PhamNuwen

I'm not sure if this was already mentioned here, but there's a free little app that you can use to figure out the tuning frequency (438, 440, 442...whatever) of a song. Technically it's a demo of the tONaRT library, which the company is licensing to pro audio software manufacturers, but it serves our purposes just fine. You can download it here: http://www.zplane.de/index.php?page=description-tonart ("download demo" button in the top right corner). The song you wish to analyze has to be in .wav format. You simply drag&drop it onto the app's window, and the app will show you the song's key, and tuning frequency. Have fun, PhamNuwen

I can confirm this is fixed now, awesome! :)

Hi all, I'm having a strange problem with album art for my latest CDLC. It's not showing up in the song list (the Rocksmith logo is shown instead) unless the song is selected. Then the album art appears correctly. Once you move to another song, it shows the logo again. I've tried JPEG, PNG, and DDS with pre-generated MIPmaps, nothing seems to help. I even tried a different image altogether, same thing. I've never encountered this problem with any of my older CDLCs, just this latest one. The images are 512x512 by the way, like it says in the toolkit. Did anyone else see this, and is there a solution? Thanks.

My process (for what it's worth): Gather as much material on the song as possible, including YouTube covers. Usually no single source is 100% accurate. I was so frustrated by the general lack of quality tabs that I started tabbing songs myself from scratch lately. Tempo map in EoF as accurately as possible. I prefer to use the spectrogram. I start with an approximate BPM, then drag around beats where I can see clear transients. Afterwards, I listen to the entire song with the metronome on, and tweak where necessary. Enter notes directly in EoF. EoF's interface not the best, but you get used to it after a while. Knowing hotkeys helps quite a bit. I try to copy & paste as much as possible, with resnap (Ctrl+Shift+R) afterwards. Create tones in RS, import them into the toolkit, add the rest of the files (song itself, album art, preview file etc.) Test, release.

I wanted to do guitar for SotW as well, but the chart I have is just bad, with almost no relation to the actual song. :) The bass chart was equally bad, but fortunately I found an excellent bass cover on YouTube, which I used instead. The YouTuber TJH3113 has many great bass covers, and among them some JT, so I plan to use his videos as reference for CDLC in the future as well.

I played guitar (badly) for many years, but I switched to bass about 18 months ago, and what I like about the difficulty is that it's much more gradual. In other words, you can find songs at pretty much any difficulty level from trivial to insane, whereas with (lead) guitar, it's usually easy/medium riffs coupled with very difficult solos. So you either stick to the riffs, or invest some major sweat in the riff repeater to be able to play solos, which for me is not that fun, and besides, I don't have that kind of free time anymore. With the bass, you can always find a song you can play in its entirety, perhaps with a couple of mistakes. It's very rare that I have to go to the riff repeater and work on a single phrase for any extended period of time. With more difficult songs, I slow them down to 80-90% to learn them first, (@100% difficulty) then increase the speed slowly up to 100%.

Songs from the Wood is done (bass only for now).

Slow doesn't necessarily mean 50%. I prefer to learn at 80-90%. That's not really slow enough to make playing difficult, but that small decrease in tempo is usually enough for me to see and hit all the notes properly.

Nice! This will come in handy for discovering new songs to play.

I also vote for 100% difficulty and slow speed. A lot of guitar playing is about muscle memory. You don't want to train your muscles to do the wrong thing, only to re-train them later to do the right one.

As a fan of progressive music of all kinds, I'll be keeping an eye out for your CDLC releases. :) I'm especially looking forward to Acres Wild and Heavy Horses. *nudge* *nudge* *wink* *wink*

Thanks Aludog, I think I'll do Songs from the Wood next, that should keep me busy for a while. :)

Just keep at it man. I can tell you, after playing guitar on and off for 20 years, and getting precisely nowhere, RS is the best thing there is for keeping you engaged. I'm using it to learn bass, and after a year of playing, I can absolutely feel myself progressing. I can play songs I would not dream of trying when I was starting out.

I think it would be enough if there was a way to "append" a revision of a CDLC to the existing entry in the database. There could be a button "Add Revision" which would let you add a download link, and write a description of your revision, which would be added as a post in the CDLC's thread. You can do this right now just by posting into the thread, but the difference would be that a link to the revision would appear in or below the top post, where people downloading the CDLC are more likely to see it. The users visiting the CDLC thread would see something like: "Download link: ..." and under it "Revision by soandso: ...." with a link to the actual post further down in the thread.

Marty, if you find that PDF, feel free to PM it to me, but there's no rush. I have plenty of material to go through.

