Billkwando

Yeah - it was an easy $20 to spend... gotta give thanks to @@raynebc for having the GPA import in EOF!

 

The nice thing is that it can be fun outside of Rocksmith as well - if you want to learn to sight read score/tab, but still play along to an mp3.  As good as Rocksmith is, for some, I hope it is a stepping stone towards not NEEDing it to play songs you like :)

Actually trying to play along with Go Play Along would give me a headache. I'm glad we don't need it for that!

 

 When I saw how powerful this tool was today, I purchased it.  I think it will save me hundreds of hours of banging my head on the desk because a drummer dropped tempo 4x in a 10 second timeframe

Yeah, I bought it within, like, an hour of downloading it.

My only recommendation is to add the 3 sec of slience in Audacity before you do ANYthing else.  It will work if you don't and then later add it in EOF, but I just find it easier.

Definitely before you try to time lyrics with Ultrastar, or you're screwed! In UC, if you ever need to use it, you navigate to your guitar.ogg (with leading silence already added) rather than the MP3, cos you want the lyrics to be timed with the added silence in mind.

That's great!  I downloaded TuxGuitar and tried importing some of my midi files, and found that it does it almost flawlessly.  I'm sure that since I can save that converted data to GP5, I can then use GPA to get a syncronized version of the track in 1/100th of the time that it took me to do it manually.  90% of my time in creating customs has been syncing up beats to the audio, so this is a God-send.   :grin:

I remember reading your post about agonizing over every note and hoped you would follow the trend and move over to GPA. :D

Edit: Nice avatar, btw. ;)

Hi,

 

  About the DDC question :

    DDC was conceived to work with CDLCs which have notes well synchronized with the rhythm and not only with the soundtrack.

    If the notes are not in sync with the beats (vertical bars in EOF), or if the time signature is not correctly set in EOF, the categorization process of DDC will affect too many notes to the same level. So you will have too many notes which can appear at the same level of difficulty.

I had some hilarious results with some of my early customs because of this, cos I wasn't synching to the measures, but only to the music. Like, note highways with 0 notes on them and stuff like that.

I use GP, GPA EoF, Ultrastar, and the Toolkit. I don't add the leading silence externally currently (only in EoF, and I don't fill up the empty space because that throws the measures off), which means that my customs have no count in....but you can see the notes coming, so no biggie.

@@ice9 @@smirocsmo and others, do you think TuxGuitar is better than Guitar Pro? I use Guitar Pro mainly for changing the strings in which notes are played (which is a really slow process because it just can't select all the notes with same pitch) and for putting slides, hammer-ons/pull-offs, harmonics and vibrato. For main low level editing I use a program called Aria Maestosa which works with MIDI, but has a lot of good things for selection and makes it -really easy to add notes and make riffs/phrases (it has a tab view mode, since the main mode is a music score one). I think I will test it today and se if it solves my problems

I use EoF for changing individual notes or chords by clicking on the note, then hitting N. I can switch the fret and string without changing the timing, and there's the convenient "Next" (arrow) button that lets you advance to the next note. I use that a lot for bass tabs that unnecessarily require you to keep going back and forth between the 2nd and 5th frets, when there's a perfectly good open string right below. And RAKES!

hey guys thanks for the replies, yeh the song i was referring to is mostly power chords which i can play with my eyes shut its one of my fav songs, but its that intro part which i cant seem to get right and all the tabs iv looked at when played dont seem to sound right, so was just gonna put it in RS to get a feel for it, thats practically what i use RS for songs i can already play and as i said just getting timings right or if something dont sound right when i play it then RS usually helps out same with a song called bigger than kiss by teenage bottlerocket, i think therees about 4 chords throughout the whole song but i just cant seem to gel the chorus and verses together, so wanna get it in there just to make everything click, gonna try and have another go later when the lil ones in bed or tomorrow when i got a full day to play around with things, the only thing im dreading is getting tones right once i get the initial parts right

There's a sticky I believe where you can go to a page that has all the tones in xml format from the existing songs, so the easiest thing to do if you're starting out is to pick a tone that you think sounds similar, then download it and edit it.

You go into tone designer in the game and pick that tone and play with it and adjust everything until it sounds good to you....then load the downloaded tone in the Toolkit and edit the same settings you did in the game.

Oh yeah song2tab or whatever it's called only works with RS1 files, right?

That looks pretty right to me, but you also need a tone at 0ms to be the default. Mark the very first measure and add a tone there. When you go to save, it will ask you about making a default tone. Click yes and click the Default button on your starting tone.

Also check the disable tone changes box, since you have more than one tone...though that's not the solution to your problem, just a tip.

Helpful tips here toohttp://customsforge.com/topic/5744-custom-tone-help/:

yeah i was just having a look again, though when i add the GP file it only gives some of the notes not chords, just the root note if you like, and then so far into the song all notes just disappear, the song im trying to get is alkaline trio - continental, not got time to tinker about with too much till i get a day free but so far its gvin me stress lol

It sounds like a crap tab. I play them in the songsterr player before I even think of downloading them. There's a million John Frusciante tabs where they just tabbed out a lick or two and put that up as the song.

Also, they often consist of multiple guitar tracks, the "meat" of the guitar only being in one instrument track.

I just played the tab you were talking about, and it was 88 measures of mostly power chords:

http://www.songsterr.com/a/wsa/alkaline-trio-continental-tab-s1183t0

Also, if you mean that you've already put it into rocksmith, then that is dynamic difficulty messing with you. You have to go into riff repeater and crank up the difficulty. If it's that, that totally got me too.

and i would make some songs myself as there are a few songs i need to brush up on but unfortunately they aint on the forge downloads tho i have requested em, i do find it really helpful with strum timing etc which you cant really get from a tab sheet, but from what iv looked at i couldnt make head or tale how to make songs and it seemed a much deeper and more complicated process than i initially thought

It's not that bad, especially if the song was recorded to a click track (metronome) or if you use Go Play Along to sync it.

