Progress?

I have a confession to make, tonight I cheated on Rocksmith.

I got myself an iRig, it’s a device that let’s you connect your guitar to an iPhone or iPad. You can the get an app from the app store called amplitube which acts like an amp. You connect headphones to the iRig and you can play without disturbing anyone else. I got this for that very reason. My guitar time is usually late at night after work when the rest of my family is in bed, so a loud amp is probably not going to go down well.

I played with this for a while, making my god awful noise and then I started to wonder what else I could do with it?

After some research I found a site called Rock Prodigy. Rock Prodigy is another way to learn guitar. This too has an app on the app store and has a couple of lessons thrown in. These were pretty basic but looking through the other lessons it seems to fill a gap that Rocksmith doesn’t.

I’ve been using Rocksmith for a couple of weeks now and I have to admit, it’s really fun. The songs it’s trying it’s hardest to teach me are songs I know and love. However, I’m starting to feel that’s all its doing, teaching me to play pre-progammed song. I don’t feel I’m actually learning to play the guitar as an instrument, just learning a sequence of movements to play a song. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy playing Rocksmith but is it really a guitar tutor or just a game that leads you to play songs?

I’ll have to check out Rock Prodigy a little more first as the whole ‘course’ is $200 (£140). This is a LOT to spend on nothing. I’ll let you know what I decide to do.

I have neglected to post an update for a few days.

I have however been continuing with Rocksmith and been making slow process. My fingers on my left hand are still getting sore, I was hoping they would have started to take the punishment by now but hey ho.

I’ve now added some Sound Garden tracks to the library and I’m having fun with these at present.

As you may know, the BC Rich IronBird does not have the most conventional shape.

As such a floor standing Guitar Stand was out of the question.

I decided to go for a wall hanger and was happily shopping for an ordinary fork like hanger until I came across this bad boy;

 A hand that sticks out of the wall to hold your guitar

Made by a company called Guitar Grip, link in the links page. Can be a bit expensive so shop around.

 

Time to get back on the horse. I went back through some of the lessons to try to get my eye in, so to speak. I then went back to learn a song. I avoided Learning to Fly, am I scared to go back to it? Maybe a little, but I also love this song and want to be able to do it justice. So I murdered Oasis’s, Don’t look back in anger instead.

Slip sliding away, you know the nearer your destination the more you’re slip sliding away.

Now I understand what the great Paul Simon meant.
To say last night’s session was abysmal is an understatement. The, quite frankly amazing, 50% of Learning to Fly from the day before slipped down to a tear inducing 19%. Every thing seemed to be against me and no matter how much I tried to relax into it, I just couldn’t do it. This lead to frustration and I eventually called it a night.

This morning I sat with my first cup of tea of the day and pondered over this. I have decided to lay the blame, for now, on being tired from a week of early shifts. Getting up 4am surely must have an impact on performance and learning. Hopefully.

Back to it then, wish me luck.

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.

Also, we have passed another mile stone as I have over 50 subscribers on the blog. I think I was something like 57 the last time I checked. Thank you all for taking the time to join me and I hope I can entertain you along the way.

I have changed the theme of the blog to make the progress page a little easier to find. I’m sure there are better themes out there and I’ll spend some time to find one when I get some to spend. In the meantime if anyone has any suggestions for a theme, leave a comment below.

Cheers.

So the weekend is over and I’m back on the Rocksmith diet. I haven’t wasted the weekend though, I’ve spent some time away from Rocksmith to learn a few chords and give my fingers a rest. The tips of the fingers on my left hand were starting to get a little sore. I’m probably still pressing down too hard on the strings. This is something I’m going to have to stop doing as it does get sore after a while. But I have resumed the diet so to speak. I tried a few songs out and I do honestly feel I’m starting to make some headway. I managed to get quite a high ‘score’ on one of the song today. I have to admit this really surprised me. I’m not sure if I can repeat the feat or if it was purely a fluke but I’ll find out tomorrow in my next session.

I found a Rocksmith challenge on YouTube where people have learned to play in 60 days using Rocksmith. If I had nothing else to do but play Rocksmith all day, I could probably manage that, but unfortunately I do also have work and a family so I think I’m going to extend my target to six months, and I’ll probably miss that one as well :-D.

Well, I’m not sure if you can call it progress but I can now play the A major chord again. I say again because I’m sure I could play this chord along with others way back when.

Friday was a busy day. I had a number of family commitments dropped on me at the last minute. So, I didn’t get much time to spend with my guitar.
I did however start in on re-learning chords.

I think my fingers must have fattened up over the years.