Rocksmith 2014 - Learning Guitar

[Radii]

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.

[Radii]

I think it will be fun, and motivating, to keep track of songs I've learned during this process and to see this list grow over time.

I'll also track here songs that I can't play yet but have set aside as songs that I specifically want to take the time to practice and master, either because I just love the song, or because I think its not a huge reach for me and I'll learn something by working on it.

Lead Guitar - Songs I Can Play

8/28: The Black Keys - Next Girl - 98.5%

Rhythm Guitar - Songs I Can Play

8/2: White Stripes - Seven Nation Army - 97.2%
8/2: Stone Temple Pilots - Vasoline - 96%
8/2: Pearl Jam - Black - 100%
8/3: Queens of the Stone Age - Go With the Flow - 92%
8/3: Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama - 100%
8/4: Oasis - Live Forever - 96.5%
8/7: Matchbox Twenty - How Far We've Come - 92.5%
8/8: Pearl Jam - Jeremy - 97.2%
8/12: REM - Everybody Hurts - 95.2%
8/13: Matchbox 20 - Unwell - 95.5%
8/14: Survivor - Eye of the Tiger - 97.0%
8/15: Tom Petty - I Won't Back Down - 92%
8/17: Linkin Park - Numb - 96.4%
8/19: Linkin Park - In The End - 94.7%
8/20: REM - The One I Love - 97.9%
8/20: Don McLean - American Pie - 95.0%
8/21: Everclear - Father of Mine - 92.9%
8/23: Versus Them - Six AM Salvation - 99.0%
8/27: Green Day - Oh Love - 93.0%
8/27: Muse - Supemassive Black Hole - 96%
8/27: Bon Jovi - Livin on a Prayer - 94.2%
8/28: Oasis - Don't Look Back in Anger - 92.7%
8/29: The White Stripes - Fell in Love With a Girl - 94.0%
8/29: Jenny O. - Well OK Honey - 94.0%
8/29: Rage Against The Machine - Bulls on Parade - 97.2
8/30: Smashing Pumpkins - Disarm - 93.0%
8/30: Paramore - That's What You Get - 95.4%

Rhythm Guitar - Songs to Learn

Radiohead - Karma Police - 91.5%
Paramore - When It Rains - 82.0%
Coldplay - Yellow - 86.0%
Green Day - Basket Case - 87.7%
Pearl Jam - Corduroy - 87.5%
Bon Jovi - Its My Life - 83.2%
Alice in Chains - Man In the Box - 91.2%
Paramore - crushcrushcrush - 71.7%
Oasis - Champagne Supernova - 91.2%
Motorhead - Ace of Spades - 91.0%
Green Day - American Idiot - 86.4%
Guns N Roses - November Rain - 65.0%
Pearl Jam - Alive - 89.9%
Pearl Jam - Better Man - 77% (at 75% speed)
Pearl Jam - Wishlist - 75.0%
Smashing Pumpkins - Today - 83.3%
Matchbox 20 - 3AM - 73.5%
Bon Jovi - Blaze of Glory - 67.7%
Paramore - Misery Business - 61.5%
White Stripes - Blue Orchid - 60.2%
Rage Against The Machine - Bombtrack - 65.7%
Smashing Pumpkins - Tonight Tonight - 65.4%
Soundgarden - Fell on Black Days - 67.5%
Pearl Jam - Release - 55.1%
REM - Losing My Religon - 73.7%
Foo Fighters - The Pretender - 33.5%
Metallica - One - 40%
Blue Oyster Cult - (Don't Fear) The Reaper - --


Lead Guitar - Songs To Learn

The White Stripes - The Harded Button to Button - 80.1%
Tom Petty - Free Fallin - 84.5%
Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - 90.3%
Sugar Rios - Gobbledigook - 87.4%
Bush - Glycerine - 79.4%
The White Stripes - Fell in Love With a Girl - 71.9%
Paramore - Ignorance

[Radii]

8/1/2015

On justinguitar.com, I completed everything in stage 1 of the beginners course. I think the first few stages I'll fly through, but I'm watching and going through everything just to be sure. Stage 1 teaches the E, A and D chords and switching between them, and there's a lesson on 4/4 time and strumming along in rhythm. I played a couple of the beginner songs for this level as well.

Rocksmith:

Played the "String Skip Saloon" minigame, high score 426,121, got to level 2.


Songs Played:


I mentioned the weirdness with the difficulty scaling in the last post. The first couple sessions here will be a ton of me playing a song once essentially on "easy mode" for the game to figure out where I'm at with it. Many of these will be played once to 30-40% completion (or less!) and then will go WAY up in difficulty, aka out of my league.


The Safaris - Wipe Out (82.5%)

La Sera - Love That's Gone (46.5%) -- This is a song on the easier side of things but once the auto-scaling ramps up a bit it gets to be a bit much for me. At the start it only has you playing the root note of each chord, and only every 3rd or 4th one at that. Once the full thing is in there I'll have to slow it down and will learn some new stuff here.


Green Day - Oh Love - 74% - I just went ahead and bumped the difficulty up to 100% here. Just a few power chords, I struggle sometimes with the quick transitions and that's a basic thing I need to work on. Chords where you play the same chord form but move it down one string and over 2 frets, etc, it just sometimes happens with a little too much speed for me for now.


Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - 45% - Love this song, it quickly gets too hard for me. I stuck it at 60% difficulty and it was too fast for me to keep up. You can favorite songs within Rocksmith, I favorite this one, when I improve enough to where its reasonable to work on this, I want to.


Bush - Glycerine - 82% - Bumped the difficulty here up to 100% as well. The score here is a bit deceptive. I dont think it really sounded all that good, some other songs in the 80-90% range sound ok. Here its all barre chords, but there is a pattern of playing the barre chord then just playing the root note, sometimes muted, and some slides between chords. So yeah I get credit for most of the notes but eh, no, not really, it doesn't sound right. Also, yes I can play barre chords, but doing it for 4 1/2 minutes straight kills the hand. Gotta take a short break after this one.

The White Stripes - The Hardest Button to Button - 20% - Easy at this difficulty but once it starts to ramp up I think its out of my league and I'm not a hgue fan of the song, we'll come back to it later.

Radiohead - Karma Police - 46% - Late 90s Radiohead? I do believe that is right around my wheelhouse, yes. This is one where going from 50% to 80% will be a *huge* jump and I'll have to spend some time working on it slowed down to get there. Favorited, I'll definitely take the time to do so later on.

Bon Jovi - Its My Life - 48%

REM - Everybody Hurts - 54% - favorited. About half of this I can play well at the top difficulty, the other half will need some work, more 90s stuff in my wheelhouse though, I'd like to be able to play this.


That'll do for today. Expect a couple more days that go like this and then I'll start sorting out a couple songs that are a bit ouf of my league that I want to dedicate some time to.

[Radii]

8/2/2015

justinguitar.com - Stage 2 Beginner stuff today. For some reason the songs that I played in the past pretty much never use the Dm chord so I'm not quite as comfortable forming it. The exercises in these beginner lessons are to swtich between two chords as often as possible in 60 seconds, with a goal of doing it 60 times. For most of them I get into the 90-100 range or more. Two of the changes here involve Dm, Am to Dm, I got that one 70 times. A to Dm I only got 56 times. I'll go ahead and move on to stage 3 but I'll keep practicing moving in and out of Dm. I was having a hell of a time with youtube so I didn't try to play any of the songs in Stage 2.


Rocksmith:

Played through string skip saloon a couple times, new high score, got level 3. You get multiplier bonuses for levelling up, so your scores naturally go up as you play more. This is the game that trains you to find the right string.

Played "ducks redux" guitarcade game, this one helps you memorize the fretboard.

There are a number of other games but I'll stick with these two for awhile probably.


Oasis - Supersonic - 47% - The first Oasis song I've run across that I couldn't play well right away, b/c its not just a bunch of standard chords for the rhythm part :P

Silverchair - Tomorrow - 36% - I always liked this back in the 90s heh.


The Ventures - Walk Don't Run - 19% - Just playing it at a low difficulty

Rage Against the Machine - Bombtrack - 64% - Favorited. There are a few simple riffs in this one, at least at the difficulty I was trying out that will be great for me to really get comfortable with.

Smashing Pumpkins - Today - 30% - Favorited. Lots of power chords, but at a slower pace than Green Day songs. This may the first song that will take a little work that I'll come back to.

Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody - 43% - ok, settle down. This is the rhythm part. I've seen a guy on twitch.tv play the lead and its AWESOME. The rhythm is really boring, with one small section that's incredibly far out of my league. Not coming back to this one lol.

Sublime - Santeria - 30%

Tom Petty - I Won't Back Down - 81% - Hey! I ran across something I can play finally. The intro/first verse involves some muting that I need to learn how to do better, but the final 75% of the song are chords I'm comfortable with in a simple strumming pattern. Neato.

Stone Temple Pilots - Vasoline - 96% - This is one I'd already worked on quite a bit, haven't played it in over a week though so I'm thrilled to essentially ace it here. The only problem is this fucking chord right here:



that shows up a few times throughout. It takes me a few seconds to get that.


Matchbox 20 - 3AM - 24% - Easy on low difficulty. There are some things at higher difficulty I can't do, that amount to playing a chord, doing a little 3 note hammer on sequence and then going right into strumming the chord. I'll favorite this b/c it seems like a thing not too far out of my reach, plus, if you haven't noticed (the songs here are heavily tilted by what DLC I chose to buy), I love the 90s :P

Pearl Jam - Black - 96% - Easiest song in the game I think. I have no idea how Rocksmith chooses its difficulty when giving you stuff, but it shoudln't have taken me so long to get to this heh. It sucks that this is so easy, because its probably been my favorite song for much of the last 5-10 years, and Pearl Jam is easily my favorite band ever. If I do this long enough to want to switch to lead this'll be one of the first things I want to learn.

