Shroud

Or you can buy a physical second-hand copy of Rocksmith for PS3 and PS4. I wouldn't be sure the game will run forever on PS4 (I don't have one and I've heard concerns about some dependency on Sony servers) but it will run for sure forever on a PS3 unless the disc gets scratched or the console breaks. The good thing about PS3 is that they're old but not yet vintage, so you can buy one for 20 bucks and the game for 5 or 10.

Chiming in to the old thread... I learned soloing very soon when picking up the guitar thanks to my first guitar teacher who gave me handouts transcriptions of various blues/rock songs with solo guitarists who were neither too simple nor too fast. Based on my experience I would totally recommend checking out any song by Pink Floyd and Thin Lizzy.

Absolutely agree on visiting a few stores and try out different models in your price range. Nowadays there are a LOT of choices, and the good news is that even cheap instruments are good enough in quality (I started playing in the early 90s and I can testify the quality has seriously improved. Just avoid the absolute cheapest, usually pop-up brands that try and disappear in a few years, and you are quite safe. Since you live in Europe, browse thomann.de website which I think is the largest online music retailer in the old continent, even if you don't buy your instruments online you'll generally find very useful reviews. Then besides your target price range, your main concern will be the general guitar type. Fender Stratocaster type is possibly good for all genres of music but especially good if you like playing with clean sounds, traditional effect pedals, or not too extreme distorsions, both rhythm and soloing. Gibsons type like Epiphone for more bluesy sounds but also hard rock. Charvel/Jackson types for heavy metal. Semiacoustics for clean jazz. Fender Telecaster types for electric country/folk and funk rhythms. But reality is that every guitar type can be used on a very large range of music so don't be afraid Amplifiers and effect pedals will also change your sound shape a lot so the native guitar sound may not end up being the most important. Instead, make sure the guitar FEELS comfortable in your hands, as shape, weight, neck measurements etc can vary a lot, and different people have different hands. Pay special attention to the number of frets (my very first Squier had 21 only, as a kid I was disappointed to discover i didn't have enough frets for certain solos) and to the type of bridge in case you want to learn using the whammy bar seriously. If you have a favourite guitarist or two you wish to learn their songs, of course the best idea is to choose a similar guitar And if you're serious about learning guitar, don't worry too much about your first because it definitely won't be your last

So it's a bit like a Rocksmith clone? It already looks pretty good, even if it doesn't have note detection, it can still be a good practice tool. But I gotta ask... what is your primary purpose here? Are you doing this just because you like programming, or is there something about Rocksmith you don't like and your target is to replace it with something different (I can't tell from that picture) and a mod just wouldn't be able to? Good luck with your project anyway!

I know we have LOTS of Red Hot Chili Peppers CDLC already, but this old neglected album has a bunch of gems that would be awesome esp. for bassists

This sounds familiar... are you using USB speakers? I think I had a similar problem long ago with distorted sound since the startup screen (and some crashes in-game) and it seemed the culprit was my USB headset, maybe it mis-interacted with the RS cable (the real issue could have been with neighbouring USB ports?). I since then switched to analog stereo headphones and never had the problem again. Could that be your case as well?

This might sound like a strange request but I wonder if anyone has any suggestion here... I am looking for some app (Android or website-based) to help organise my practicing. I would like to be able to enter a list of practice items (such as individual songs, exercises, or topics) and mark down whenever I spend time on them, with the app remembering the last time I did, so that I am aware of how many days have passed since last time. I don't need statistics, or anything more detailed than just marking "done" on a given day. Mostly the purpose is to make sure I don't neglect certain types of practice for too long. If the app has reminders, for example when exceeding a certain number of days without doing a certain exercise then even better. The reason I want such thing is because I currently cannot afford to have a fixed practice schedule. I practice whenever I have enough time and peace, but I don't know in advance when it happens. So I need something to remind me what I haven't practiced lately. At the moment I am using an app meant for house chores which is not bad: instead of telling me "you haven't vacuumed for a whole month" I have created custom items that tell me "you haven't practiced improvisation for a whole month", but if I could find a music specific app then it would be much better. Any suggestions?

