Rocksmith 2014 - how to get the most out of it

[ParrotDye]

Hi all,

I'm new here and pretty inexperienced when it comes to bass, however, games I do know inside out, so I offer you my experiences with Rocksmith 2014 and the improvements over the previous Rocksmith title.

[b]ROCKS[/b]
For anyone who doesn't know, Rocksmith was a videogame designed to use a guitar as an input device. About Nov last year RS2014 came out, now rebranded as learning software. The difference is moot as it does roughly the same thing, only now with a few additions and a much better menu system. The premise is that strings are colour coded, and coloured notes travel down columns representing a frets and hit the string at the point when the note is played. Some notes incorporate symbols to indicate slides, bends, hammer-ons or pull-offs, palm or fret-hand mutes, natural or pinch harmonics, tapping, accents, slaps, pops, sustains, tremolos and vibratos. Meanwhile, the columns the notes appear on represent the places where your fingers should go and contain information on note duration and finger placement. Songs are split up into phrases and as you perfect each phrase, it adds more notes or techniques into the phrase until you max out the songs' score.

[b]TIME[/b]
One improvement over the first title is the ability to set a songs' mastery phrase by phrase without the need to 'level up'. In addition, the game sets up your initial mastery based on your overall performance in the game so far; for instance when I load up Iron Maiden's Fear of the Dark, my initial mastery is roughly 88% but varies depending on individual phrase difficulty (the intro is easy and therefore 100%, the bridge slightly harder and starts at 75%). On the other hand, Incubus's I Miss You starts fully maxed out because it's easy throughout. If I switch over to 6-string, these drop down to my level there. While this system is flattering, I still need to reduce a new song to a simpler setting to start with, just to learn what I'm supposed to be playing, and often I will set it up to increase phrase difficulty regardless of how I perform just to see where I'm ultimately heading.

[b]EFFORT[/b]
This system of progression through dynamic difficulty is analogous to increasing precision at constant tempo, rather than constant precision at increasing tempo, as would be the case of a sight reader or tabman. It's worth mentioning that I still have to learn the songs. There is far too much information for the brain to process when running at full speed, so knowing that X follows Y is necessary and the only way to see what's going on is to slow the track down to a crawl, pause and practice a bit, then have another go. Once a song or phrase is mastered, it becomes fairly easy to find what to play through muscle memory and onscreen cues.

[b]FAQts[/b]
As a nod to previous posters on this subject, I want to address a couple of complaints. Firstly, the game is fairly forgiving in terms of timing and I think it does so because learning an instrument is hard enough without being denied a successful hit for being slightly ahead or behind the beat. I have experienced this first hand and know how patronising it feels to play poorly and be given a jovial "You're gonna be a superstar" and an accuracy of 95%. I've since turned off the subtitles and voiceover to avoid this and spend most of my time replaying songs to hone my timing and execution. I know when I've played a hammer-on or missed a note it credited me for and so practice, practice, practice.
Secondly, complaints of lag are greatly exaggerated. HD TVs and monitors waste time doing something called handshaking and both Rocksmith and RS2014 compensate by pushing the video out early rather than the audio out late. For console editions you use an old RGB or composite scary lead to jack into your hi-fi and set up an multi-channel output so that the display and the associated lag do not impact the delivery of audio, and then you're golden. As an aside, you can check the lag out for yourselves by turning on the hi-fi and TV sound simultaneously, where the lag is obvious even on the XMB or Dashboard. In order to calibrate lag more accurately, I pick a song and slow it down to make sure the onscreen notes are in time with the drums on the backing tracks. The only aspect of RS2014 that suffers from lag is the technique games which rely on on-screen prompts rather than a drum beat and memory.
Lastly, the lessons have been given a good shoeing, and rightly so. While they do cover the basics, they function as little more than practice arenas for that particular skill. I've found that if you get stuck on one lesson, the game cannot guide you though in smaller steps, nor can it increase the challenge over and above giving you a separate, harder lesson on the same topic.

[b]FIGURES[/b]
As for my own complaints, I do not like the colours they picked for the strings as they are too similar and I'm colourblind (deuteranomoly). This isn't too bad on bass as there is only Red and Orange to screw up, and RS2014 has got a colourblind mode which Daltonizes the palette yet only succeeds in shifting the problems to note recognition against the background which is just as bad. Again, this is practice, practice, practice, as, if I know the note is there and which one it is, I will remember. The other major complaint I have regards note duration. While some chords or sustains are clearly shown as cut off, most of the 8ths and 16ths are simply displayed as notes in amongst others, so for those who share my love of OCD, this will annoy and send you reeling off to the CD rack to get the right timing down.