White Strips - Seven Nation Army - 97% - I can play a riff if it stays on the same string! And if it repeats over, and over, and over, with just minor variations.

[Radii]

I set aside the 2nd post in this thread to track songs I've learned, and songs I think are within reach that I want to specifically work on. Today I added the 3 songs I can play at a 95% or better rate in the game. Typically 90%+ is my threshold for saying "ok, I can do this", though sometimes the game gives credit for hitting notes in weird ways and you can get a good score but you know you don't really have it yet.

So far, the songs I've added to that list are ones I already knew I could play, and I'm still just playing through the huge list of songs, at least the ones on the easier end, to get a feel for where I am and to get Rocksmith's sorting to even out a bit, since it does weird things w/ its difficulty scaling and how it recommends things based on it.

The real fun will start when I start dedictating some of my practice time to improving a specific technique or song, which I'll probably start doing in a few days.

[Radii]

Another thing to point out is that there is a HUGE custom/mod community for this game (mod may not be the right word exactly). There are apparently upwards of 14,000 songs that people have tabbed out and put on a site called customs forge. I haven't messed with that any, as I'm afraid that loading in a ton of custom songs will screw up my ability to easily sort by difficulty within the game to work my way up.

So, for now, I'm ignoring that and only sticking to songs I've actually purchased. I did go insane w/ DLC on the last steam sale so that's still a huge number of songs. At some point once I get better though there is going to be a big sidetrack to go download the entire Pearl Jam catalog, or all old school Metallica (that is probably a long ways away heh, but its a goal for sure) and to go crazy with that.

Another long'ish term goal would be to upload some of the stuff I can play, though honestly just uploading game content w/o syncing it to video of me playing seems pretty boring? And as for recording myself doing anything at all and putting on the internet... yeah I dunno about that just yet. :P

[Groundhog]

Great stuff. I played the heck out of this with my bass, but wasn't aware of the mod community, thanks!

[Radii]

Originally Posted by Groundhog

Great stuff. I played the heck out of this with my bass, but wasn't aware of the mod community, thanks!

CustomsForge

Since I haven't explored it yet I don't know if there are any tricks needed to get it working, hopefully its well documented. Also my understanding is that since all the content is user created, the quality of it may be hit or miss. Or the existence of a bass or rhythm tab may not exist, I assume lots of people just tab out the lead and that's it.

[Radii]

Justin Guitar Lessons

-- 1 minute changes from yesterday that I needed more work on - both involving Dm. Did much better today.

Stage 3 of the Beginners Course:

-- G chord and C chord are introduced. The 1 minute changes for today are C to Am, C to A, C to G, G to E, and G to D. No issues here.

-- "Basic Finger Workout" - This kind of thing is why I'm not skipping over any lessons. There are weird gaps in what I know and have practiced even at this very beginner stage. This is a simple exercise to help stretch out the fingers a bit, build a little strength and give some control. Doing this exercise even though its in this early beginner section is actually a really good stretch for me on the lower strings. I spend 5 minutes doing this, and will continue to this every day for a bit.

-- Basic strumming pattern/rhythm practice. 5 minutes

-- Play one of the "easy stage 3 songs" - I went with How to Save a Life by The Fray.

-- Go through one of the "listening" exercises, audio only where he plays a chord and you try to identify it. My ear sucks, so this will be good to do too. 5 minutes.

I actually spent significant time here today before firing up rocksmith.


Rocksmith

Maybe won't play as much tonight, I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing with audio settings and getting other audio programs like Mumble to work while Rocksmith still functions, holy crap.


Green Day - American Idiot - 77% - That is one of those kind of BS scores. Large portions of the song are just playing the same chord for 4-5 bars in a row. So my score goes way up doing that. But the key chord changes that happen over and over during each verse I bomb heavily. Favorited to work on. I suspect as soon as I can play one Green Day song I'll be able to play them all.


Gold Motel - Brand New Kind of Blue - 26% - This is from 2012? Huh.

Matchbox Twenty - How Far We've Come - 87% - Not bad! All chords, an Am7 and F major 7th that I botch pretty bad, and I need to get a bit better at the strumming pattern. I'll have this over 90% soon though and it sounds pretty decent.


Queens of the Stone Age - Go With the Flow - 92% - Another one I could already play. I probably won't again. Moves fast, but the same pattern for the entire song, boring.

Radiohead - Just - 24%

Sugar Ros - Gobbledigook - 48% - Won't be coming back to that for awhile.

White Zombie - ThunderKiss '65 - 32% - Fun to play on easy, gets a good bit harder though.

Artic Monkeys - R U Mine? - 29% - Same as last song, fun to play on easy, scales up too much for me though.

Everclear - Father of Mine - 40% - Favorited to come back to, pretty sure I can nail this with a little work.

Pearl Jam - Jeremy - 74% - I went and found this one, it wasn't near the top of the list, but it was something I was working pretty hard on last week.

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama - 93% - Maybe the second easiest song behind Black?



Ok, that's it for tonight. Tonight I added Sweet Home Alabama and Go With The Flow to the list of songs I can play, and will add American Idiot, How Far We've Come, Father of Mine and Jeremy as songs to set aside time to learn better and master.

[Radii]

Goal for tomorrow - Spend 10 minutes working on improving a song from my "songs to learn" list (probably Jeremy). I have sooooo many songs, I could spend weeks blasting through all the ones it throws at me as the next "lowest diffuclty" (until I touch it and the dynamic difficulty starts kicking in and then it goes up and is way too hard) and sorting songs into categories.

But the main goal of writing this down, and of looking to add structure, is to find things that I can sort of do, think I could do better with a bit of concentrated practice, and to go do that. I don't want to distract myself too much by the OCD nature of needing to sort the giant list of songs in the game

[Umbrella]

Cool thread. I just bought Rocksmith 2014 to try and help my bass skills. I would consider myself a mediocre player going in. I've probably only spent an hour on it or so, and so far it is pretty easy. I was able to 100% Pour Some Sugar On Me on only the second try. However, I see Spirit of Radio coming up soon, and I'm sure that will humble me to no end.

I've got an old electric guitar I may bust out. I don't really play guitar, so that will probably go much worse.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by Umbrella

Cool thread. I just bought Rocksmith 2014 to try and help my bass skills.

Thanks!

Also, there was Primus DLC released recently for the bass players

[Umbrella]

Originally Posted by Radii

Thanks!

Also, there was Primus DLC released recently for the bass players

Yeah. That is like PHD level. I saw some of those tracks online, and I was

[Groundhog]

One interesting thing I found while playing Rocksmith was that I sometimes really struggled to follow the notes on screen, but if I shut my eyes and played by ear I did a lot better, but I'd been playing bass for about 15 years before I picked this up. It's still a lot of fun though, mainly because I'm playing songs I'd never really think to try.

[Radii]

Justin Guitar Beginner Stage 4

-- The finger workout from Stage 3 for 5 minutes. This is the finger control/stretching/strengthening practice. Hand definitely hurts a little by the end of this in the stretchiest parts, but I can get back to the 1st fret (where the reach is the longest) and do this just fine.

-- This lesson introduces G7, C7, B7, and Fmaj7 chords. I've played all of these but not regularly, and forming them is not at all natural for me. I may well not advance past this stage in one day.

-- Since I'm not as used to these chords I do the 5 minutes of "chord practice" which is just forming each chord, strumming it, picking it to make sure every string is clear, strumming again, trying another one, to get used to each of these.

-- 1 minute changes. Goal is 60 in a minute
-- C to G7 - 50
-- C7 to Fmaj7 - 56
-- E to B7 - 45 - Really uncomfortable.
-- C7 to G7 - 39
-- E7 to A - 83

-- Rhythm Practice, 5 minutes of working on a couple strumming patterns. I don't really struggle with that so I was randomly throwing in the various 7th chords to get used to them.

-- Song Practice - played Sittin On the Dock of the Bay


So I probably will go on to stage 5 tomorrow, looking ahead the chords in that stage are all chords I already know, so I'll work on the other lessons there tomorrow and spend more time w/ all of the chord changes involving the 7th chords from today and tomorrow.


Rocksmith

I watched a series in League of Legends tonight that took up most of my evening so I won't be playing as much as I planned.

Oasis - Live Forever - 96.5% - Warming up with something I already know basically.

Pearl Jam - Jeremy - 90.5% - WOOHOO. So I was at 74% on this yesterday, and it felt much worse than that. I used the riff repeater function (to play one measure, or section, over and over) to play through the main variations on the little 4-8 note riff that occur during the intro until I was able to muddle my way through all of them at full speed. After doing that I was able to get 90% on the song. It still doesn't feel comfortable and needs more work, I'm not saying I have this down yet, but this is something that a week ago, before I started the dynasty, I was playing at 40% speed. So this is actual, real improvement, feels good!

Oasis - Don't Look Back in Anger - 85% - Er, one last song that I know how to play well before bed, and I guess I'm pretty tired, I expect 93-96% on that, we'll knock it out tomorrow.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by Groundhog

One interesting thing I found while playing Rocksmith was that I sometimes really struggled to follow the notes on screen, but if I shut my eyes and played by ear I did a lot better, but I'd been playing bass for about 15 years before I picked this up. It's still a lot of fun though, mainly because I'm playing songs I'd never really think to try.

