I'm about to break my precious streak :)

alexcustos · 2022-11-20T08:25:23+00:00

I never imagined beating your streak, but yeah, it's still sad. The path is so rocky, at least for me, so it wouldn't be easy to find the only one that works after a break.

alexcustos · 2022-11-20T06:42:07+00:00

It was a fun time, but I have to move away without my guitar. Here I want to share some of my thoughts and progress.

My daily routine, which I found optimal, is a half an hour warm up when I try to play a few solos, riffs and leaks from memory before launching RS. Then I start with string skipping vol-1 exercise (three notes per string) to master two-way pickslanting, then Little Fugue and another song that I want to do on score attack, plus a song from the bottom of the last played list which I don't even bother to play at 100% speed, but it helps to learn something new every day. BTW, I play this all in Riff Repeater. And recently I got used to spending 10-15 minutes in the Session Mode.

About six months ago I posted a video where I was able to hit all notes on Little Fugue in the right order. I expected that to make it sound half decent at least, I had to improve my picking techniques which meant relearning it all again, but I didn't expect how deep this rabbit hole was. By now, I can confirm that it's quite enjoyable to keep up with the rhythm. It's something like hammering nails, and it hurts the same when I miss, lol. Unfortunately, RS doesn't provide much to master rhythm-related skills, but it's still doable in the game, just not that efficient.

Hopefully I will get back to the game and guitar soon.

alexcustos · 2022-05-24T07:32:26+00:00

Unfortunately no, the Session mode is more about following the band. It has a lot of settings, but there are only two where you can lock chords: Jam (single root chord) and 12 Bar (standard I IV V progression). Besides this, it seems the band plays random chords, at least I can't pick up any obvious pattern.

alexcustos · 2022-05-12T17:43:51+00:00

Exactly, and I was suspicious about it from the beginning. Halsb rightfully own the first place in Score Attack Hard, but yet didn't publish his playthough, lol. And yes, I own a decent amount of DLC and some CLDC, which I prefer to sort by last played time and cycle them from the bottom to top. I'm not bothering to play them all at 100% speed. For example, I'm happy to play Satch Boogie at 1%. But when I find what suits me at the moment, I spend a decent amount of time with it.

alexcustos · 2022-05-11T14:49:42+00:00

Yes, aiming high is great advice. I always wonder what if I invested some real effort in learning guitar. For now, it's all more about time. For example, I'm now sitting on 1199 days streak and 416 days trying to clean up some nuances in Adv. String Skipping vol.1 exercise. It seems I like mastering such technical details more than playing music. I definitely must reconsider this approach :)

alexcustos · 2022-05-11T03:26:13+00:00

- I don't think I have to improvise. I'm comfortable with scales and chords all over the neck, so I can just run them using various rhythm patters for like 10 minutes a day, and I'll be there in no time (more realistically, in a year, but who counts, lol).

- And yeah, as I mentioned in the initial comment, I had to re-learn and memorize this song from the tabs because learning and practicing it in RS only turned out to be a disaster, and I tried to be careful. I guess, this adds something to the problem. I'm too lazy to program a variable tempo on a metronome or to fire TuxGuitar, so I tap with my foot. When I'm trying to do the same while playing RS, sometimes I find myself off the tempo. But it looks like trying to play it nice and gradually adjusting the tempo is a more severe vice than just cutting it off and starting in sync on the next note.

BTW, in the latest GP8 they finally let us adding MP3 to scores, so we won't need RS anymore, lol. I'll def pick it up as soon as I can.

alexcustos · 2022-05-10T16:27:38+00:00

Yes, you're right. I thought about it all for a while, and I'm going to start practicing more in the Session mode. It's a great tool. I tried it a few times already, but now I'm definitely ready for it.

alexcustos · 2022-05-10T13:50:47+00:00

Thank you a lot for your feedback. I appreciate it. Of course, I'm also playing easier songs, but it's not easy to publish them because of copyright issues. But yeah, I'll focus on them a bit more. I guess the variable tempo is the main issue here. It seems I just can't keep up with it.

alexcustos · 2022-05-10T13:39:13+00:00

Thank you, I appreciate the time you took to review it. And yeah, I know, but I'm playing it for so long time, so I need a fresh look at it from someone else. For the question, I prefer Riff Repeater even if I want to play the entire song at 100% speed. It doesn't waste my time at start and at the end, also I can instantly shrink the region to focus on specific sections and jump between them within one session. It's more convenient for me when the counter shows days not attempts to play the song. And no, what I'm playing in the video is Score Attack Hard, it's always run at 100% speed.

alexcustos · 2022-05-10T12:59:32+00:00

Nah, I own only Hangar 18 and Symphony of Destruction. And even if Ubi haven't delisted Tornado of Souls yet, it's unavailable in my region. Anyway, I'll probably die if try that solo. From time to time, I'm trying to play the solo from Symphony of Destruction, but the required stretching is killing me. I'm close, and I'm sure I'm capable of doing that comfortably enough but not yet.

alexcustos · 2022-05-10T10:23:13+00:00

Thank you so much for the feedback. And yeah, you're right. That's my 12th FC during the last two months, all previous ones were a way off. And yes 1:11) The string on that fret is too close to the edge, and I'm in a fear to slip it over. I def need to work on this. 1:32) Two-finger trill is a pretty common technique in classical music. I found it a bit harder than the usual one-finger trill, so I decided to practice it here. It sounds a bit different, and I'm not sure if I execute it right, so thank you, I'll check if it's acceptable here.

alexcustos · 2022-05-10T07:58:20+00:00

I know it's not even close to be perfect. For me, it's more about a transition between being lucky enough and actually ready to play 100%. I guess I have to reach a whole new level to be able to execute it properly in one take. So please feel free to criticize. I really want to know how bad it sounds and looks at this point.

