Spotlight Guitarcade: Temple of Bends and Day 52

Temple of Bends

The Temple of Bends is a game where a character walks along platforms.   You use note bends to extend down vines that allow the character to traverse the platforms and progress through the level gathering treasure a long the way.  While all of this is happening, the level is being flooded so that you are limited in time.

Temple of Bends reminds me of Pitfall at first, but also looks a bit like Donkey Kong Jr.  Its style is certainly in the games of that era, with appropriate music.  The problem I have with this game is that Bends are kind of wonky in Rocksmith.  I hear that this game is doable and fun, but the fact that bends are not detected well in practice sessions have soured me on playing this game very much.

Maybe the bend detection is too touchy?  Too precise?  I know that "perfect" bending is touted as something Jimmy Hendrix did spot on, but maybe there should be a bit more forgiving detection in them at the start.

Day 52

I have had an epiphany... perhaps not a jump in playing skills, no, but I realized why learning songs in the Rocksmith way rubs me the wrong way.

First, I have to say, the fault is for sure mine.  The solution is built right into the game's tools, I just got too frustrated to think of the solution while I'm learning a song.  The way Rocksmith teaches you a song is that they give you the whole song, and you plink away at pieces throughout the whole song until you get the whole thing down.

Why does this sit wrong with me?  At 75% of a song "mastered" you still can't play the song without Rocksmith and sound like you know what you're doing.  At 65% of something as simple as Knocking on Heaven's Door, the song still sounds like plinks, plucks and bad guitar playing.  You need that backing track to sound like you know what you're doing.

When I learn songs using Youtube, I learn the recognizable parts section by section.  I'm probably at, ohh, maybe 10% of Black Betty being able to play, but you can tell the song I am playing in by the 2nd chord.  So inside Rocksmith I can do the same.  I just need to listen to the entire song, pick out the parts and Riff Repeat those parts over and over, and ignore trying to learn the whole song in one go like a Guitar Hero song.

I read a lot of people love the Rocksmith approach.  They really see the "game" as a "game".  They say it makes them feel accomplished rather early into learning the song and it works for them.  The game offers a lot ways to learn if you dig and look.  I'm going to keep learning Knockin' on Heaven's Door in the general way because I made a commitment, but it'll be the last song I learn in that way.

Echoes and Day 50

The sound of Reverb is the attempt to mimic the echo of the music reflecting back to the audience in certain acoustic spaces.  Generally, like in real life, a reverb echo is many many copies of the original signal fed back into the signal chain at very quick intervals, but lowering in amplitude(volume) each time until it quickly is no longer audible.  The real neat part of reverb is the ways it has been achieved.

The first way that Reverb is made on purpose for recordings have been in "echo chambers".  These are purpose built rooms with nothing more than a speaker and a microphone.  The signal is played and real echos, real reverb, is recorded in the chamber.  The only "fake" part about it is that the whole band is not playing inside.  This technically means that the room can be arranged to produce "unnatural" echo effects that would not happen in a performance.

Then came the plate and spring reverbs.  They used a transducer to turn the signal into physical movement that would manipulate a piece of metal into creating reverb effects.  At the other end of the metal would be a microphone to pick up the sounds.  Plate reverbs can be huge, hundreds of pounds, but can be tweaked with many settings.  Their size prohibits them from being portable, so are generally used as studio recording devices.  Spring reverbs are not as precise, but can be made small enough to fit into amp models you can carry around.  Fender are best known for including reverb in their amplifier combos in the 60's and 70's.

The plate and spring echo is the "classic" reverb sounds that are well accepted today.  The flaw is that they create a false echo, not a real representation of the signal.  Digital Reverb is the most common found now, as it is relatively easy to copy a signal and feed it back to create the echo.  Unlike Plate or Spring which mimic a generic echo, digital can actually create the many signals found in real echo.  Over time digital reverb now mimics the Plate and Spring reverb, and can even do their styles while actually using true copies of the signal, in many ways some find it superior.  A good digital reverb can do all the types and blend them, and even do some strange ones.

Day 50

Ok, this is the home stretch.  I'm going to think positive and work on learning a song from the game that I don't already know.  Here we go: Aerosmith Walk this Way.

Ok.  Screw that.  If it was Ragdoll I could probably listen to it over and over while I learn... not so much with Walk This Way.

Knockin' on Heaven's Door.  Ok, now this song I think I like enough to listen end on end while "learning" it in the game.  I'm going to do it at least for 45 minutes every day till the end of the 60 day challenge.  I'm not going to be pessimistic and I'm not going to say that how the game teaches songs is bad, I'm going to trust it and do its recommendations and I"m going to learn this song without going on Youtube.  I want this game to teach me a song.  A single song in the 60 day challenge.

Given, I did use Rocksmith to learn You Really Got Me, Everlong and Blitzkrieg Bop, I used a lot of youtube help with Everlong and I don't really play the version the game puts forth.  The "lead" version, because again, it only sounds good if I'm playing it with a backup band.  I opted to go for a more solo friendly version.  You want me to sit there and plink out the lead verion, I can, but you'll soon go "oh I see what you mean".