For the few songs that I already knew how to play from teaching myself a little in the past, trying them in Rocksmith is really annoying, b/c the strumming pattern I used isn't the same, or some other small thing is different, so I'm just ignoring them in game.

For other stuff when I get like a 95% on something easy (relative to my skill level, etc), the 5% I'm missing seems to be right around chord changes or I'm not playing something quite cleanly enough I think? Things that sound 100% fine to me, but the game isn't giving me credit for. I'm ok with that.

Playing by ear is never something I've been capable of doing. Some of the justin guitar lessons are aimed at improving your ear, I'm curious if I will be able to train that.

[Radii]

This isn't my video:



From 25 seconds to about 1:05 is the section I was repeating over and over. Its really simple, there isn't much to it at all, but I have literally *zero* experience doing anything but playing chords, so this is basically my beginning of being able to move my fingers comfortably and to play the proper individual string while I'm doing it, etc etc.

I'm really looking forward to the justinguitar lessons where you start learning about scales and practicing them for the same reason.

[Umbrella]

Originally Posted by Radii

For the few songs that I already knew how to play from teaching myself a little in the past, trying them in Rocksmith is really annoying, b/c the strumming pattern I used isn't the same, or some other small thing is different, so I'm just ignoring them in game.

For other stuff when I get like a 95% on something easy (relative to my skill level, etc), the 5% I'm missing seems to be right around chord changes or I'm not playing something quite cleanly enough I think? Things that sound 100% fine to me, but the game isn't giving me credit for. I'm ok with that.

Playing by ear is never something I've been capable of doing. Some of the justin guitar lessons are aimed at improving your ear, I'm curious if I will be able to train that.

I think there is a lot of truth to this. It seems to me, at least for bass, that a lot of times they choose the less optimal fingering pattern. Instead of jumping from the 3rd fret to 7th on the A string, I would go to the 2nd fret on the D string instead. I don't know if the game is just listening for the right note, or if it knows if you actually hit the right string.

[Radii]

Justin Guitar - Beginner Course Stage 5

-- New Chords - A7, D7, E7, D7 is very slightly slow for me to form, the other two are no problem.

-- One minute changes, goal is 60
- C7 to G7 - 52
- C7 to Fmaj7 - 60 exactly, hooray
- E7 to B7 - 55, good improvement from yesterday
- E7 to A7 - 74
- D7 to G7 - 55

Better on everything, will work more on this.

-- Rhythm Practice - A triplet strumming pattern w/ some suggested progressions to play 12 bar blues, neat, and good practice for all the 7th chords. 5 minutes of this.

-- Song Practice - I worked on an extremely simplified version of Eric Clapton's Before You Accuse Me.

-- Listening Practice - stage 2's practice on this, recognizing major vs minor chords, and figuring out specificaly what chord was played by ear. Made a couple mistakes here.

Rocksmith

I played through Jeremy a couple times, some of it is sounding better but score didn't go up. There's another part I'll need to work on.

Janes Addiction - Jane Says - 32%

REM - The One I Love - 57% - Favorited, this one I think I should be able to do pretty easily.

Matchbox 20 - Unwell - 82% - Favorited, a couple things in here that are a pretty big stretch (physically, 2nd to 6th fret thingy), but I'll get this pretty soon too.

Tom Petty - Refugee - 46% - Ok on easier difficulty, needs work once it scales up. Not sure I get a whole lot new out of this so I'll just come back to it later.



Pretty tired tonight, that'll be all the practice I get in. Adding the two favorited songs to the list of things to learn.

[Groundhog]

Originally Posted by Radii

CustomsForge

Since I haven't explored it yet I don't know if there are any tricks needed to get it working, hopefully its well documented. Also my understanding is that since all the content is user created, the quality of it may be hit or miss. Or the existence of a bass or rhythm tab may not exist, I assume lots of people just tab out the lead and that's it.

Thanks again - I got a chance to go through the site last night and download some songs. Had a great time playing Beatles, Pink Floyd, Tool, King Crimson, etc... given the game a whole new lease of life for me.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by Groundhog

Thanks again - I got a chance to go through the site last night and download some songs. Had a great time playing Beatles, Pink Floyd, Tool, King Crimson, etc... given the game a whole new lease of life for me.

Awesome!

I did go make an account there and downloaded some Pearl Jam and Metallica and Pink Floyd, nothing that looks like I'll be playing around with any time soon, the Rhythm part of Metallica's One looks like a decent thing to try maybe in a few weeks, and playing Yellow Ledbetter will definitely be a big goal of mine whenever I think I can get close to that.

[Groundhog]

God, I could only imagine the guitar solo for One with lead guitar...

[Radii]

Originally Posted by Groundhog

God, I could only imagine the guitar solo for One with lead guitar...

Metallica - One (Lead) | Rocksmith 2014 Custom Song - YouTube

Link should point to the start of the lead solo.

[Groundhog]

Yeah, that's about what I expected.

94% accuracy too.. wow.

[Radii]

Justin Guitar Beginner Course Stage 6

-- Finger Workout - 2 minutes. The strength/stretching exercise I've been doing the last few days.

-- Basic Picking Exercise - A new practice introduced to get used to picking individual strings. Since I still struggle heavily with quickly getting to an individual string I may as well do this. 3 minutes.

-- One Minute Changes - I'll just do a ton here I think and see how many I can get to 60 tonight.
- C7 to G7 - 62 (up from 52 yesterday)
- C7 to Fmaj7 - 71 up from 61
- E7 to B7 - 58 up from 55
- D7 to G7 - 61
New ones from this lesson:
F to C - 73
F to E - 62
F to D - 73
F to Am - 79
F to G - 76

Whew, that was a lot. Anything I got over 70 on I'll probably set aside, the others I'll keep working on.

-- Rhythm Practice - New Strumming Pattern, worked on for a few minutes.

-- Song Practice - Played Counting Crows - Mr Jones


Rocksmith

Played Jeremy a couple times, worked on one thing I was still struggling with, I'm still getting 87-90% on it though.

I also improved Don't Look Back in Anger by Oasis to 89.2%, I don't get why this one isn't well over 90% by now actually. I wonder if I'm just not playing some of the chords cleanly, or if its a PC issue... I don't give Rocksmith exclusive audio right now, b/c I'm in voice chat with some buddies while I'm playing. I see people saying that can be enough to cause it to not pick up some things correctly sometimes. Gonna play this later after a reboot in exclusive audio, and we'll see.

Matchbox Twenty - How Far We've Come - 91% - Maybe a similar issue as the Oasis song here, but I got this sounding good enough that I'm quite happy with it. Moving it into the "yeah I can play this" category.

Green Day - American Idiot - Raised this from 72% to 77%. Some of it is just still a little too fast for me.

Smashing Pumpkins - Today - Another one on the favorites list, I got a 30% the first time but that was at a low difficulty. I played it at full difficulty/full speed here and got 63.7%. Most of the song is power chords and at a slower pace than American Idiot, I think I mentioned that before but forgot. Definitely need to finish learning this before going back to Green Day. I'm moving this "up the list" to work on more frequently.

REM - Everybody Hurts - The next song that involves playing individual strings and a picking pattern that I want to learn after Jeremy. I bump this up to 100% difficulty but that's too much, so I slow it down to 60% and just repeat the intro and part of the first verse over and over. I didn't try to play it through so no new score. I did figure out the pattern, its simple, just picking through a D chord and then a little pattern w/ a G chord, but I can't recognize that in full speed yet.


That's it for tonight. Definitely gonna screw around in exclusive mode after a reboot tomorrow and figure out how badly I'm hurting myself by giving other programs resources.

[Radii]

Justin Guitar Beginner Course Stage 7

Looks like this lesson touches on LOTS of things that I've never officially learned in any capacity.

-- Note Practice - A semi-theory lesson/practice, to start thinking about the actual notes being played on each string, with an exercise to name all of the individual notes on the first 4 frets on each string and to pay attention to the notes used to construct each of the major open chords. I spend 2 minutes on the exercise given here.

-- Power Chords - an intro to power chords, how to play them, technique tips on string muting, and a lesson to start to memorize all the notes on the low E string. 3 minutes on the note memorization part of this.

-- New Chords - Asus4/Asus2/Dsus4/Dsus2/Esus4 - So I know variations on the A and D chords and I know of suspended chords but don't really know the theory, but neatly enough, the "note practice" above to identify notes in a chord and the explanation of what suspended chords are explains it quickly and easily, hooray learning.

-- 1 minute changes - Still some of the 7th chords that I need to build up, and F to E was a bit tougher than the others for me. Plus two new suspended patters:
- C7 to G7 - 66 - almost there (I want 70)
- E7 to B7 - 75 - big jump in that one, I guess the B7 is finally starting to feel a bit more natural.
- D7 to G7 - 74
- F to E - 80 - why the heck did i struggle w/ that yesterday, huh.
- A -> Asus4 -> A -> Asus2
- D -> Dsus4 -> D -> Dsus2

Those last two I'm 100% comfortable with, got it.

-- New Strumming Pattern. This is a good one, picking the bass note of a chord on beats 1 and 3 and playing the chords on beats 2 and 4. Good practice for me to accurately hit one specific note in between strumming chords I'm comfortable with, especially chords where the bass note isn't on the low E string. 5 minutes here.

-- A minor pentatonic scale - WOOHOO. Scales, about time. 5 minutes of practice on this.

-- Song practice - worked on California Dreamin by The Mamas & The Papas


Whew, that was a lot of stuff.

