Spotlight Guitarcade: String Skip Saloon and Day 41

String Skip Saloon

String Skip Saloon is a game where you play a bartender/owner cow-girl.  Bandits have decided to raid and destroy your saloon, so you have to defend it by shooting a pop-cork gun at them to knock them out.  Each "lane" of bandits is a string on your guitar.  You pluck/pick/play the string to make the cow-girl fire in that lane.

This game is a take on a game I had never known about or played until a little over a year ago.  It is called "Tapper" and the reason I know about it is because it was the video game character bar in Wreck-it-Ralph.  In that game you pour and sling beer down the counter tops to the awaiting cowboys.  The sounds are very period correct, and the game is almost exactly what you'd expect from a game inspired by Tapper.

String Skip Saloon helped me immensely... kind of.  The game did not help me learn the strings, though since I was a bass player before, I had practice with that sort of thing already.  What the game got me used to was the way the game presented the lessons and songs.  In traditional music, the top string is actually the bottom string.  Meaning, "high" "top" string is your highest pitched, skinniest string, and your "low" or "bottom" string is your thickest, deep bass string.  Counter intuitive to beginners, but "normal" for anyone that's used sheet music or tabs.  The way the game is set up, like Guitar Hero where the notes fly toward you, having it a mirror image of your guitar is easier... if you're new.  String Skip Saloon helped me learn an alternate view of notes and schematics and get "used" to it.  I flipped the strings on screen, that IS an option, so it would feel familiar, but it made the actual song and lesson thing harder.  So you'll just have to figure out which is best for you, and String Skip Saloon can help.

Changes I'd make?  I'd allow the strings to be switched for JUST this game, instead of having to switch them for all the lessons and songs as well.

Day 41

I have said before that because of my written word habits, I record just about anything interesting I might not remember later.  I came across one of the recordings when I was practicing power chords.  It was a clean recording, but there was a part where I continued through the chord into a sort of lead phrase and it sounded great... I stopped for some reason and didn't continue and went back to the chords.  I could not remember how I played what was recorded there, but it caused me to get to experimenting.

I'm working on moving in and out of chords while playing some lead.  I'm trying to get it all to sound like it all fits.  I know a lot of it is timing, but it is also getting the phrase right in the amount of time before you have to go back to the chord so that you don't sound like you put a halt on the song.  At least, that's what is going through my mind as I work on and try to get it working right.  Its much easier to do when playing some chugging metal, because the distortion will carry you through.  With a clean sound, its much harder, and so that's what I've been focusing on.  The more I get into chords, the more I want an acoustic.  Rocksmith has an acoustic modeling amp, so that's a help.

Once again, and I can't emphasize this enough, Power Chords are wonderful for practicing this.  Don't turn your nose at them.  I can go back and forth to them easily, and it really gets my confidence up.  Once you're physically prepared for this kind of play, you can then move on to using other types of chords.  They can easily be stepping stones, and they sound great and that's encouraging.  They help me and so I can only assume they'd help you.

I guess I have not had a huge "break through" in a while, and I'm not sure if this is good reading or not.  Playing both rhythm and lead in the same song might not be an epiphany but it is a real skill I'm practicing along with chords.  My pieces are getting better though.  My phrases are matching up and I'm sure what I play can be confused as music.