In a nutshell (and very simplified):

• You open EoF, choose New, and browse to your MP3 and EoF will pull the artist and song name from the ID3 tag.
• Browse to the (hopefully already synced with GPA XML or) Guitar Pro file (from songsterr.com or wherever), which will give you your notes. Add leading silence somewhere along the way, if needed.
• Play through the track with the metrognome and claps turned on to make sure notes line up.
• Seek to the measures where you wish to add tone changes and put those in.
• Create your 30 second preview
• Do the Wwise thing to get your in game audio tracks (apparently the toolkit will do that for you too if you have Wwise installed)
• Tap out your vocals in Ultrastar Creator (making sure to put a + sign between syllables in words that have more than one.
• Add your actual designed tones and pack it up with the toolkit

If you decide you want to try it, there's more detail than this, but that's the general flow. I also have a numbered thread full of good questions and answers, so you may wanna check that out too:

http://customsforge.com/topic/4787-everything-i-always-wanted-to-know-about-custom-creation-but-forgot-to-ask/?hl=billkwando&do=findComment&comment=31225

1. I think you can unpack/repack them with the Toolkit.

2. Those must be mislabeled, if you can't adjust the difficulty in Riff Repeater.

3. I have a Panasonic U50 50" plasma and a Denon 1312 receiver, and get no noticeable lag on 360 hooked up with HDMI. Playing customs on the PC I use component video cables, and a optical for audio, so I'm no help there. I have noticed that the flashing dot setting in options is pretty useless/incomprehensible.

4. You should be able to extract tabs with the toolkit as well (at least with customs). BTW, I'm one of those people who takes all the good guitar parts and mashes them into one track, so sorry about that, lol. I see it as a tool for the lone guitarist, and I try to make my versions so you could play them on a street corner with a hat for change and sound good. :P

Edit: You can find the toolkit and posts about it here: http://customsforge.com/forum/56-rocksmith-custom-tool-kit/

I think he

Go the CDLC database and search for the titles -- there's a DD column.

 

http://search.customsforge.com/

 

If a CDLC doesn't have DD, you can use the Dynamic Difficulty Creator (DDC) in the Rocksmith Toolkit.

I think he means ones on his HDD that didn't come from here, but the 2nd tip is a good one! :D

I think you can use the toolkit to do the conversion now, no need for Wwise. Have a look at the OGG tab.

0_o

Really??? Wwise is so tedious. I gotta check that out. Which tab is it? (I'm not at that pc right now).

Edit: Oh nm, I see now.

You mean besides loading it in-game, right? You can easily tell, at least if it has DD at all.

What setting should it be on? I've never checked mine...

You can try this, it definitely works:

http://customsforge.com/page/customsforge_rs_2014_cdlc.html/_/pc-enabled-rs-2014-cdlc/computer-blue-r3537

I haven't barely ever had issues with the toollkit packing files, and I've made a few customs. I guess it's good I always test.

MadMaxx, on 03 May 2014 - 5:40 PM, said:

  i modified my file with the values 80,120,160,240, 320, 400, 480, 560, 640 but in the game the waves all look the same, it looks like they are all default. There must be something that we are missing.

  Do your vibratos in the game look different?

 

I thought I could see a difference between 80 & 120, but it could be just because I also made the note tails longer.

The only thing I can think of is to double check that your EOF project defines the bass track's tuning as Eb and the toolkit does as well.

Yeah, I'm a big dummy. It wasn't set on the bass track in EoF. I guess I assumed setting the guitar would do it.

Thanks!

I have this song I'm working on for my wife (Extreme - Tragic Comic, first draft custom is already up if you wish to test) and it's in Eb and for some reason, the bass is detecting everything as being 1 fret lower than it should be (like if I fret open notes at the first fret, it thinks that's right). I don't seem to be having this problem with the guitar and I thought I set all the tuning stuff right. Any thoughts?

If you can reproduce that problem, please send me project file and a set of steps (ie. select notes # to #, copy to clipboard, search for next instance of fret catalog entry #, paste).

Fortunately (for my project, if not for testing) I wasn't able to replicate it a 2nd time, and your solution worked out perfectly! Thanks again! :D

Make sure to put + signs between your syllables. It's actually easier to time the lyrics when the words are split up. Make sure you go through it carefully. There's no way to save a file in Ultrastar until you've finished timing the whole thing, so there's no way to stop and adjust the lyrics partway through if you made a mistake. It's easier to edit after in EoF but still not exactly simple. Make sure to re-enable click and drag if you had it disabled, cos otherwise you can't move the words around.

Try not to move the words too far out, because if they're not highlighted in blue, they won't show up in the song, and I haven't figured out how to expand the blue area yet.

Oh ok thanks. I'll give it a try.

Make sure you save the package file in the toolkit so if you do another song from the same album, you can load that file and have the album art/info and volumes already set. Also if you need to go back and adjust tone volumes, you'll have it already.

So I just finished my first custom song. Everything looks great (except for a few minor tone adjustments) but the sound of the song itself is way too low. How do I go about increasing the volume of the song??

In the toolkit you can bump the volume up on the track, which probably means you'll have to adjust your tone volumes again. It's on the left, above the box where you load in your arrangements.

I'm try it now and it won't paste the end fret on my slides, even though it had them when I copied.