Rocksmith

So much for blaming audio/hardware on not getting good enough scores I changed the audio exclusivity and rebooted and played Don't Look Back In Anger and got it from 89.2 to 90.7%, which is nice... but not the type of gain I was thinking of when I wondered if there was a legit issue with audio and processing power needed for the game. Just user not being good enough yet

Oasis - Don't Look Back In Anger - 90.7% - See above.

Pearl Jam - Jeremy - 93% - Played it twice w/ improvement both times. There are still a couple parts that need to sound better, but I'll give myself credit for this one now.

Smashing Pumpkins - Today - 81.7% - This was at 63% yesterday, massive improvement, but not quite to that 90% range. I worked on one difficult part in the riff repeater for a few minutes and that helped a lot.

REM - Everybody Hurts - 90% - Well then! The sections where there is a picking pattern just require moving my fret hand between G and D chords, not a lot of finger movement, so I decided to just play it through at full speed and see if I got overwhelmed by it. I did not, at all. I did hit the wrong string with some frequency (especially when looking for the D or G string, the 3rd/4th ones in the middle), but forcing myself to keep the tempo seemed to help and it felt a lot smoother by the end.

Matchbox Twenty - Unwell - 87% - Up from 82%, definitely feeling good about that one.


-- Ok, time to play some new stuff before bed.

Bon Jovi - Livin on a Prayer - 50% - favorited.

Minus the Bear - Cold Company - 56.5% - Too hard for now, but maybe not by a huge amount.

White Stripes - Blue Orchid - 41.0% - Favorited. Very much too difficult for now but something that I can work on a few measures here and there and eventually get. It'll go at the bottom of the list and won't get touched for a bit but I want to make sure I come back here.


I'm really really pleased with the progress that showed up today.

[Radii]

Justin Guitar - Beginner Course Stage 7 - Repeated

I'm not moving on just yet, some of the stuff from this last lesson is a little more boring, memorizing notes, learning how chords are formed, I feel like if I plow past that and on to the next lesson I won't actually complete that stuff, and I know it has value (and I *am* at least moderately interested in music theory).

-- Working out notes in open chords - 2 minutes

-- memorizing notes on the low E string - 3 minutes

-- A minor pentatonic scale practice - 5 minutes

-- 1 minute changes:
- C7 to G7 - 74 - hooray, finally over 70
- F to B7 - (b/c I'm out of suggested changes so lets try something that seems difficult) - 58, not as tough as i thought, i guess i am actually learning something here.

- Strumming Patterns - 5 minutes

-- Song Practice - The Kinks, You Really Got Me, power chord practice. Actually, really good practice in shifting between power chords quickly, neat.


Rocksmith

I decided to mess around with a couple different picks today and to play w/ the strap length (I play almost entirely standing up... I sit too damn much already), so I decided to go through all the stuff I already know instead of messing with a lot of new stuff:

Seven Nation Army - 97.0 -> 97.2%
Vasoline - No Change
Black - 96% -> 100%
Go With the Flow - No Change
Sweet Home Alabama - 93% -> 100%
Live Forever - No Change
How Far We've Come - No Change
Jeremy - No Change

Got two songs to 100%, whee. The two easiest, but still feels good.



Going through other stuff, no improvement on Today. Got Everybody Hurts from 90.0% to 90.4%.

Pearl Jam - Alive - 73% - Not a bad score, but its deceiving. The parts that I could play were very easy, and the parts that I couldn't were impossible. Favorited, will need lots of work.

[Radii]

Justin Guitar Beginner Course Stage 8

-- G Chord Variations - Learning a couple different ways to play a G chord.

-- 1 minute changes
- F to B7 - 73, after only getting 58 yesterday, getting better.
- C to G variant - only playing the G notes on the 1st and 6th strings, a quicker movement from the C when a faster change is needed. 75.

-- 12 bar blues - working on picking pattern and pace and rhythm, 5 minute practice.

-- Basic Fingerstyle Practice - no pick, form a chord, pick thumb on root note, then the 3 highest strings, very simple picking pattersn to get used to it. This is something I'm comfortable with, a couple songs I used to know used simple enough patterns like this for me to learn. Everybody Hurts is *very* close to being this simple. 5 minutes of practicing this.

-- Scale Picking Exercise - 5 minutes - practicing the A Minor scale using different picking methods (all up picks/down picks/alternating), and playing the scale in time with a metronome to slowly start building up the speed of it, a bit of a step up in practice from just getting used to playing through the scale.

-- Power Chords Part 2 - Power Chords that start on the A string instead of the E string. 5 minutes practicing this, paying extra attention to making sure I've got the 6th string (E string) muted properly, something I haven't been paying as close attention to as I should in the songs I've been working on so far that use power chords.

Spent some time messing around with Pretty Fly For a White Guy for power chord practice, pretty tough one for me though for now.


Rocksmith

I played a few of the songs I've been working on most, Jeremy and Everybody Hurts and Today, didn't improve any, though Today *sounds* way better to the ear now.

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole 96% (at 60% speed) - so if you use the riff repeater and play the whole thing, even if you just do it a section at a time, which is what I did, it gives you a score for how you did... but only accounts for the difficulty, not the speed. So I played this through at 100% difficulty but 60% speed and apparently eventually got a 96%. At full speed I instantly fall apart. I need to slowly build that up.

That's all I have time for today. The justinguitar lessons are actually taking a lot of time right now, between the actual practice and watching the youtube vids for the intro to most of the lessons. That'll pay off though I'm quite sure.

[Radii]

JustinGuitar Stage 8 Beginner Course

We'll stay on the same stage today, if for no other reason than I don't want to watch a bunch of new youtube videos for new lessons. Could use more practice too for sure.

-- Note memorization - memorizing notes on both the 5th and 6th strings (low E and A string), combined with power chord practice. - 7 minutes

-- Scale practice w/ picking patterns - in time w/ metronome, working on speed and rhythm a bit too. 5 minutes.

-- Practicing all the previous rhythm/strumming patterns that I've learned - 5 minutes - some of these at a quicker pace I really struggle with, probably need to go back a bit here.

There's more stuff I could do here but don't feel like it tonight.

Rocksmith

RATM - Bombtack - Got this up from like 64% to 65.7% after a couple plays heh. Still nowhere close really, not even on max difficulty yet. Its not that complicated but I just don't move quite this quickly yet.

Pearl Jam - Jeremy - got this up from 93% to 94.5%, whee. I'm not really aiming to do this, I just like playing the song :P

Green Day - Basket Case - 15.1% - very low difficulty. Favorited to come back to as soon as I am better at power chord movement.

Basket Case is in a different tuning so I go through a bunch of songs that are tuned the same.

Motorhead - Ace of Spades - 34.1% - One of my favorite metal songs ever, I will play the hell out of this song once I'm capable. Its gonna be a looong time though.

Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet With Butterfly Wings - 50.6% - waaaay harder. WAY harder than Today, and harder than the Green Day songs too.

Alice In Chains - Man in the Box - 60.7% - long ways off from getting this better too.

Guns N Roses - November Rain - 64.9% - This one is CDLC (custom) that i've downloaded. Its nothing compared to the lead, of course, but still way way out of my league.


That was fun, probably not that useful for me though.

[Radii]

Rocksmith

Just playing around tonight.

I can hit Muse's Supermassive Black Hole at 70% speed now (up from 60%), so working on that still and improving.

Oasis - Champagne Supernova - 88.0%

Pearl Jam - Better Man - 48.2% - I can play most of the second half of the song which is just chords. The intro riff is part of the rhythm at least in this custom DLC, I'm favorting this b/c I its just simple enough (and I like the song enough) that I'll have the patience to really work on it.

Pearl Jam - Release - 32.8% - Also favorited. The rhythm is just a bunch of playing around with picking a D chord and various Dsus chords for 90% of it. Something that will be good practice for me too.

Pearl Jam - Wishlist - 43.7% - favorited, love this song, most of it is a simple pattern w/ parts i'll need to work on.

REM - Losing My Religon - 71.9% - Favorited. This is all chords, except for a couple places where you play a root note/bass note mixed in with the strumming pattern, but some of the chords are not ones Im used to at all at this speed, can probably get most of this with just a little practice.

Survivor - Eye of the Tiger - 91.5% - favorited, just to improve one little section so I can say I know the best workout/movie montage song ever on rhythm guitar :P

Metallica - One - 40% - Similar to Better Man, the rhythm for this isn't ridiculously hard (though the last half is WAY TOO FAST for me right now even though its extremely simple to play behind the big solo), the intro and verses are the main reason to favorite this though. Relatively simple but a bit out of my reach now, and something I recognize instantly so I'll definitely be willing to start at a slow rate and build up to playing this at full speed.

Metallica's Fade To Black is another one that I'll want to learn but its a noticible step up from One, no point in putting it on the list until I can play One, or at least til I'm a lot closer.


At the end of the night I played through Jeremy one last time and bumped it up from 96'ish to 97.2%, neat!




I felt bad for no concentrated practice so I spent a few minutes playing through the one scale that I know before putting the guitar down for the night

[Radii]

8/12 - 8/13

I played some yesterday but didn't post. Haven't been doing justinguitar stuff other than just playing through the scales a little, so this is stuff I tried out/improved on over the last two days.

Rocksmith

I did a few guitarcade games, one is a scale game that has you hopping around the scale more (instead of playing it sequentially), I should be playing this a lot I think.

Foo Fighters - Times Like These - 69.2% - not yet

Foo Fighters - My Hero - 71.7% - also not yet.

REM - Everybody hurts - 94.7% - A big jump and a really clean play, I'm officially moving this up to "can play" from still learning, though how I do any given playthrough will depend on if I get flustered during any of the picking sections.

