Week #4: I think my TV doesn’t want me to learn guitar.

This last week, while easily being my most inconsistent, was also disheartening because I fear my current set up with the cables plugged directly into my TV may not be conducive to high levels of play if I ever were to get there. Fortunately, the school year has started back up and thanks to my weird hours at a new job, most of my time home will be spent home alone so there should be little interference with the TV on that front. Should definitely look into getting a better set up, maybe finally getting a decent pair of headphones or something.

In lieu of much else to talk about, let me vent a bit about Everlong.

I think at one point I liked Everlong. It’s a simple title with an initially catchy riff that’s easy to sing along to. And I totally understand why it is as pervasive as it is in these types of games. But 3 or 4 rhythm guitar games later and I would be okay with never hearing this song again. At this point its just so goddamn boring.  Like, your playing a random Rock Band setlist and all of a sudden this song shows up and immediately everyone rolls their eyes because this is that song in high school people would say they liked to sound deep. As if the Foo Fighters ever did anything deep in their lives. And I generally like the Foo Fighters too.

Week #3: I am really, really terrible at guitar.

I should probably stop trying to sound like a broken record and start just trying to better myself. Not much to add this week, as I mentioned before the quick progress through at least understanding, not mastering, the basics is over and now actual grind time begins. I shifted my focus slightly this week to be about working on improving on one song, in this case Boston’s “Peace of Mind.”, which will likely be the song that gets me through this game.

Did finally manage to pass the palm mutes lesson, but that is the only thing I progressed on in that front. It also felt really rough, another moment when having an actual teacher giving me advice would have been nice.

Weekly updates might not be the best thing to do, more for lack of things to talk about after a while. I’ll mostly just be doing weekly ones to keep to a schedule but they may not be all that enlightening all the time.

Rocksmith Week 2: I am really terrible at guitar

Okay, learning guitar is going to be harder than I thought. Definitely harder. Not that I hadn’t expected it to be hard ahead of time, but good God did I hit a brick wall this week. Also, the number of lessons I completed is even less than before. While this is to be expected, this time I wasn’t able to complete either lesson.

The two lessons I did attempt were palm mutes and tremolos. For starters, I love palm mutes. Made by resting your palm near the base of the strings of the guitar, palm mutes give the guitar that dirty, grungy sound that I always thought sounded great but never really knew how guitars sounded like that. However, I do not know whether it is my setup (Rocksmith recommends hooking the guitar up to a separate speakers, not the ones on the TV. My current setup is not conducive with this.) or inappropriately tuning my guitar (equally as likely), but during this lesson in particular it would just not register me playing the right note. I assume I got it wrong some of the time, but since they make you repeat the riff until you get it one hundred percent and I can hear what I am playing I know I got it right more than once.

This also leads to my first real problem with the game’s approach to teaching you guitar. When you are in the middle of a lesson, the game will make you do a few riffs with the newest technique you just learned. When you fail to do so several times in a row, the game starts slowing it down incrementally until you can get it before speeding you back up. While I like this aspect of it a lot, upon repeated failings at the lowest speed they set it to, you’ll find the game gives you little by way of help beyond “Let’s try that one more time.” This is definitely a point in time when having hands-on training with a pro would be incredibly helpful.

This also became apparent during the lesson for tremolos. Tremolos are just the rapid succession of notes, but I wish it were that simple. This may end up being one of the biggest problems I have as a carry over from Rock Band and Guitar Hero. In those, tremolos are incredibly simple up and down strums. Guitar Hero guitars even click in a reassuring manner, if annoying once you learn to just use the music. But tremolos are nowhere near that convenient. Technically, I passed this lesson, but I sure as hell didn’t feel like I did. I was playing at maybe one-fourth the speed and off-beat way too much. Again, this may be the limitations of the technology or my own setup, but what I was playing didn’t sound like what they were looking for at all.

Now I am a little more fully aware of the uphill battle I’m going to have from here on out. At least I seem to be doing better at the Guitarcade games.