[b]MONEY[/b]
The track list is worth noting; it's a bit iffy and it's expensive to buy extra tracks. The game and cable costs £50 (I think) but additional tracks are typically £2.40 a pop or sometimes £9.70 for a pack of five. There is a good range of titles on-disc but I was left feeling that lesser songs were pushed out while preferential ones were held back for DLC. For instance Wheezer - Say It Ain't So is on disc while Hash Pipe is DLC, Rush - The Spirit of Radio is on disc while YYZ is DLC, B'z - Ultra Soul is on disc while Hotei - Battle Without Honor or Humanity (Kill Bill Vol. 1 soundtrack) is DLC. There are some high points like White Zombie - ThunderKiss '65, Radiohead - Paranoid Android, Muse - Knights of Cydonia, and Monster Truck - Sweet Mountain River; that last I'd never heard before but wow is it good to play on bass.

[b]GEAR[/b]
The other features which I haven't touched on, but are no doubt a huge draw to some are the tone designer and session mode. Tone Designer allows for a bunch of licensed amps, cabs and effects pedals to be stacked, tweaked and used in the game. I'm no expert on Marshall vs Orange gear so I can't tell how good the analogue is to the real deal but as someone of modest means, I welcome the ability to try out something I can't afford.
Session Mode is an AI band that you can jam with. There are loads of instruments with which to form a band (although too many synths for my liking) and you modify the behaviour of the band to introduce challenges like direction change or tempo slew, then pick a scale and get to work. It's apparently pretty good and I did have to prise my bass from my brother after an hour of him jamming in Mixolydian with a Banjo player and a Steel Drummer.
The games are pretty funny for the most part, but as mentioned above, fundamentally broken by TVs inherent delay.

[b]SUM[/b]
Overall, I consider Rocksmith 2014 as a sandbox for learning. It has the obvious attraction of playing recognisable songs with decent guitar and bass effects, and the method of learning is way more accessible than tablature or score. There are also seemingly intentional mistakes built into the tracks as challenges similar to vintage Mechano kits, perhaps to encourage independence from the player. RS2014 eschews the forced progression and gating of the previous Rocksmith in favour of open content, and is best enjoyed by setting your own standards as goals. While it does lack the deep learning content that the Ubisoft's PR would like to think is there, it does put and keep a guitar in your hands; as testament to this I have used by 6 string more in the last year and a half than in the preceding 22 years, and bought a bass 9 months ago after trying out the bass emulation within the game. It does not stand on it's own as the only way to learn (I don't think any piece of software ever could) but together with the plethora of other resources available such as tuition and video guides, Rocksmith gets the job done. For the price of a years worth of strings, there is every reason to recommend Rocksmith.

[Diablo]

There is one huge elephant in the room you don't touch on at all - the tuning. RS1 made you check tuning after every menu/song change which too ages. The "fix" for this was to make the tuner so incredibly sensitive, and to list songs in alternate, slightly off, and drop tuning that you just spend your life tuning the bass instead of playing. It was completely unnecessary for them to do that, at least the slightly off should have been normalised to 440.

Your comments about the 2deliberate mistakes" are hugely frustrating when you try to 100% a song, play every note and still get a miss. Now when you go through and listen you can find these, add them in, and get 100%. Mary Janes Last Dance is a fine example of this, two notes are missing from the highway.

I also found the arcade in 2014 a farce - well it is.

Overall I have RS1 and 2, and to be honest I spend a bit of time on 1, none on 2, and most of my time with a Tascam, UG tabs & Hal Leonard books which is by far a better tool for learning than anything Ubisoft wish to claim. For some reason watching notes plough past you on a screen, in my experience, does not burn them into your brain like an MP3 track and written notes on paper. If you are learning songs for gigging RS does just not work for me.

The other issue is the songs. RS1 songs were a good mix, but the on-disc songs for 2014 are, in my opinion, pants or at least 90% of them are. Obscure fillers and tat. They saved all the decent stuff for downloadable content which means you get fleeced every week for a year if you want them, so that's another £100-150 if you buy them all. For that you can get a Tascam and half a dozen Hal Leonard books and after 12 months I know which will teach you more.