I spent about 15 minutes using the riff repeater to work on the intro for Metallica's One. Progress, can play the first bit at 100% speed, but not the full intro yet (not even remotely close).

I worked a decent bit on Pearl Jam's Better Man too, at 75% speed I can score a 77% on it. I can improve that one a ton once I get used to it, I'm sure I'll put a lot more time into this than anything else soon.

Pearl Jam - Alive - 85.0% - Up from 77% I think. Most of the song I can play just fine, but there are sections that are pretty rough still. I picked a couple of them out here and used the riff repeater on them and then played the whole thing through at full speed. Still a couple more sections to finish up, I think I can get this up over 90% this weekend though.

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - Some pretty big improvement here. Last time I played it I could play it at 60% speed/95% accuracy but failed hard past that. I'm up to 80% speed now and still over 95% accuracy. I tried it at full speed and its still way too fast that way, but that still felt like a big jump. I probably spent about 20 minutes on it today as I was excited to see progress.

Matchbox Twenty - Unwell - 95.5% - Woohoo! This song isn't hard on rhythm at all, but the first time I played it I got an 82%, a few days later 87%, I haven't touched it in about a week and this time it seemed really really easy and I wonder why I wasn't at 95% the whole time. I guess that is playing and practice paying off, even if its on a small scale w/ an easy thing here Pretty happy to have that feeling though.

Everclear - Father of Mine - 79% - Another pretty big improvement, I can definitely play this, there are a couple sections with fast chord changes that need work though.

[Radii]

8/14

I spent 15-20 minutes practicing my scales with a metronome, I got to where I can comfortably stay in time at 132 bpm.


Rocksmith

Pearl Jam - Alive - 86% - slight improvement from 85.

Survivor - Eye of the Tiger - 97% - In honor of the songs from movies Mount Rushmore I had to come back to this, there was one tiny section I needed to riff repeat a few times, and I got it from 91.5% to 97, definitely something I can play on rhythm now!

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - Improving slowly but surely, I can nail this at 85% speed now. I tried it at full speed and got a 75% but it was an ugly, ugly 75%. Just not playing large parts b/c its still too fast.


I worked on the Muse song a good bit and played through a few things that I didn't improve on and didn't note here as a result.


8/15

-- League of Legends playoffs this weekend, so I watched about 6 hours of league (think of it like NFL Sunday basically), there were a few games where I picked up the guitar and mindlessly practiced scales or riffs/sections that I know from songs I've learned, etc.

JustinGuitar

I started looking at the last lesson in the beginner course. The most interesting thing there are variants on playing the basic minor scale, instead of playing it straight through using some other patterns to get your fingers used to moving around in different ways and to think about ways to improvise in a key.


Rocksmith

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - So I was picking every note with a down pick before, at full speed that's bad. So I went back, slowed it down again and played it 3 or 4 times to get used to the idea of alternate picking for most if not all of this (outside of a few power chords). Got back up to 85% speed and 95%+ accuracy, it took a half hour or so I think. I tried it once at 90% speed at got a 95% on it, but if I miss a note or fret hand gets out of place I get badly mixed up. Still improving though.


Tom Petty - I Won't Back Down - 92.0% - Sometimes 92% sounds like crap in sections, sometimes it sounds just fine, depends on the song, but in this one I feel like I've got it down now, that's up from 81% the last time I tried it, woohoo.

Matchbox Twenty - 3AM - 73.5% - I think this is the first time I played this at full difficulty, since it was at 23% before. Needs work. There are some odd hammer ons as part of chord changes, and a few different little riffs at different points that I butchered my way through.

[Radii]

Been playing some every day but not quite as much in any given day, catching up:

8/16

I played a little on Sunday, not a ton, more scale practice, especially the lesson about playing through the scale in different patterns to get the fingers used to moving around more. I played a little in game but I don't think I improved anything.


8/17

Spent about 5-10 minutes screwing around w/ scale practice again. I need to go back and "officially" finish out the beginner course, but I'm having fun doing it this way for now.

Green Day - Oh Love - 85% up from 74%, added to favorites, its the easiest/slowest green day song i have downloaded, may as well knock it out first. I haven't played it in awhile.

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - I thought to myself "you know I can play this at 90% speed and 95% accuracy now, I should just suffer through full speed til I get it... and again completely collapsed at that speed. So I'm still incrementally moving up. At 95% speed I'm in the 85% range for the song now.

I ended up tuning into Eb Standard for something so I played a few more songs there:

Green Day = Basket Case - 60% - played at full difficulty, 60% at full difficulty indicates problems haha.

Extreme - More Than Words - 69.5% - Actually something I'd like to learn, tho its out of my reach now and I'd probably rather know the lead part here by far anyway.

Smashing Pumpkins - Tonight Tonight - 65.4% - Favorited b/c I really love the song, but it will take an awful lot of work to learn.


While I'm screwing around w/ tunings, lets try Eb Drop Db, some stuff here I like.

Linkin Park - In The End - 80.4% - Favorited, I can work on my harmonics here, and for completions sake knock this one out. Pretty darn boring though.

Linkin Park - Numb - 91.4% - I'll say I've got this one. Linkin Park on rhythm is really boring huh?

Misery Business - Paramore - 36.5% - at 50% difficulty.


I quit playing earlier than expected here b/c my back was bothering me (yoga sunday/gym monday/sore as hell apparently). Sitting to play in my office chair really doesn't work well.


8/18

Pearl Jam - Better Man I spent 10 minutes working on this, maybe a bit more. The intro and first verse I can play ok'ish up to 95% speed, there is just something about that last 5% though. And there's a bit in the first chorus that I am seriously struggling with even at real slow speeds, back to that later.

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - I can now get a 94.5% score at 95% speed. Its an ugly sounding 94% though. Too much hitting an additional string, etc. I tried it once at 100% to see where I stand - 90%!? Its a HORRENDUS sounding 90% haha. I can keep up, but I feel like I'm missing a ton of notes. It is clearly an improvement though. A few days ago at 100% speed I just turned the song off almost immediately, couldn't follow it.

Don McLean - American Pie - 87.5% - Favorited. Love this song, I've actually played it before outside the game, there are some chord changes that I'll get better at next time, this one won't be that hard to get. I didn't realize I had this song, was just randomly scrolling through stuff.

Bon Jovi - Blaze of Glory - 67.7% - Also favorited. Some chords, some playing up and down the fretboard which I'm not good at, but this stays on one string at a time (a couple bars of sliding up and down the B string, then moving to the G string for a bit, etc). Something that will take a lot of practice but will help me getting more used to finding the right string quickly.

[Radii]

8/19

Green Day - Oh Love - 88.7% - up from 84%, I think its sounding a ton better too.

Linkin Park - In The End - 94.7% - Up from 80'ish, I got this one. Its very very easy on Rhythm though. But I wanted to knock it out, so yay.

Don McLean - American Pie - 89.2% - up from 87.5. Thought I might have done better w/ this. Next time.

Pearl Jam - Alive - No improvement in score, but its sounding a LOT better, so worth noting.


I didn't play for very long Wednesday night.

8/20

I worked on scales and some of the picking patterns w/ the A minor pentatonic scale during part of the half hour I had to kill between finishing up work for the day and the gym.


REM - The One I Love - 92.4% - up from 54%. I can definitely do better than that as well. Pretty easy song, just the strumming pattern to get used to.

Don McLean - American Pie - 92.7% - played this once and got it up to 90.4%. Came back later in the evening and got 92.7%, I'll take it, I got this one.

Man I have no idea what I'm doing wrong on "Today" by Smashing Pumpkins. I've been stuck at 81% there for a week+, and when I play it, it doesn't sound bad to me. I end up going through the riff repeater just for the intro over and over and it seems like its really picky about this Eb5 chord that comes up a lot, but I also am not really hitting some of the power chords cleanly when I move back and forth. Ok, user error still The intonation on my guitar isn't perfect, but I don't think I can blame that :P

Everclear - Father of Mine - 89.4% - I had a very very slight increase from 79.4 to 79.7%. The chorus just wrecks me. Riff repeat the chorus until I get it almost cleanly, try again. 89.4%! Whew. Ok, I think I can get this, but its 100% barre chords and my hand hurts, so we'll have to get it tomorrow.


Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - Still struggling to do this past 95% speed. At 95% speed I get 90%+ score, frequently 95%+ score. At 100% speed it falls apart. I got a 90% once but it was hectic and awful. Solution? Inch this shit to the finish line... 96% speed - 95% accuracy... lol, and then up to 100% speed because I have NO PATIENCE I did get my best score ever at full speed, 92%, but it still kinda sounds like shit, no way I'm taking credit for this one yet.


I worked on the chorus for Better Man for a bit, that's kicking my ass too


I've "cleared" 3 songs in the last couple days, so that's awesome, and made a huge jump in the Everclear song that felt really satisfying, while some things (BetterMan/Supermassive Black Hole) feel like progress is hard to come by. I'm sure working on those songs is good practice for me anyway.

[Radii]

I've been keeping the second post of the thread updated as I've given myself credit for songs that I feel like I can play and make them sound good - the % score is sometimes not the best judge of that, so I'm setting it based on my feel for how well I'm playing something, not just based on the number. Anyway, I'm now up to 15 songs where I feel I can play the rhythm part reliably, I'm rather happy about that!

[Radii]

8/21

Worked on scales and picking patterns w/in scales for 10 minutes or so.