Great pick! Kate Bush is still somewhat under-represented in CDLCs, but there are more of her songs which would be good on bass, for example "Kite" and "Saxophone Song" from the same album.

Do you mean that the original audio of the song is too loud, or that the sound of your guitar is too loud? If the problem is with the original song audio, you can open the CDLC with Custom Forge Song Manager, right-click on it, select "Edit Song Information" and then modify the "Song Volume" value. If the problem is with the guitar sound, you need to edit the "tones" used by the CDLC, but Custom Forge Song Manager doesn't do that. If you don't mind a non-permanent solution, from within the Rocksmith game you can pick any existing tone from your DLC/CDLC collection or create your own tone, and assign it to one of the quick tones slots, so that you can switch to using that tone while playing a song by hitting the corresponding key 2, 3 or 4 on the keyboard. This is what I use when I stumble on a CDLC that has an annoying or flat-out wrong tone

Quite old classic from John Lennon together with Elton John, I just realized yesterday night what a fun bass workout it has!

Was just looking at coldrampage's post in this thread below, but apparently I cannot reply there to add this question of mine: I must have CDLCs in my collection that are affected by the "dead tone" problem, but it's hard to figure out all of them, especially because playing the bass means that often tones aren't very different from no tone at all. So I usually notice the tones have died only when I start playing a CDLC that has been pitch shifted, and hear that the notes are now all wrong... by which time who knows what was the previous CDLC that killed everyone's tones coldrampage suggests that such CDLCs can be fixed by adding tones using the CFSM. But can you also spot such problematic CDLCs directly from the CFSM list, when you don't know which CDLCs have the issue? And/or is there a batch repair that would fix all dead tone CDLCs?

I noticed some time ago that the "report" functionality has actually improved, there are now more options and even the possibility to add some free-text explanation. In addition, it seems that reporting songs now adds a red flag beside them without immediately removing them from being downloadable. These are really useful improvements, thanks a lot!

This is not a technical question, but just a curiosity about how do you all feel about Rocksmith having a distinction between lead and rhythm guitar. Note that I mostly use Rocksmith with the bass actually but as a long-time guitarist I have always found the "lead vs rhythm" distinction bogus. I didn't go to "lead guitar" lessons when I was young, I went to just guitar lessons. As a guitar student, you study pretty much everything, and everything is just guitar. The distinction is in my opinion a relic of certain old rock bands, but it kicks in only if you happen to join a band where there is more than a guitarist, and (in the good cases) the two or more guitarists decide to split responsibilities or (in the bad cases) social pressure within the band force the supposedly least skilled/experienced guitarist to avoid solos. Anyway, going back to Rocksmith, I don't think it was a great idea to separate lead and rhythm paths. It's confusing at best, and teaching a bad concept at worse. There's plenty of songs with a single guitar track, but it could be anything, including strumming chords or riffing rhythms. Conversely, there's another plenty of songs with multiple guitar tracks, but where neither has a solo (supposedly a feature that qualifies it as "lead"), or where both tracks have a solo... especially in the heavy metal genre, there's bands with two or three guitarists taking turns to solo within the same song, would you expect all the solos to be condensed in the same lead path (sometimes impossible when the solos overlap) or would you expect each path to wholly cover a separate guitar track in the original song? Either way, confusing... many ways what you find in one path is not what you would expect. I wish Rocksmith simply had only one guitar path and one bass path, and then allow to choose from multiple guitar parts if the song has more than one, without having to switch path, just like it does when you have alternate charts, only with more visibility or explanation about what each part includes. I don't know if it's just me, but do you think... are separate lead and rhythm paths that useful to you?

