sabotai's dynasty (
Sab learns music (Guitar and Piano) - Front Office Football Central) rekindled an interest in music for me. I've played guitar off and on for years, but at a very low level. I'll play for a few weeks, only playing stuff I'm already ok at, and then quit. So for most things I might as well be a complete newbie.
I bought Rocksmith and the cable right before the last steam sale. I originally bought an acoustic-electric, but Rocksmith really does seem to work much better with electrics, so I bought my first electric guitar about a month ago. I also spent a couple hundred dollars on DLC during the last steam sale, b/c that's what I do, so I've spent a fair bit of money and want to make sure I get my money's worth out of this.
Current Skill Level
As far as my current skill level, I'm comfortable playing chords, I can switch smoothly between all basic chords, I'm mostly comfortable with barre chords. Uh, thats about it! I found a comfort zone that would let me play a few pop songs and sing along here and there and never left it. I've never learned scales, picking a single note on a single string is borderline rocket science.
I've been playing rocksmith for a couple months, and there are some songs that I get high scores on right away playing the rhythm path (Sweet Home Alabama, everything Oasis) b/c they fit entirely into my limited existing comfort zone. The second you add even the most basic riff (Pearl Jam's Jeremy) I fall apart. Songs that are heavy in power chords (Green Day) I get decent scores on but if I make a mistake I might get flustered and fuck up for awhile. Or, I end up on the wrong fret or wrong strings and am still learning to move up and down the fretboard without looking.
Practice Plan
Like sab, I intend to do a mix of things in Rocksmith and on justinguitar.com. The first couple guitarcade games in Rocksmith are also still great practice for me. One is focused on finding the right string quickly, just playing open strings but moving between strings quickly in random patterns. The other has you stay on one string and find specific frets quickly. Neither of these things are comfortable and done via muscle memory yet for me, so playing these mini-games is something I do most every time I sit down.
I'm trying to play every day, I'm not really setting times, but I do want to be a bit more structured when I play to force myself to continue working on new things, and not to just play the 5 songs I'm good at over and over, which is an easy habit to fall into.
My general plan is to split my playing into three parts:
1) justinguitar lessons/rocksmith mini-games to improve specific skills.
2) working on songs within rocksmith that I can't play well yet. The scaling difficulty feature in Rocksmith is neat, but I only like using it up to a certain point. I prefer increasing the difficulty to 100% to play the full song at a slower pace once I find things that I want to work on, instead of keeping the difficulty low and only playing 1/3 of the notes in the actual song.
3) playing songs I'm already ok at to try to perfect them.
Like I said above, its easy for me to sit down and jump straight to step 3, play all the stuff I can already do fairly well, but not really learn anything new. I'm hoping to avoid that.
I'm starting out with the Rhythm path in Rocksmith, I may switch to lead if I advance to a certain point, or bounce between them. I'm also going to create a new profile to track stuff here so all my scores/ratings will come with a clean slate.
By default I sort by difficulty and start with the easiest songs and move up, putting songs in different buckets to come back to based on how much I like the song/like playing it, and whether its something I can play ok, something out of reach but that I can work towards, or some songs are just way too damn hard for now.