Bon Jovi - Livin On a Prayer - 81.5% - This is the first time I've played it at full difficulty, there's a simple bass pattern happening over the verses but at speed my fingers get a bit mixed up playing it at full speed, despite it being fairly simple, so this will be good to work on. Power chords moving around during the chorus, good practice too.

Everclear - Father of Mine - 92.9% - I got this one, the chorus could be slightly cleaner but I'm really happy with how this sounds overall.

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - 94% - That's at full speed, and I can go for a few sections and make it sound nice and clean. But this is the opposite of a lot of the rhythm songs that are all chords, like the Oasis songs, where I feel like a song sounds really good but I'm only getting a 90%. Here, I'm getting credit for a lot of individual notes but it sounds like shit b/c I'm hitting another string or it just doesn't sound clean at all. So even though 94% seems really good, I'm not saying I know this yet, I certainly wouldn't play it in front of anyone and expect them to say its ok! Still, progress!


Still sitting at 88-89% on Green Day's Oh Love. I mess up the strumming pattern in the chorus a bit and changing from power chords on the E string to power chords on the A string at speed I still mess up with enough regularity to keep this down.

I haven't sorted by difficulty to just try out new stuff in awhile:

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Higher Ground - 79.9% - If this is the easiest thing left I'm in trouble. There is a lot of stuff in here where I can't make my fingers move anywhere near that fast yet.

Whitesnake - Is This Love - 40.1% - Played at about half difficulty, gets to be too much fast past that.

Sublime - Caress Me Down - 59.0% - not at max difficulty, I don't think I've ever heard this song, not a fan.

Foo Fighters - The Pretender - 33.5% - Favorited, played at 60% dificulty or so, will take a ton of work, but I really like this song.

Versus Them - Six AM Salvation 89.5% - Favorited, just to knock it out.

Soundgarden - Fell on Black Days - 67.5% - favorited, the main riff in this that repeats very frequently is fun and I can mostly do it, there are a few changes in there that I would need to practice, and then a little solo that has you moving pretty quickly between the 12th-19th frets, an area that not many songs have sent me yet at all.

Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear the Reaper - Favorited, b/c the super awesome riff that everyone would be instantly familiar with is in the Rhythm part of the song and it doesn't look too ridiculously difficult.


8/22

Messed around with scales some while watching like 5 hours of league of legends. That's it.


8/23

Messed around with scales some while watching about 8 more hours of league of legends, CLG OMG.

Warmed up w/ a couple easier songs, didn't beat any scores.

Versus Them - Six AM Salvation - 99.0% - up from 89.5%. Neato.

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - 94% - Same score as Friday, but it sounded MUCH better. I tried to play it a second time though to see if I could improve it and it was a disaster, still inconsistent, but best play yet by far.

Green Day - Oh Love 89.5% - up slightly from 88%, still sounds good but slow gains here.

Pearl Jam - Alive 87.2% - up about 0.3%, har. There are two sections here that are rough for me, and all i need to do is just do like in the justin guitar "1 minute chord change" practice and practice a few of these weird things, but I haven't taken the time to do it yet.

White Stripes - Blue Orchid - 60.2% - That's at full difficulty, that's bad! Would probably be ok if I dropped it to 80% speed or so and build up and learn the couple riffs that repeat frequently here. I'll do that next time I come back here.


8/24

I played 5 rounds of guitarcade games in rocksmith, new rule for myself in these games, NEVER look at the fretboard. If I fail b/c I get lost on where my fingers are, so be it. Given that, I did pretty well, set a high score in the ducks game which si about finding the right fret.

Green Day - Oh Love - 91.4% - Up from 89.5%. It sounds pretty darn good. I think around 93% or so I'll say I've got this one down and give myself credit for it. I'm still screwing up the strumming pattern which changes frequently from bar to bar just a bit too much.

Bon Jovi - Livin On a Prayer - 88.8% - up from 81%. Worked on the small lick that plays over the chorus and can do it at full speed now, its really simple but if I mess up a note I still might get flustered and miss 5 more as a result. Good improvement though1

Green Day - American Idiot - 86.4% - up from 77%, that's pretty huge, b/c I was getting most of my score here on the chorus that's very, very easy. The verses are lots of power chord changes at a rate that I couldn't handle at all before. I'm missing a lot still but I can at least do it enough to make a big gain here. A long way to go for it to sound nice and clean but I'm really happy with that.

Don McLean - American Pie - 93.0% - small increase from 92.7%.

I tried Pearl Jam's Better Man, no progress there. Maybe time to set that aside for awhile despite my love for that song.

I also played through the into for Don't Fear The Reaper at 50% speed, can practice that any time now and build up my ability to play it faster.

Went back to Silverchair's Tomorrow, there are a lot of little licks in here that I can't do at speed yet either, we'll come back to that.

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - 95% - Another small gain here. I think I'm gonna end up at 97 or 98% before I'm happy with it though.

Pearl Jam - Wishlist - 75.0% - up from 40%, don't remember if I played it all the way through last time though. There are a few things that need a lot of work here though.



I've added 2 more songs to the list of things I can play well enough to be happy with them. I am definitely at a point though where there are a couple songs I should be able to "beat" soon but MOST songs that I can be working on now are things I can play decently but have sections that need some concentrated practice to make real improvements.

[Radii]

8/25

REM - Everybody Hurts - 95.2% - played this warming up, made a small improvement, neat.

No improvements on Supermassive Black Hole or Oh Love today.

Bon Jovi - Livin On a Prayer - 90.5% - up about 2.5%, feels a lot better too, I have a much better handle on this.

Pearl Jam - Release - 55.1% - Played at 50% speed, oof. Its mostly the same riff over and over though, I'm just missing a lot of it heh. I guess that means something to come back to.



8/26

Didn't play today.


8/27

Justin Guitar

Time to work on this last Justinguitar lesson! So there are a list of things to know/be able to do before advancing to intermediate:

Chords: basic chords, 7th chords, A, D, and E sus chords, F, D/F#, G/B, C/G. Be able to change between any two chords 60 times in a minute.

-- Some chords that I don't play a lot I have to practice a few times before I can get 60 changes/minute, I've got this.

Rhythms: be able to play all of the strumming patterns taught so far

-- Yup.

Scales: be able to play the minor pentatonic scale at 120 beats per minute using all up picks/down picks/alternate picking

-- Yup.

Improvising: "You should be starting to experiment with using the minor pentatonic to improvise. Don't expect too much at this stage; just be able to play about and make up something easy over a blues."

-- This one is an issue for me. If I have a specific pattern in mind in advance I can do it (a couple were taught in the last lesson). Some patterns are harder than others though, just like in some of the songs that I'm learning some things that look like very simple picking patterns in songs prove very hard for me still. But just "jamming", even at a slow pace, pretty hard. I need to spend some time doing this too


Theory: A bunch of stuff here, knowing which notes are which in the first 5 frets, all the notes on the thickest two strings (for power chords), etc. I actually don't have all that down either. I can figure it out relatively quickly but I don't *know* these things by heart yet.


Songs:

He has 10 songs listed that you should be able to play before advancing.



There is emphasis on *really* knowing this stuff before moving on to the Intermediate lessons, not just half assing it and moving along. So, on the days that I want to work on justinguitar stuff, I'm going to spend 5 minutes doing improvisational stuff, 5 minutes on theory (memorizing notes basically), and then learning one of the 10 songs on the list.


For Improvising I tried out Rocksmith's Session Mode, stuck in some drums, a bass, and a metronome and put it on 70 beats per minute and messed around for a bit. I did get a little more comfortable moving around while doing this for 5 minutes. Need to do this a ton I guess.

Not gonna lie, I skipped the theory section for today

Song - Three Little Birds by Bob Marley. The version taught here is incredibly easy. Got it.


Rocksmith

Green Day - Oh Love - 93.0% - Woohoo, rewarded for actually practicing, right? I can still do much better than this, basically my hand gets a bit tired from a song that is literally nothing but power chords by the end and I mess up a little. The first half was exceptionally clean though, and I'll take credit for knowing this now.

REM - The One I Love - 97.9% - Crushed it. Up from 92.4%. I already had given myself credit for this but that was really really clean.

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - 96% - Can't tell the exact % b/c I did better than this once at a slower pace, but this was by far the cleanest play of this that I've had, and its finally... FINALLY time to take credit for it. Though I clearly have to recognize that I'm having a really good day (taking a break yesterday made a big difference? dunno), and probably can't repeat this reliably yet. But, after working on this for so long, its good to be able to say I can nail it on a good day at least.

Bon Jovi - Livin on a Prayer - 94.2% - Yup, really on a roll. Up from about 90% here.

Matchbox Twenty - How Far We've Come - 92.5% - I'd given myself credit for this at just 91%. Got it up to 92.5% now at least.

Smashing Pumpkins - Today - 83.3% - Well, my score went up on this in the first time in FOREVER, but, not all that much (it was 81%), so I'm not THAT much on fire tonight. I still seem to have a hell of a time making this one sound right.

Pearl Jam - Alive - 89.9%$ - up from 87.x. There are still two sections here that I bomb on, once I get those I'll get 94-95%. Needs work though.

Green Day - Basket Case - 83.2% - up from 60%. The ending I fucked up horribly, I'll need to practice that. Its mostly power chords that I'm getting better at though. They don't change as quickly as in American Idiot either, so I'll probably get this one first.

Basket Case is in Eb tuning so I'll play some other songs in that tuning:

Rage Against The Machine - Bulls on Parade - 95.6% - I played this at half difficulty the first time, then went up to full. Not gonna take credit for this yet though. Its super easy to hit the right notes, but there are patterns of muting that are critical to make it sound good, and I don't have that down yet. So the very high score is a bit deceiving, I don't think it sounds good enough yet. Favorited though for sure.