With customforge forums being specifically dedicated to CDLC and only marginally on discussions about studying, composing, performing and such, I wonder do you regularly visit other online forums for musicians? Do you have any good recommendations for bass learners? I used to visit harmonycentral forums long ago but they are nearly dead nowadays. Also, there was quite too high amount of toxicity for my tastes there.

Harris is still out of the question for me as well, even with a pick. The exercises I chose for my own fingerpicking at this stage are all of the "fundamentals" type, meaning low-complexity and continuously repeatable. This is what I do on any instrument when I feel I have a basic mechanic to build or flaw to correct, based on the "divide and conquer" principle (i.e. isolate one minimal skill and focus on that). The most obvious first exercise was just to play 8ths strictly alternating index/middle, single string and single fret. The note chosen doesn't matter, but it shouldn't be the same each time, so that I build consistency with different string tensions, therefore I vary between low and high frets. More importantly, I made sure to do this on each string every time I practiced. At the very beginning, the difference between my index and middle picking was so evident, that I did not use the metronome, in order to focus on sound and volume consistency; but eventually I had to add the metronome because timing consistency is another side of the matter. From this most basic exercise, I created two branches. The first branch is for practicing changing string while alternate picking. So I simply substitute one note every four with another note on an adjacent string, and practice a bit every pattern on every pair of strings. For instance (using EADG to mark the strings but not the notes, which are still arbitrary) EEEA, EEAE, EAEE, AEEE and then AAAE, AAEA, AEAA, EAAA... The point is to practice all cases of moving up/down a string with different fingers while still trying to make all notes sound identical. When this becomes too easy, move on to patterns with two+two notes like EEAA, EAAE... or alternate two patterns, or apply them to non adjacent strings, or just increase speed. The second branch is about accents, breaks and subdivision. I stay on the single note single string but accent one note every four, or skip one note every four (then when ready, accent or skip two, alternate two patterns etc.) and also practice triplets, quintuplets, septuplets or shuffle timing.

Coming back to my own thread after half a year... Eventually I did not use any bass exercise book and ended up designing my own exercises for right hand fingerpicking. I got rid of my worst index/middle fingers inconsistencies and now I play significantly more naturally with alternate picking. One thing where I was really bad at was fast octaves. Now the simplest ones (one note down, one note up) are almost a joke after practicing alternate picking, plus playing Laura Branigan's "Gloria" as a cardio every now and then but more galloping octaves like Rod Stewart's "Da ya think I'm sexy" are still very challenging. In such case now my fingers want to always play different strings, index on the lower and middle on the higher, and so long for alternating...

I don't know the two songs in question, but "hammer-on from nowhere" is definitely a guitar technique, for example Joe Satriani does it very often. "Pull-off from nowhere" is not strictly impossible (you could pull the string slightly sideways without pressing down i.e. without producing a note, then release it to cause the pull-off and play the empty string) but it's definitely awkward and I couldn't quote a single example song that uses it. "Bending harmonics" can be done with the whammy bar (as coldrampage already said). I recommend listening to "Where were you" and "Two rivers" by Jeff Beck (from the album "Jeff Beck's Guitar Shop") and to the solo of "Frank" by Steve Vai (from the album "The Ultra Zone"), all of which contain masterful examples of bending harmonics

I'll back "Sample in a Jar" and add "Scent of a Mule" and "Tweezer" but I expect Phish songs to be a nightmare to chart.

You've been heard

It was charted, both guitar and bass... maybe it was removed?

This probably doesn't help your case, but if you have switched to using a different audio output, try reverting to what you used previously. For me, all the RS crashes I ever had were caused by audio, and were never solved by reinstalling. In particular, USB headphones cause random crashes for me, so I only use audio jack headphones with the game when not using speakers.