My last point is all the software bugs and Ubisofts inability to fix them. Just look at the Rocksmith forums on Ubisoft for endless lists of over-moderated issues, DLC not being available in certain regions, auto-logins not working, lack of career path (I personally liked that in 2012 - why did they remove it?) and all that means I don't think I've logged in for 3 months.

My call would be to buy a cheap version (ebay, second hand shops etc) of RS2012, that would be worth the spend. Forget 2014 it is a pain to use.

Cheers,
Rich

[ScreencastTutor]

The best thing about Rocksmith is CDLC. I've made a fair few myself, easy to do.

Check customsforge.com for them.

Edited March 14, 2014 by ScreencastTutor

[Kempy535]

I have tried and cannot get on with rocksmith. The note to fret placement has you running all over the fret board. I found the timing to be slightly off or weird and also when learning a song the you can over play notes in the rhythm and you still score perfect. I know the score master corrects this but I would rather learn the rhythm in the lesson section.

I also found the volume level to change mid song and the tones to be a little off.

The most annoying thing is the song choice. I was under the impression that you could buy any rocksmith song and use it in RS2014. So i purchased the game and then found out this wasn't the case. If I wanted the old songs from RS I had to buy the old game and then the song then port them across. This seems like a really stupid way of dong this. Even more so when you can find a version of the game with all the songs and dlc for free

For me it was a waste of money

[ParrotDye]

[quote name='Diablo' timestamp='1394786352' post='2395158']
There is one huge elephant in the room you don't touch on at all - the tuning. RS1 made you check tuning after every menu/song change which too ages. The "fix" for this was to make the tuner so incredibly sensitive, and to list songs in alternate, slightly off, and drop tuning that you just spend your life tuning the bass instead of playing. It was completely unnecessary for them to do that, at least the slightly off should have been normalised to 440.
[/quote]

You're right Rich, I'd forgotten to mention tuning. It's true that Rocksmith will ask you to retune for every differently tuned song but it will not between multiple songs with the same tuning. It also has a few songs with slightly sharp or flat tunings which I would have liked to standardise and I do avoid them as a result. Retuning is more of an issue for me on 6 string as it was a floating bridge and the damn thing takes 3 or 4 tries to get right. For my hard tail bass I only have to retune once. Rocksmith also allows you to fine tune your strings in the pause menu within a song; presumably incase you need to tweak it. There is a digital style tuner in the bottom left of the screen which I usually use to tune both guitars before I play a song, and it will adjust for any non-standard pitches depending on song. I believe this was an update.

There are occasions when a note is not detected. For me these are usually occur in sub Eb standard setups and seem to be the result of me over depressing the string into the fretboard. One solution for this is to slightly undertune the dropped string so that fast and furious fretting doesn't get in the way of hitting the notes, otherwise you'll need fretless bass levels of precision to keep the string from tensing up too much. I imagine the reason for the sensitivity of the tuner is due to the inclusion of oblique bends on the lead side. It does also become obvious if you are out of tune midway through a track as you suddenly start missing all the notes from one string.

[quote name='Diablo' timestamp='1394786352' post='2395158']
Your comments about the 2deliberate mistakes" are hugely frustrating when you try to 100% a song, play every note and still get a miss. Now when you go through and listen you can find these, add them in, and get 100%. Mary Janes Last Dance is a fine example of this, two notes are missing from the highway.
[/quote]

[quote name='Kempy535' timestamp='1394827378' post='2395771']
The note to fret placement has you running all over the fret board. [/quote]

I was referring to the running all over the place as the intentional errors. I think they are deliberate simply because there is usually a perfectly good place to play the same note that doesn't involve a dive up to the 15th fret from the neck when an open G would be just as good. A good example of this would be Police - Every Breath You Take as much of the track is palm muting around the 5th fret. Gamification maybe? Is that track boring on bass otherwise. The point is RS will take the right note from a different position on the fretboard if you think it's better, and sometimes it appears to throw down the challenge of asking the near impossible for which there is a much simpler alternative. I looked at Mary Jane's Last Dance again and I can't find any missing notes so I feel you're mistaken there Rich. I took some video of me working through each phrase in turn; [url="http://youtu.be/KlkjI-1paK8"]here[/url]. Skip to 10:30 for the summary screen

[quote name='Kempy535' timestamp='1394827378' post='2395771']
I also found the volume level to change mid song and the tones to be a little off.
[/quote]

I had the same thing Kempy, but after digging around in menus, I found the gain setting got the cable and turning it up seems to level the volume changes between tracks.