Alice in Chains - Man In the Box - 79.0% - favorited, I played this before and did much worse, will take a bit to make this sound good too, but I can do it.

Alice in Chains - Would - 79.1% - Unlike Man in the Box, this felt awful. We'll come back to this later.

On to Eb Drop Db tuning

Nirvana - Heart Shaped Box - 34.6% - played at 50% difficulty. Still didn't do well. This will be awhile.

Paramore - Misery Business - 61.5% - Pretty rough, but this is something I can learn. And I'm a bigger fan of Paramore than perhaps a 38 year old man should be admitting (ah fuck it, I like what I like, and I really like a lot of Paramore's songs). So, favoriting.

One OK Rock - No Scared - 79.6% - I know this song from a rhythm game, "Osu!". A bunch of really easy parts with a couple solos taht I can't even pretend to try to hit.

Now on to some songs I haven't played before, back to standard tuning, just sorting by difficulty:

The White Stripes - Fell in Love With a Girl - 85.1% - Favorited. A simple song though its a mix of power chords and regular chords that you don't usually see, so will take a bit of practice, but I think I'll get this fairly easily.

Jenny O. - Well OK Honey - 76.4% - Favorited as well, I don't really care for this song, but there was one chord I kept screwing up, and I think I can ace this really easily with a couple more tries, so favoriting for completionists sake.

Maroon 5 - Harder to Breathe - 66.1% - Nope, not for me yet.




Whew, played a TON today, in two different sessions this evening with some errands and work in between. I had a ton of fun playing today.

[NoSkillz]

Just a quick note to say I'm following this and enjoying it.

I bought my first guitar late winter last year and put it down about a month later due to my normal, busy spring and summer at work and at home. I also started with JustinGuitar.com (and bought his books as well) and this dynasty hopefully will motivate me to get back into it when things die down a bit in the fall.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by NoSkillz

Just a quick note to say I'm following this and enjoying it.

I bought my first guitar late winter last year and put it down about a month later due to my normal, busy spring and summer at work and at home. I also started with JustinGuitar.com (and bought his books as well) and this dynasty hopefully will motivate me to get back into it when things die down a bit in the fall.

Thanks! I'm definitely liking the justinguitar stuff, despite the number of days where I ignore it and just fire up Rocksmith to play right away without practicing anything! I'll either buy some of the more advanced DVDs he offers or donate to him at some point depending on what I decide to do w/ his site once I get through the free lesson path.

[Radii]

8/28

Sttraight to Rocksmith today. I warmed up with some songs I already know, didn't break any top scores but did well on them all.

I want to try something different to start, just out of curiosity:

Lead Guitar

Lets see what the easisest songs on Lead are like.

Sugar Rios - Gobbledigook - 87.4% - favorited. Entire song is on the low E string, basically picking a bass line.

Bush - Glycerine - 79.4% - favorited. Almost all barre chords with a picking pattern of picking the root note between strums. Needs work.

The Whiote Stripes - The Harded Button to Button - 80.1%. This is just the type of song I need. Most of the song is just picking through power chords using the same pattern every time. Perfect for me at this point. Favorited.

Muse - Supermassive Black Hole - 90.3% - LOL. Its the exact same as rhythm part with one very small solo added in.

Tom Petty - Free Fallin - 84.5% - Almost all barre chords. favorited to knock out.

The White Stripes - Fell in Love With a Girl - 71.9% - I know I played this on rhythm a couple days ago. I think this is different, even though its entirely chords too. Or, I'm just off today hah. Yeah, went back to rhythm and played that, 88.8%. Very different.

The Black Keys - Next Girl - 98.5% - This is actually the reason I tried out lead, I saw some thing on the rocksmith subreddit listing the easiest songs in the game, and this was on the list, and I watched a play of it and said "yeah I can do that". Turns out I can. Its a simple, not too fast paced riff repeated for most of the song with a couple things added in. My first lead song!!

Green Day - Oh Love - 81.7% - Another one I've been playing a ton lately. The 81% comes from the large parts of the song that are the same between rhythm and lead. The missing 19% or so comes from the solo that doesn't look like its really that hard but its waaaaaaaay out of my league for now.

Bon Jovi - Its My Life - 19.5% - Favorited, I got such a low score b/c I stopped playing it early. There's a really small picking section in between the power chords that I need to go back and learn. Its simple but not something I can pick up at full speed. So, come back to this when I feel like slowing it down.

Rolling Stones - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction - 85.0% - Again mostly easy, the recognizable riff is very easy here, but a couple solos aren't. So I get a good score but am forever away from improving it.

The Who - Pinball Wizard - 68% - Ok, I'm quickly falling too far out of my element, parts of these last few songs where I just shrug and wait for the power chords to come back.


Rhythm Guitar

Oasis - Don't Look Back in Anger - 92.7% - One of those that i've been stuck around the same spot forever, here I get a 2+% increase and I'll finally take credit for it.

Oasis - Champagne Supernova - 91.2% - really? Up from 88%. I thought it sounded like shit, heh.

[Radii]

8/29

Rhythm Guitar

Coldplay - Yellow - 75.2% - Favorited, I really like this song, there are some really strange barre chord forms in there that I'll need to work on, but that's really the only issue here.

No Doubt - Spiderwebs - 59.5% - LOL. That's at full difficulty. That is too hard for me for now. But with a little more skill I can see that being incredibly fun to play.

Pearl Jam - Corduroy - 73.7% - Oh? I can learn this! Favorited. To the top of the list you go. Top 5 song from my favorite band, yes please. There's a little riff that repeats a lot, and an odd pattern of chords, not hard, just odd. I can actually play this. This is probably the most excited I've been in this game so far about a song and my prospects of being able to learn it

Smashing Pumpkins - Disarm - 85.0% - Favorited as well. The chords are very easy here, but more than most songs the strumming pattern is critical to making ths one sound decent. Anyone who knows the song well knows what I mean I assume.


REM - Losing My Religon - 73.7% - up from 71%. I went back and found the first time I played this and favorited it, I said there are some chords taht I need a little practice on but I'll get this fairly easily. Holy shit what was I smoking? Some sections of this are just awkward as hell. I do need to riff repeat them a lot, but I dunno if I will actully get this "fairly easily". Past me is an idiot.

The White Stripes - Fell in Love With a Girl - 94.0% - up from 88%. Really happy w/ this. I played it through about halfway and all of a sudden the strumming pattern clicked, restarted, easy pass. I can get higher if I keep playing it for sure.

Jenny O. - Well OK Honey - 94.0% - up from 76'ish. Very easy song, just needed to see it again. I could do better than this here as well, maybe I will someday, but most likely I'll never play this again!

Green Day - Basket Case - 87.7% - up from about 83%. It sounds way better now though, WAY better. Just need to clean up some of the fast chord changes, but I really enjoy how this sound now.

Rage Against The Machine - Bulls on Parade - 97.2% - BAM. I got a great score last time too, but I wasn't happy with it and didn't take credit. The pattern for muting is key here, and for the majority fo the song, I have it down now and love how it sounds. One section I'm getting credit for but I know my pattern for muting isn't quite perfect, but most of the song I love how it sounds here too.

Motorhead - Ace of Spades - 83.6% - Up from about 34% the first time I played it. My score shouldn't be that high. My playing here is pretty haphazard and I'm lucking into getting credit here and there. But every once in awhile I'll hit it exactly right for a bar and it sounds so awesome b/c well, this song is fucking awesome. So I've got it close enough now to want to try to perfect it.

With Ace of Spades, that's a sign of real improvement too I think. I can keep up with the pace now and be generally in the right place on the fretboard at all times, the first time I played it through I don't think that would have been true. Definitely getting a lot better at some things!

Guns N Roses - November Rain 65.0% - Slight improvement from 64% before, but I understand what's happening here now where before there were huge sections I just watched go by. There's still one little solo in the rhythm part that I'm gonna have to watch go by, but 98% of this I can learn.

[Radii]

8/30

Rhythm Guitar

Warmed up playing scales and then American Pie (tied my high score on that exactly).

Smashing Pumpkins - Disarm - 93.0% - I'll take it. There's one chord change that I could do slightly cleaner, otherwise I have this sounding really good. Up from 85% the first time I played it.

Pearl Jam - Corduroy - 80.1% - up from 73.7%, happy seeing that.

Coldplay - Yellow - 79.1% - up from 75%. I just need to keep playing this to get more used to the funky non-standard chords being used here.


-- A lot of Paramore is in Eb tuning, and since a couple songs I'm working on are in Eb tuning (Basket Case primarily), I went and downloaded my favorite Paramore songs that have custom DLC.

Paraomre - Where The Lines Overlap - 55.7% - tough, not yet.

Paramore - The Only Exception - 69.4% - Holy hell. Well there is my introduction to barre chords on the 12th and 14th frets. You start to lose real estate that far down, and my fat fingers have a real hard time forming a barre chord up there. Easy song if I can do that though.

Paramore - When It Rains - 73.2% - Favorited, all chords, some power chords, some barre chords, some standard, some moving around pretty quickly. I'm better at this stuff than playing individual notes, but this still is good practice, and I like the song quite a bit too. Its in Eb standard so it gives me another song to play through when I re-tune.

