less if this was not a feature.

Day 02 No songs... ok, songs too.

I started out the day deciding not to try and play a song.  I am a long way from songs being very fun right now.  I started out going to the lessons section.  I watched a few without skipping, and as I mentioned above, thank goodness they let you play around while the lessons are going on.  I worked on getting the lesson's practice track down to memory, and then I moved on.

Looking at the menu, I decided to finish out a mission about setting up a jam band.  Apparently I did it wrongly yesterday for completing the mission.  Paying more attention to it, I loaded a pre-set band like they tell me.  The pre-sets have a lot of variety, and you don't have to dink around with little sliders if you don't want to.  I really appreciate how this game has obviously powerful control over things, but has perfectly usable pre-sets.

After a few jam missions completed, I decided I wanted to try the Guitarcade.  Yesterday I payed a visit to the Guitarcade as part of a suggestion that the game gave me(not a mission, songs will suggest things to help you play the song better).  I obviously was not ready for it,  I sucked at the game and so stayed away from that.  Today I loaded up the first game, Gone Wailin'.  All these games have a retro 8-bit look to them, and I really like it.  Gone Wailin' is a guy that rides on top of a whale.  You make more noise, the whale spouts water, elevating you.  There are bananas to grab as the characters move along the scrolling background.  It is pretty fun actually.  What does it teach?  Well, you have to mute a lot, which is something good for beginners to practice, also it will build up hand endurance.  While neither were something I really needed to practice, I am new to using a pick.  I have this bad habit of my index fingernail raking the strings, leaving me with a sore finger nail later in the day.  I'm using this to help me keep in the habit of holding my fingers more correctly.

At the end of my session, I decided to go ahead and look at playing a new song.  The Arctic Monkey song is pretty good even though I"m not a huge fan of theirs.  I also played some more of "You Really Got Me" by the Kinks.  Still not fun to learn songs yet.

Rocksmith; what is it and Day 01

Rocksmith 2014 is an update to the original Rocksmith(sometimes called Rocksmith 2013).  It combines rhythm gameplay(Guitar Hero) with learning.  Instead of a guitar controller, you have a special cable that allows you to plug any electrical guitar into your game system.  This cable translates the guitar's analog tone into a digital signal that can then be used by the game.

The focus is less on making a game, and more on making a teaching tool that resembles a game.

The game uses licensed music that is converted by the game developers into several difficulty levels that progress from easier to harder as you learn to play.  The devs have also modeled amps and effects so that you sound like how you should in each song.  You can slow down songs, repeat certain parts by themselves for practice, and adjust their difficulty if the game is going to quickly for you.  The best part is that it turns practice exercises into Retro-80's style arcade games that you play by doing whatever subject you are practicing that day.

The game's tag line is the 60 day challenge.  Play at least 1 hour every day, doing whichever activity you want(learn a song, jam with a band, do lessons), and by the end of the 60 days, you will consider yourself a guitarist.

Day 01

Day one started with a small crisis.  The USB connection was finicky for me, and for about 2 minutes I was adjusting things while trying not to cuss like a rockstar at the top of my lungs.  I have not had that problem since. The game asks questions to get a similar guitar on screen to the one you're playing.  You then choose a path(changeable very easily) between Lead, Rhythm and bass, after which you tune.  The tuning is a little eager to move through strings... I had to redo a string, but it works, and is nice.  Then I'm shoved into the main menu with a suggestion to learn a song.  The game has "missions", a sort of questing system to help you figure out what you want to do.

 I'm a little bit of a tech/gear nut, so the first thing I did was ignore the suggestion to get started with a song.  I go and look at their "Tone" sculptor.  You can put pedals before the amp, and there are a wide variety.  If you know your pedals, you can figure out which is the Tonescreamer and which is the BOSS DS-1 by how they describe them.  There is everything from a chorus to a envelope filter.  You can choose from tons of amps(just about every Marshall made, and a few boutique amps with "Rocksmith" printed on them to avoid copyright), then even cabinets are modeled.  Lastly you can use some studio/rack effects like reverb and compression.  You map the tone to a controller so you can easily switch between them.

It is freakin' impressive, but if you're new at it, it can be daunting.  They have default settings based on songs in the game, so find a song with a tone you like, and use that.

Getting a little long...  I'll try and wrap up day 01.

I started with Blitzkrieg Bop.  I suck at counting quick notes using a pick... but within 20 minutes, I could stumble my way through the song outside of the game, and people could guess the song I played.  I then found my way to the jam room and instantly had a breakthrough in my playing.  I said before, I actually KNOW the concept of scales and chords, but I have never really applied it.  It just has something to do with my learning style.  I can be told things and it never sticks.  I created a classic rock inspired jam band, chose the key I wanted to play in, and instantly something clicked.

This key felt like how I play "My Girl" on bass.  Holy crap, its the same pattern!  I started playing some bluesy stuff in the pattern, then tried a punk way of doing things.  The band changed to match whatever I was playing, it felt like I was actually playing with a jam band.

It was great.

I now know the key of E's pattern starting at the 12th fret by memory.  My brain just could never work like that before.  I had muscle memory patterns of parts of songs that I used to improv blues lines before, but numbers just make my brain space out.  Within a few minutes of PLAYING while LOOKING at visual representations of the pattern, and HEARING it all work with the band, and it was committed to memory.

How its going to be.

I plan on going into more detail about the game, and about music and maybe my stuff, each post having a different subject.  At the end of the subject I will update the blog with my progress with a day count, and my progress..

About my Music Room

This blog is one about my musical endeavors.

Music is a hobby of mine.  I've never been in a band, and I only play for my own enjoyment.  Its definitely something that costs money, not makes money heh.  Also, I'm not very good at making it.  Oh, I have lots of scholarly reading, and I have a grasp of theory, but its "book" learnin' is all.  I do not apply it very well.

I typically play bass guitar.  I can play some motown, and do some jazz improv, but I've never been able to really slap or tap.  I also own a regular guitar, of which I can only do a few blues lines and then improv in the same way I do on bass.  I am sloppy as hell with a pick on guitar, but I'm forcing myself to use it and slowly seeing improvement.

I am mainly starting this blog to document my efforts at using Rocksmith 2014, which I was gifted at Christmas 2013.