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December 5, 2014 In Uncategorized

Rocksmith Diaries #1: I Reallllly Like the Way this Game Teaches

I am a humongous music fan, and one of my biggest regrets in life is not learning to play an instrument. I had a guitar when I was 14 years old, and although my best friend also had one and went on to become an amazing player, I never had the dedication to really learn how to play. In my mid-30’s, I decided to buy a bass guitar and take some lessons. I could only afford about six month’s worth of lessons, and when I stopped going, my practice time continued to dwindle until the bass was pretty much gathering dust. This despite music continuing to be a huge part of my everyday life. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about playing music.

Writing is my primary creative outlet (although you could make a strong case for podcasting as well), and while it’s immensely satisfying to write a short story or an entire novel, it does not scratch the musical itch I have.

I’ve had a lot of success writing first drafts of my novels during NaNoWriMo, an event that somewhat gamifies writing by having you set daily and monthly word counts, giving achievements for hitting certain milestones and just generally making goal-setting fun. Ubisoft’s Rocksmith games are built on a similar premise of gamifying the learning process for guitar and bass. I picked up Rocksmith 2014 the other day, and through the first few hours I’ve spent with it, I am really liking the game’s approach to teaching, as it makes practice fun.

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The tutorial process is a mix of videos demonstrating everything from the basics of the physical instrument itself to positioning and picking techniques. The actual lessons are tablature-based, and what’s really cool about them is that they build as you get better. For example, a practice bass track might start out with 15-20 notes that you need to play. Once I hit a certain accuracy mark more notes are added in, and this process continues until you’re playing the entire bass line.

It’s a really great approach to teaching, because it lets you learn the outline of the song, and then become progressively more detailed. In the lessons i took before, I might learn the beginning of the song for example, and then move on to the next chunk. Rocksmith gives you the whole song, but lets you play more and more complete versions of the song as you get better.

It’s really early on in the process, and I don’t want to make any predictions based on my lousy history of trying to learn an instrument, but what I can say is that Rocksmith takes an excellent approach to teaching, and since you’re playing a real instrument as opposed to a plastic toy, you’re learning with every moment you spend with the game.

I’ll record some more snippets of my progress as I go along. Wish me luck!

P.S. Sorry for making you click out on the video. For some reason, if I just embed the clip, it autoplays every time you load the page, and I didn’t want that.

January 2, 2014 In Uncategorized

365 Days of Rocksmithing: Day 1

In 2012, I bought a copy of Rocksmith and a pretty kickass electric guitar. I also bought all the accouterments for the guitar, including a set of picks, a guitar tuner, and a nice strap bag. I even bought an adapter so I could connect the guitar to my iPad so I could use the iPad as a substitute amp. I had high ambitions: I would finally learn to play the guitar after on-and-off efforts since junior high school.

As before, I failed to keep at consistently practicing, and what little I learned over a couple of weeks of playing Rocksmith faded away fairly quickly.

This year, I’m forging ahead once again on my quest to learn how to play at least one song on the guitar. My wife kindly bought me an actual guitar instruction book, but I know that I learn more efficiently by actually applying theory to practice. So, the goal is to play the guitar for at least 30 minutes a day, which will equal at least 10,950 minutes played over the course of a year. If I can’t learn something after spending 10,000 minutes practicing it, I might never learn, even if popular wisdom says that we need to practice a skill for at least 10,000 hours to achieve mastery.

To hold myself accountable, I’m also documenting my progress every day, even if the post is just a simple paragraph. So, here we go.

Day 1
I wish the living room were a little warmer in the morning, but I suppose the cold will wake me up better than anything else. I thought the blank screen before me was an inauspicious start to this quest; I checked the connections, which seemed fine, so I restarted the Xbox and hoped for the best. Thankfully, everything seemed to boot and connect correctly this time.

I had forgotten how long and how many loading in Rocksmith took. Not for the first time, I thought about trading in this copy of Rocksmith for a copy of Rocksmith 2014. I wonder if the loading times are any better in that version.

I had also forgotten that I had to tune the guitar every time I loaded a song. This is the kind of thing that saps my enthusiasm.

I first tried the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ version of “Higher Ground,” and the game remembered my previous progress, so it tried to throw me into the deep end with chord switches. The program interpreted my flailing along the guitar neck as a plea for help and took the difficulty back down to simple one-string notes with a minimum of chord changes. I felt humbled.

I then tried to play my favorite song on Rocksmith’s soundtrack, the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” This was probably the song I practiced most the first time I tried to learn to play the guitar with Rocksmith, and the note placement is so distinctive that I could hear when my fingers weren’t in the right place. I played through the song twice, and my brain and fingers still struggled to remember where my fingers needed to go. This is going to take longer than I had thought.