Paramore - That's What You Get - 95.4% - Almost all power chords, pretty easy progression. 91.8% first playthough, played it again, 95+. I'd expect that now from a song like this, its not slow but its not really fast either. But, 2 weeks ago? I wouldn't be able to see this and knock it out right away. So while it feels easy now, its a good sign of progress that I've been able to make this feel easy

Green Day - Basket Case - 86% - no improvement. I watched someone play this on youtube, playing the first and last verse using all downstrokes sounds MUCH better than alternating, but that's a speed that's new to me, so I'm working on that here.

Paramore - crushcrushcrush - 71.7% - Eb drop Db tuning. One chord that shows up a couple times is really hard to get to for me, if I work on that I can get this. Favorited.

Paramore - Ignorance - Lead only part. Probably my favorite Paramore song, in E standard. There is an intro with some quickly played barre chords an then the verses are picking the top 3 strings, patterns I can get used to and will be good to practice, but I can't do it yet. Favoriting anyway!

-- I played through Pearl Jam's Better Man to see if some practice on other things has made me magically better at it. No, no it has not. The intro is, by my very meager standards, a pretty intricate picking/fingering pattern. Nowhere close yet.

-- I played through Corduroy one last time and got it up to 81.2%.


A bit of a sidetrack into Paramore land today, some fun stuff in there though.


8/31

Don McLean - American Pie - 95.0% - Up from 93, hooray improvement, was just playing that to warm up.

Radiohead - Karma Police - 91.5% - I haven't played this in forever, this is up from about 45%. So this is somethign I should work on "beating" soon. My score is good but its not there yet, doesn't sound good enough. I had been avoiding this though b/c I remembered it being too hard, nice to see that changing too!


Basket Case is something I am going to want to play daily, so time to go through the list of Eb tuning songs that I want to play today:

Paramore - When It Rains - 82.0% - up from 73.2% yesterday.

-- No improvement on Basket Case today, got 87% which is right around my top so far.

Motorhead - Ace of Spades - 91.0% - up from 83. But its bullshit. I'm just playing as fast as I can and hitting power chords around the ones they're asking for. There's a specific pattern that makes for the famous riff in this song and I can make it happen but not in time w/ the song hahah. I'm just getting credit for hitting most of the notes right, but it sounds like dogshit.

Alice in Chains - Man in the Box - 91.2% - up from 78% I think, and this one actually does sound pretty good, but there are a few little 4 or 5 note riffs that I'm not even trying to play, I should at least learn those before I give myself credit here.

Guns N Roses - November Rain - 75.0% - up from 64.9%. Will still need concentrated practice on a couple parts of this, most of its easy/boring on rhythm though.

Linkin Park - Numb - 96.4% - up from 91%, very easy song, hadn't played it in awhile, figured why not.


Back to standard tuning.

-- I've been working on the intro to Don't Fear The Reaper outside of the game, I'm not fast enough yet though, I can keep up at 85-90% speed. Getting there.

Preal Jam - Corduroy - 87.5% - up from 81%, still could be a lot cleaner, but getting there.

Coldplay - Yellow - 86.0% - up from 79'ish, getting better at hitting some of those tougher/unfamilier chords.

Bon Jovi - Its My Life - 83.2% - up from 19%. Last time I played this I said "there is a small picking section in between the power chords"... I dunno if that was b/c I wasn't on full difficulty or what. There are 3 notes to play individually at a pretty slow pace like 3 times in the song. Rest is chords. I'll get this soon.

-- Finished up the night working on the intro to Blaze of Glory by Bon Jovi which is a small solo-y thing. I'm doing it at 75% speed right now and not fully accurately, so that's the starting poing there.

[Umbrella]

Have you tried session mode yet on Rocksmith? I was messing around with it the other day, and it is pretty fun. It's meant more for soloing, so it's not as conducive to bass as guitar. With your scale work, I think you should be ready to try it.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by Umbrella

Have you tried session mode yet on Rocksmith? I was messing around with it the other day, and it is pretty fun. It's meant more for soloing, so it's not as conducive to bass as guitar. With your scale work, I think you should be ready to try it.

Yeah, part of the final justinguitar beginner lesson is to be able to improvise within a scale. I have spent a little time doing that in session mode, I find it difficult, which is probably why its a pre-req to move on to intermediate stuff. The session mode definitely helps though, I should be doing stuff like that more often than I am if i wanted more efficient practice

[Umbrella]

Originally Posted by Radii

Yeah, part of the final justinguitar beginner lesson is to be able to improvise within a scale. I have spent a little time doing that in session mode, I find it difficult, which is probably why its a pre-req to move on to intermediate stuff. The session mode definitely helps though, I should be doing stuff like that more often than I am if i wanted more efficient practice

Just start out by playing the scales during session mode, using some sort of rhythm you like. It will sound strange, but so what? From there, you can just noodle around with the notes within the scale. In session mode, you can use the "jam" option, and you will always stay within the scale you choose. Also, make sure you keep the tempo down to a point you feel comfortable with. A nice slow bluesy type jam is a good place to get your feet wet.

I've always said the best way to improve your skills is jamming with other musicians, but session mode is a decent enough substitution for that. And in some cases it's better, as you don't have other people giving you the stink eye if you make a lot of mistakes while learning.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by Umbrella

Just start out by playing the scales during session mode, using some sort of rhythm you like. It will sound strange, but so what? From there, you can just noodle around with the notes within the scale. In session mode, you can use the "jam" option, and you will always stay within the scale you choose. Also, make sure you keep the tempo down to a point you feel comfortable with. A nice slow bluesy type jam is a good place to get your feet wet.

I've always said the best way to improve your skills is jamming with other musicians, but session mode is a decent enough substitution for that. And in some cases it's better, as you don't have other people giving you the stink eye if you make a lot of mistakes while learning.

Thanks, I did this for 10 minutes tonight and it is fun. I am slowly getting more comfortable improvising just a little and not only going straight thorugh the scale. Picked 70bpm (though I'm comfortable playing eighth notes or tiplets at that pace and playing a bit faster usually). My big technical thing is still doing stuff like fretting the 4th string but picking the 3rd if I'm not playing in some sort of set pattern and just moving my hands around, so they're still not quite in sync together yet. I know that gets better by doing this kind of thing more often though!

[Umbrella]

Sounds good. I think a combination of what you are currently doing, with a little jam about once a week will really improve your skills a lot.

And I was messing around with scales this weekend, and I just realized something. Once of the most famous riffs of all time, the beginning of My Girl, is just a major pentatonic scale. I don't know how I've never noticed that before. So ignore my previous statement about playing scales sounding strange.

[Radii]

Update for the last week:

9/2

Oops, I played some stuff yesterday but forgot to save the file I log all this in and rebooted. I improved on a couple things but didn't beat anything new. It was mostly the rhythm stuff I've been working on the last few days, Basket Case and When it Rains by Paramore and Corduroy and the like.


Lead Guitar

Pearl Jam - Sirens - 66.4% - Something I discovered yesterday actually. There is a solo in here that's too much for me, but a lot of the rest of the song involves playing individual notes at a mostly reasonable pace. This will be a really good song for me to work on, slowly, to improve my ability to pick individual strings. Just about the right difficulty where its too hard for me now but not by so far that its impossible.

I don't see any youtube videos of anyone playing this in rocksmith, so maybe once i master it i'll have to upload the first play of it there

-- I used the riff repeater on every section of this individually at full speed, except for the solo, which I tried out at 70% speed. The song is really simple outside the solo, and I was able to get it up to 77.7% after this practice and another playthough.


Whew, really long day today, early bedtime so that's it.


9/3

I played in session mode for 10 minutes to start out, should be doing this more often going forwar!

I played through a few songs I haven't touched in awhile, Everybody Hurts, Supermassive Black Hole and American Pie, slightly rusty on them, still 90+ for them all though.

The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army - 98.2% - up from 97.x.

Pearl Jam - Alive - 88% - Time to throw this back into regular rotation. I spent 5 minutes or so using the riff repeater on the difficult sections here, my best is 89.9%, but I think if I start playing this daily again I'll be able to get it soon, I can definitely do some of this better than last time I tried.

Pearl Jam - Corduroy - 92.9% - up from 89ish%, its definitely feeling much cleaner too, very very close to really having this.

On to the Eb songs

-- Basket Case remains around 88%.

Paramore - When It Rains - 89.3% - up from 85'ish, good good!


9/4-9/8

Work is insane and I hardly fire up rocksmith at all for a few days. However, I did pick up my acoustic every day and screw around. I learned how to play I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie outside of rocksmith. I'm seeing them in concert next week and looked up some lessons on youtube on that, I was able to get the odd picking/strumming pattern mostly down, sounds pretty good. So I played that some daily and played some other stuff, just messing around when i had a break from work really.

9/9

I spent 20 minutes in session mode, whee.


Bon Jovi - Its My Life - 83.7% - Huh, thought I did terrible, improved slightly though, like 1/2%

I played a few more songs, but just too tired heh. Hopefully tomorrow the schedule gets back to something reasonable

[frnk55]

I've logged in 72 hours now playing for the first time Bass guitar. It's fun but at the same time I feel like I'm going nowhere. I'm just finding easy slow songs to go on and I'm closing in on Clapton's wonderful tonight at 100%.

So any bass players on Rocksmith? Just curious how long you've played and when did you get to the point where you said I'm pretty good at this.

I feel like I'm so far off and have no talent.

[Alf]

I am entering my third year learning the bass guitar after 6/7 years of playing guitar. I could easily and early on play root notes, but adding the 5ths, 3rds, and 7ths was a little slower. Of course, since I was already a guitar player, basic rhythm learning was easier. However, rhythms not starting on the downbeat are way harder to learn.

Edit : I still feel like a noob, but I can play !

My 0.02€