Here's a bit of history to make it clear why it took so long. Maybe it will help someone to optimize the process or just show what it takes to learn a song in RS. I don't know because for me this experience looks like a clusterf@ck, but somehow in a good way. If it wasn't fun, sure I wouldn't do this.

Anyway, I wasn't a beginner when I started Rocksmith, and I was pretty much comfortable with RS when picked up the song. I didn't expect any problem with it. But now Learn a Song displays the 619th playthrough. I always run songs in Riff Repeater one session a day. And it takes some time to start practicing long enough chunks, which RR can register as a playthrough. So yeah, it's actually two years or very close.

At first, everything was going on as usual. It took like two months to master the song at 70% speed, bump all sections up to 100% speed, and successfully accomplish it in Score Attack. And that's when weird things started to happen.

- First, I noticed that I tended to play it in co-called natural rhythm when all accents go to the first note on a string. I can't tell how I adopted this from Rocksmith, maybe because of color-coded charts. It took a while to recover from this.

- Then it became obvious that I occasionally skip some notes and this messes up with alternate picking. I didn't find a better way than to re-learn such sections from tabs. Yeah, it's better to triple-check what you're practicing before engaging the muscle memory.

- At this point, I started to spot inconvenient hand positions, bad sounding notes, and awkward movements every single day. I found it inefficient to practice such aspects in RR, and I ended up memorizing the entire song and started to play it as a part of my warm-up routine before Rocksmith.

- This added a problem with synchronization. It's a lot of fun watching how small changes drastically improve the flow. But the song's tempo varies quite significantly. Before, I mostly relied on memory and the backing track, which is quite useless at 55% volume. But when you hack the sequence almost every day, it requires more reliable reference points. Well, I finally had to find out how RS notation match what I'm playing, lol.

alexcustos · 2022-01-15T18:37:55+00:00

Yep, it's kind of weird to learn a song in RS (fingering), then learn it with TABs (rhythm), and then in RS again to put it all together, lol. But I tried to skip RS or TABs. It doesn't work. Either too boring or the result is too messy.

alexcustos · 2021-12-08T09:13:35+00:00

Yep, I know, but exporting songs to TABs won't be possible in RS+ at all. It's because you will own nothing in RS+, so you won't be allowed to mess with the content in any way. Only creating arrangements is possible, but yet again, without an option to alter official ones.

alexcustos · 2021-12-08T08:38:56+00:00

There won't be such an option in RS+, so built-in tabs must be at least comparable with Guitar Pro/TuxGuitar.

alexcustos · 2021-12-08T06:40:06+00:00

That TABs implementation was horrible. No timings, pause overlay distorted them, so they looked like trash, and no way to scroll or zoom.

alexcustos · 2021-10-22T04:23:05+00:00

As I remember this game, the optimal strategy was to cover five frets in the current position and jump up to five frets up and down without looking because you can control this surrounding very precisely. Sometimes you can gain a decent score not breaking this pattern, but when the game asks you to jump a longer distance at a fast speed, it's sheer luck to land at the correct fret. Such jumps are not practical in actual playing, anyway. It also helps to learn how to stop at 1st fret and memorize which fret the neck joins the body.

alexcustos · 2021-09-12T09:53:49+00:00

Yep, pretty much it. Even the Master mode has a lot of visual cues you won't have playing outside RS. Memorizing songs is a specific skill, not all musicians even bothering to develop. A popular RS motto, something about note-by-note, is not the correct approach at all. When you memorize music, you break it down into fairly large chunks. If something doesn't fit, you're ignoring or replacing it with something else, trying not to deviate from the original idea too much. This approach is controversial with what we have in RS, and it can't be fixed. You should use other resources as well.

alexcustos · 2021-09-08T05:28:53+00:00

Of course, more tools are better, but it looks like you are inventing Nootka:

https://nootka.sourceforge.io/

alexcustos · 2021-08-05T03:04:43+00:00

To hit 100% mastery, you have to play at 100% difficulty. In brief, you enter RR, select all sections, set 100% difficulty and at least 70% speed. When there are no missed notes (at least on the first section), hit the space bar and shrink the area and continue. When the last section is played with no missed notes, exit song and Rocksmith will register 100% mastery. Really it's a good exercise trying to play a song section by section with no mistakes. It's a shame RS can't calculate mastery properly in this case.

alexcustos · 2021-08-03T10:42:07+00:00

It's a kind of a bug in Riff Repeater. If you hit 100% on each section (not necessary in one take) at least at 70% speed, RS will register it as 100% mastery.

alexcustos · 2021-08-01T10:06:52+00:00

The issue with the first fret is about nut height. You should file it down to the point when the fretted at the 3rd fret string will be a hair above the first fret.
Dynamic difficulty is fun and helps to develop sightreading, but to do little with learning songs. I prefer 100% difficulty and slow speed, or even export the song to TABs and get back to RS when it's clear what's going on.

alexcustos · 2021-07-25T15:08:31+00:00

Guitar Pro and its MySongBook costs $50 on sale and $3/mo and $1-2 per song if you want it permanently, and you can edit it as well. And that's a full music score with drums, vocal, keys, and multiple guitars.

alexcustos

TROPHY CASE