Ok, first I must apologise for not updating for a couple of days. There have been some technical difficulties with my blog and it was completely offline for a time. Hopefully this has now passed and I can get back on track.
For the last couple of days I’ve been ‘playing’ Rocksmith and once again making my fingers sore, yes I am still pressing too hard on the strings. I really must learn to break this habit. I’ve also been playing around with the options and functionality of Rocksmith.
By default the track volume is set to 100%. Which is great if you want to listen to the track you are playing but this has the down side of drowning out the sound of the guitar. I’ve lowered the track volume and now I can hear, what can sometimes be referred to as the God awful noise, that I’m actually playing. I think this is helping as I now know when I’m playing duff notes.
The other thing I’ve been using is the riff repeat function. This allows you to concentrate on a specific part of the song, the intro for instance, and play it repeatedly to work on getting it right.
The way Rocksmith teaches you is to start you off with a few notes of each phrase, a small percentage, and then increase the number of notes it expects you to play.
With the riff repeater, you can set the start percentage and also the speed. This does seem to be helpful. I have been setting the level (number of notes) to 10% and the speed to 40%. If you manage to play the 10% of the phrase at 40% speed without cocking it up, then it increases the speed by 10%. Once you can play the phrase at 100% speed a couple of times, it then increases the difficulty to the next level. This may not be by 10% but it throws more notes in so you play more of the song lowering the speed back to 40% allowing you to work back up to the magic 100%. Rinse and repeat, literally.
This brings me to the title of this post.
Along with the mirriad of songs that come with Rocksmith, there are also hundreds available to buy as additional songs. Today I bought The Foot Fighters, Learning To Fly (do you see what I did there? Pilot Training – Learning to Fly). I love this track, don’t ask me why, I just do. I used the riff repeater and I can almost play 50% of the song. So I think I’ll be using this function quite a bit.
Time to rest my sore fingers.
Bye for now.