I work for a major software company, so I know exactly what you're talking about. :)

Updated to version 0.9. Added rhythm guitar track, custom guitar tone (clean, really) + small tweaks to the volume levels. Pruitt, it you don't find any major problems with this version, it's going to be the 1.0, and I'll post it to the database.

The only thing I really wish Rocksmith had is ASIO support. I have a Scarlett 2i2 and a Zoom B3, and both have pretty much zero latency with ASIO, yet don't work nearly as well with RS as my crappy built-in "HD audio" soundcard. But of course, if RS fully supported ASIO, they would loose their "protection" in the form of the real tone cable. Edit: although, they could still require it to be plugged in, and support input from other devices. I have plenty of free USB ports.

I'm a fan of the open source approach as well. I've made numerous small tweaks to other people's customs, ranging from removing a "The" at the beginning of the "Sort Name" field, adding a custom tone where there was none, splitting the song into sections for easier riff repeating, to fixing wrong charts. I don't feel like I can upload the new versions under my own name, but if there was a way to attach these tweaks to the original database entry, I'd gladly do that. Of course, some of those originated from Smithy's, and don't have a database entry here yet.

As long as we're building castles in the air... App opens up, showing all .psarcs in a folder (can be set to RS DLC folder or a different one) in a sortable list, with album covers etc.Selecting a song starts playback like in learn a song mode, except without DDC (always 100% difficulty).App renders note highway using OpenGL, with the ability to adjust colors, and flip the neck vertically (tab compatible) and horizontally (lefties).Playback is via ASIO (ASIO4All exists for people without ASIO-capable soundcards).Optional sound input, mixed into the song being played. Not necessary if player wants to use direct monitoring.If input is used, app acts like a VST host, allowing one to load his or her favorite amp sim. App could save a VST preset for each song, or even switch presets based on tone changes.Riff repeater is activated by pressing space like in RS. Loop points snap to sections, phrases, and bars.Integrated time-stretching library allows playback at lower speeds, with optional automatic speed-up, and adjustable step (10%, 5%, 1%...)I almost forgot: support for extended range insturments (5+ string basses and 7+ string guitars) This may sound like a pipe dream, but a lot of the code is already out there. In the past I modified the open source VST host to create a synth preset generator, and it wasn't that difficult. Ogg playback is a no brainer, time stretching is available, so the only part that would have to be coded from scratch is interpreting the RS XML into an RS-like note highway.

That's not a bad idea MartyV. I would probably ditch Rocksmith for such an app, if it was available. It would be best if it could play an Ogg Vorbis file + Rocksmith XML out of EOF, then we could use all the existing RS CDLCs. Maybe it could actually incorporate the CLDC unpacking code from the Toolkit to load .psarcs directly. Add to that a time-stretching library, a simple OpenGL-based 3D rendering of the note highway, and ASIO support, and it would be a killer app. Also, without the need for tone recognition, you could use real gear and/or software amp sims like TH2 or GuitarRig for tones. I would personally much prefer to use my Zoom B3 for both tone and I/O. It's too bad I don't really have time to code it up. I have experience with both OpenGL and ASIO, so if someone starts the project, I'm willing to lend a hand in those areas.

Here's version 0.7 with the following changes: Sustains removed (except where they belong, I hope :wink: )Second riff of pre-verse shifted one string up to a more logical position, as suggestedNew tone, where I tried EQ-ing before the amp + some compression Next: guitar track

Thanks for the comprehensive feedback! :) Can you tell me which part you play differently? I never played Living... before, and my only source was a tab downloaded from UltimateGuitar. Sustains: I'm thinking about removing sustains from some of the shortest notes completely, thus leaving them up to the player. I also noticed that the original tab is a bit off while playing it, so I'll definitely plan to adjust by ear. Tone: I'm also playing roundwounds, and I wasn't able to get the grit out of the tone without making it sound totally muddy. Playing on the neck PU and cutting the treble a bit seems to help though. I'll keep tweaking it. Volume: I noticed this as well. It's probably because this song was recorded before the "loudness wars" started, and isn't compressed beyond recognition like some modern ones. I'll try boosting it a little bit.

I have a rather basic Ibanez SR 300, which is nevertheless very nice to play: http://i.imgur.com/mURtGvV.jpg (Plus an older Ibanez guitar, and a Yamaha guitar I'm no longer playing that much.) I'm really lusting after this though, the Prestige 5005E: http://i.imgur.com/EcJ634q.jpg

Bass: Zoom B3 into headphones / nearfield monitors, and I absolutely love it. Guitar: Guitar Rig 5 from Native Instruments, though I don't play as much guitar anymore.