Spotlight Guitarcade: Hurtlin' Hurdles and day 36

Hurtlin' Hurdles

Hurtlin' Hurdles is a game in which you use Tremelo to cause a robotic runner to outrun an approaching robot destroying spiked roller of death.  It is a sort of relay race where you change robots when you change strings.  To keep ahead of the spike roller you have to collect certain power ups that will increase the distance between you and the death roller.  I felt like a picture did not accurately show what the game was like, so I included a video above.

There are two games that this Guitarcade calls back to.  The first is a blast from my personal past called "World Class Track Meet".  There was an old addition to the original Nintendo Entertainment System called the "Power Pad" and it came with a game, the only game I ever played that used the thing, called World Class Track Meet.  You "ran" on the pad and "jumped" to avoid hurdles in the track meet.

The second game that this calls to was Base Wars, a baseball game where they players were changes to robots.  Similar robot games also came out where they took sports and replaced the humans with robots and added power ups and such.  You mix Base Wars with World Class Track Meet and you get Hurtlin' Hurdles.

I do not play this game as much as the others.  I'm just not a tremelo person, but I can tell you that if you need to build up familiarity with the base technique, this game will do it.  If you need to build up the muscles that let you play tremelo for long periods of time, this game is a must, and this game will do it.  It is entertaining to watch, but very stressful to play.  The graphics, music, and style fit the influences perfectly and again, whoever put the time into making this game did a great job and really looks and feels like something they were passionate about.


Day 36

Today I worked on getting my "rock" tone better in Rocksmith.  I started with a JCM800 marshall amp, this is pretty much a standard in Rock.  I got the overdriven sound, but felt like it needed a little something extra.  I ended up putting the OCD clone pedal(Custom Overdrive I think it is) in front of the amp at a lower gain boost setting and that sounded pretty good.  There was something missing, and I couldn't quite figure it out.  I think what I realized is that my stereo's speakers are just weak in the treble.  I'm not a trebbly kind of person.  I prefer motown bass sounds and crunchy distortion in general, but when I put that treble booster in the signal chain, it made the sound come alive.  So it is something I would not use in real life through my amp, but it compensates for whatever is missing in my stereo speakers.  So when you're doing some tone shaping in Rocksmith, try out things you normally would not think you'd want to use.  I'm about 75% satisfied with the sound.  I had to put a noise gate in there because the treble boost is also a "junk" boost.

I have just about gotten "play effortlessly" in the easy, medium and powerchord version of Simple Man by Lynyrd Skynyrd.  These are not Rocksmith categories, I'm learning this from watching youtube, but the skills to play this song are something I learned in Rocksmith, and that I am actively practicing in Rocksmith's Guitarcade and lesson practice tracks.  Next I need to start coming up with how I'm going to do my 1-2 minute "can you play Simple Man?" sample version.  This means I have to listen to the song in its entirety each day...  I have to reiterate that I'm not a huge Skynyrd fan lol.  This was simply to work on my technique.

I know that Simple Man and Everlong have featured a lot in these posts.  I am deliberately trying to be "light" on learning songs during this 60 day challenge.  I'm focusing on what I feel I am weakest on, and that's technique.  I feel like if I get diverted by learning 5-6 Beatles songs, 5-6 Black Sabbath songs, etc etc; that I will slack on my pure technique practice.  Sometimes I find songs that seem perfect for practicing the technique I'm working on, and that's the ones I feature here a lot.  Everlong helped me on Power Chords, timing practice, song section changes, and stuff like that.  Simple Man is teaching me chord changes, the balance of power chords with regular chords, and improvisation inside chord structure.

Tomorrow though... I'm thinking of investigating the basics of funk strumming.

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.

Overdrive, Distortion and Fuzz day 21

Imagine a guitar signal as waves drawn on paper.  Sharp mountain looking waves.  In Overdrive, these waves are rounded off.  They are squished, or compressed, and this creates fat, rounded hills rather than jagged waves.  They are fat sounding, and full of new harmonics and multiple frequencies in the same area.  You get your guitar's tone, but also just a bit of dirty signal.  You can either increase your guitar signal into the amp and overdrive the tubes in the pre-amp, or you can push the amp's volume to louder than it is meant to go and get a power amp overdrive tone.  This really decreased the lives of the early tubes(not to mention it made audiences deaf).  Later, players wanted to be able to do this all the time, so they created pedals that would boost the signal before it got into the amp.  This would guarantee overdrive, these were the first Overdrive/boost pedals.

After the pedals came to be used, players found that you could REALLY push that signal through and it would distort the sound into a crunchy, broken up sort of sound.  They created pedals or modded amps so they you could puts large amounts of gain through a tubed amplifier, and this created Distortion.  It is enough overdrive to lose some of the characteristics of the guitar your playing, but it created enough rich harmonic overtones that it still sounded musical.

One day someone went mad, and said "what if we just cascade the signal on top of itself in a pedal and caused it to get so broken that you can barely even hear the original guitar's sound" and low and behold, Fuzz was born.  Fuzz can get so strong that you practically can't hear the original guitar signal put into it, but it creates a nice, enveloping fuzzy pattern that still responded to the guitar player.

So as you can see, Overdrive, Distortion, and Fuzz are all related, and are almost steps in a sequence.  Its a bit of light, medium and heavy "dirt".  In a later post, I will explain why distortion is such a problem for bassists.  Hint: it has to do with that flat line in the picture at the start.  That flat line sucks.


Day 21

I went back into the lessons today and did the Double Stop lesson.  This is yet another guitar thing that I had heard of that I had never really learned what it was.  Turns out, I knew what it was, and I did a whole hell of a lot of it with playing bass lines.  Its just that I knew it as droning.  I am kind of let down by what it is, because it sounds more interesting than it is.  It is just two notes played at the same time and typically is not part of a chord.  Now, I'm not sure if doing a octave thing with it counts as being a double stop, but I do that a lot too, its one of the reasons I took to playing Everlong pretty easily.

Which is kind of funny.  I already knew how to do power chords because of the Green Day songs I had learned years ago.  I already knew how to do the octave parts because, well, I like to do octaves on bass, I've been doing that for years.  So the only real part that was holding me back on Everlong were the thought that it would be too difficult, and the Drop D tuning, which I never did before.

Today I also started playing with the Pentatonic major.  I have to say after playing tons of the minor scale lately, I really like the sound of the major.  For some reason it makes me want to make slower, soft rock music.  I had to record a little piece I came up with while just practicing it.  I've not memorized completely the pattern yet, but I'll be working on doing that for a while.  Repetition, it can get boring, but its the only way to learn.