Rocksmith is not really a learning tool, its a sandbox. The things I've learnt have been through my effort, not some Matrix style download with a price tag. I can't afford tuition, so I've used videos on youtube, chats with musicians, trial and error, theory content, etc. Rocksmith just fits neatly into that landscape as a practice space.

[quote name='ScreencastTutor' timestamp='1394811286' post='2395522']
The best thing about Rocksmith is CDLC. I've made a fair few myself, easy to do. Check customsforge.com for them. [/quote]

I wish I could access custom tracks. That would solve a bunch of cash flow problems and allow for reworking tracks and tones to taste. If you're using a PC, have at it. As it stands, I have paid for the import of RS1 tracks to RS2014, and have added about 60 DLC tracks to my library so I figure that must have cost £160 which would get me the decent second hand amp and compressor I need to actually start playing for real, however, I've had a blast in the process and have only recently started yearning for the gear. Back at day 1, I had no more skill at playing than I possessed from my teenage forays; that's got to count for something.

[Diablo]

[quote]I looked at Mary Jane's Last Dance again and I can't find any missing notes so I feel you're mistaken there Rich. I took some video of me working through each phrase in turn; here. Skip to 10:30 for the summary screen[/quote]

I can't see the video as it is set as private. There are (were the last time I bothered to fight with RS2014) 2 notes missing, one on each of the last bar of the 2nd and 3rd chorus if I remember. I'm not in the business of spending half an hour playing and doing a vid etc just to prove my point though. It was in Score Attack - if you play in LAS it does not show up.

I will refer you back to my point about a Tascam and Hal Leonard though - you would be a lot further forward now if you'd spent your money on those instead of DLC. RS can be fun, but it does not teach you how to play, it is like GT5 or GT6 for driving. You might be a hero in a virtual world but you'd die at a live gig.

Cheers,
Rich

[ParrotDye]

Fixed the public setting now.

I take your point that a video was a little extreme. I was a curios how a video would turn out too, both from a sound and video standpoint and how well I come across.

So what is a Tascam; the only thing I can find that looks close is a portable 8 track recorder. And are Hal Leonard books just tab with timing? I found these videos, the [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qg1OedAcm2k"]first[/url] talking about how ledger lines are't used and antiquainted riffs are avoided, then the [url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDdUbioVLy4"]second[/url] ironically using both.
What am I missing out on?

I'm not claiming Rocksmith has taught me anything. It's certainly facilitated some learning. For instance, initially I was struggling with two finger plucking, so I researched it, practiced it and am now a lot better at it. Then later I found I was getting pull-offs wrong so I researched it and found I needed a small flick off to make it sound. I practiced that and am again a lot better at it. More recently, I've started the daunting slap and pop stuff. I found a Flea DVD and a number of other resources on slap and pop before I was getting close to actually making a good sound. So I'm in the cycle of practice and improvement. If I can get to 95% accuracy on Higher Ground at some point then I'm probably going in the right direction.

[quote name='Diablo' timestamp='1394838163' post='2395953']
You might be a hero in a virtual world but you'd die at a live gig.
[/quote]
C'mon, there's no need for that! I'm about mid table on some of the score attacks, but in fairness I don't really care about score. I'm more interested in learning to play than perfecting some easy song for a short term high. I wouldn't die at a gig because I wouldn't be stupid enough to assume I could rock up with a band I barely knew, gel instantly, and whip out awesome licks without trying. I'd join a band and rehearse for a while, play songs I could handle, and practice difficult passages until they stuck.

[ParrotDye]

These sound good

[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Dakota (Stereophonics)[/font][/color]
[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Learning to Fly (Foo's)[/font][/color]
[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Blitzkreig Bop (only 4 notes in the whole song!)[/font][/color]
[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Teenage Kicks (4 notes plus 1 passing note)[/font][/color]
[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Any blues standard - just learn the standard A-D-E 12 bar and you've got it, stuff like Johnny B Goode, Route 66 etc you can get away with playing the same bassline for any of them, and stick in variations/passing/walking as you feel more confident playing them. Wow, even an octave up occasionally![/font][/color]

[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif] [/font][/color][color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif] [/font][/color]