Requests and Day 35

"Play something you've come up with"

That's what every newer guitarist would want to hear.  The reality is that when you sit down to show someone that you're learning guitar, they instinctively want to hear something they recognize.  Its only human nature, they want to compare you to something they've heard to be able to judge your skill.  If you can play something they perceive as a good song, they're going to think "oh wow, my friend can play this popular song!".  I'm guilty of it as well.  I used to ask "can you play Sweet Child of Mine" and in the later years, "know any Pantera?"

I've been on the other side now though, and I regret being that way.  When you're new and you're learning, you're focusing on technique and practicing.  In all reality, you probably know some pretty good sounding things to play that uses the techniques you know, but you might be missing one technique to be able to play ACDC, or Guns N Roses.

You also might know a few genres.  You might be tempted to say, "well I can't play that, but if you tell me a genre of music you like, maybe I can play something in it for you in that style".  Seems like 90% of the time they're going to say "I like J-pop" or "know any Skrillex?", or something equally as un-guitar or something you just don't know the style of.

That's just how life goes.

So if you're reading this, and you have a friend that is practicing and learning guitar, remember what I've said.  There are 10 million-billion songs out there, and chances are your first 20 you can come up with aren't going to be something they can play.  Look at them, smile a little bit, and say "just play something you know or something you've come up with yourself".  You're going to hear something new, don't be scared, you might be the first person ever to hear a new piece of music that never existed in the world before.  It could be great.


Day 35

I have pretty much decided on 4 "tone" categories that I like to play in.  Clean for acoustic/chords work, light overdrive for bluesy stuff, British Crunch(my favorite) for ACDC sounding rock, and high gain "High on Fire" tone for metal.  Today I played with the Tone shaping section to try and get two of these:  high gain metal and low gain overdrive.

I have to say that low gain overdrive is the hardest to get "right" with the sound in my head.  I think that's why there was so much fuss over the Tubescreamer pedals that Stevie Ray Vaughn popularized.  He sort of gave everyone a "base" to start from.  There's a billion tubescreamer clones and light overdrive circuits in the pedal world.  Am I happy with what I"ve done in Rocksmith to get the sound?  I'm about 75% happy.  I would like my natural tone to get out a little bit more, but none of the low gain pedals have a mix built in to run a dry signal through.  I may have to go to the regular drive category and just really roll off the drive.  My real Marshall amp does not do this sound very well, I need to break out my amp modeler and test out some stuff.

I am about 90% satisfied with my high gain metal tone I have though.  I looked up Matt Pike's amps and found that there might be a clone of it in Rocksmith.  So I chose that amp, maxed the gain, and then put a high gain distortion pedal in front to boost it even more.  Its pretty awesome sounding metal bliss.  There's a lot of Matt Pike inspired metal guitarists out there these days, so I can cover a lot of ground with his sound.  Take away some bass in the signal and you can get a lot of Mastodon's sounds, for example.  I'm not a squeally diddly diddly dealeo doo kind of metal fan.  I'm more of the Black Sabbath heavy riff kind of metal fan, and Matt's tone is sort of an Iommi on steroids kind of sound.