There are a lot of CDLC with non-standard tunings. These are always VERY annoying, because not every guitar or bass model allows for easily re-tuning your strings, for example if you have a (very common) Floyd Rose bridge on your guitar, even re-tuning a single string requires to unbolt the nut and adjust all of them. The Custom Forge Song Manager tool can help with non-standard tunings where all strings are tuned up or down by the same amount, by converting a CDLC into standard tuning and applying a pitch shifter. It won't sound beautiful in-game however, and it can't handle properly CDLCs with lead/rhythm/bass charts in different tuning, or CDLCs that do not have a lead chart. So please please please... do not make CDLCs in non-standard tuning unless necessary! There are many CDLCs in Eb tunings where there are NO NOTES on open strings (fret zero) and no harmonics played. This means it is unnecessary to tune the instruments other than in E standard. If you usually just grab tabs from websites and turn them into CDLCs, when you see that they have Eb tuning instead of E, be aware that many times this means they were probably done by a BAD charter who maybe didn't even bother to tune their own instrument before charting the tabs, at which point they are also likely to have other mistakes. Don't think that a bad CDLC is better than no CDLC at all, it is worse because other potential (good) charters will think the song is already done and won't do their own CDLC of it. And be aware that most people will simply trash your CDLC after downloading, if they see it requires non-standard tuning, just like I used to do before figuring out how to convert them. Sorry for the rant!

I already forgot about this question of mine Well in any case, if anyone's interested, I ended up for the moment assigning the following three override tones: 2- Rocksmith Theme bass tone: for most soft/regular songs 3- Cherub Rock bass tone: for a mildly distorted punch 4- simple custom tone of my own with a -1 semitone pitch shift I figured out that the last one is a DEALMAKER for CDLCs that are bass-only with Eb tuning, because the CFSM's pitch shifter unfortunately cannot successfully convert to E standard a song that doesn't have the Lead Guitar part, it only changes the tuning so that it doesn't require to re-tune the instrument, but it fails to apply an actual pitch shift to the tone. But now I can just press '4' and apply a pitch shift on the fly, and voilà! Lots of new CDLCs I can play with out re-tuning my bass

I am looking for suggestions on bass tones mainly for the purpose of overriding the tone on CDLCs where the tone designed by the author isn't really good. I have a bunch of CDLCs with the tone so bad that listening to what I'm playing becomes a torture, but instead of keep bothering the author to fix the tone, I can just try to override it with another tone "stolen" from another song. I thought that this required some heavy editing of the CDLC itself, but I just saw a video about the "tone assignment" in-game functionality which I never noticed before, and now I am intrigued by the possibility of just switching on-the-fly, even if it's clearly not a permanent fix. So for that functionality it looks like you can assign a maximum to 3 tones to hotkeys... what would be your recommendations for 3 bass tones (preferably from core RS songs or Cherub Rock so you can be sure I already have them) that could reasonably cover most of the use cases i.e. when special effects (delay, flanger...) are not required?

Not much room there to make it easier, but I definitely had to invert the string to make it look more like TABs. I always had serious issues with RS "notation" since the start, and I still have them when playing guitar charts. In fact, I mostly use RS with the bass instead, simply because there are less strings, less notes, and very few chords or solos I am not a fan of dynamic difficulties at all, but obviously you can use them to decrease the notes on the screen. Even with bass charts, there are still cases where the 3D graphics make it hard for me to figure out the exact timing of the notes, because two consecutive notes on different strings appear at a spatial distance which doesn't correspond to the time distance. What helps me there usually, is to try and look more at the tempo lines below the notes, instead of just at the notes (but be aware that there are CDLCs with pretty messy tempo lines). Open strings also confuse me a lot, and I wish there was an option to show them as a "zero fret" notes instead of the whole string highlighted. To top it all, sometimes the visuals don't seem to sync well with the audio... I tend to think this is a problem with my GPU or CPU because it seems to happen a bit random, but anyway when it happens I also noticed that my scores are better if I follow the audio instead of the video (meaning, if I don't try to "hit" the notes when they reach the bottom of the screen, but if I play them according to the audio), so I second arrov's recommendation to use your ears more than your eyes