Shroud

I've been playing bass only for half a year but guitar for much longer (started 30 years ago, on-and-off several times) so take my advice with a grain of salt... For ear training it's always been difficult for me to find ways to improve alone, without other musicians backing up. One thing in Rocksmith, perhaps not exactly targeted at ear training but which I find useful, is the jam session mode. There you can setup different keys and modes, and improvise at your own pace across chords changes. For drilling basics, my favourite way is actually to pick interesting repetitive patterns in songs I like and use riff repeater to practice them at different speeds. A couple of my recent favourites are Jethro Tull's "Living in the Past" and Midnight Oil's "Stand in Line".

Wonderful article, thanks! Having previously transcribed for RockBand, I also suggest the use of stem separators like Spleeter, but be aware that sometimes some notes can end up in another stem so always remember to listen at the full audio afterwards.

Excellent question... I mostly play bass with Rocksmith, have played for about half a year now, and nowadays I pretty much always start by setting difficulty at 100% and sight read everything at first try. Then obviously, sometimes there's a song which is too difficult for me to play because I can't really follow up what's in the screen (this is especially true for songs with lots of empty string notes, which confuse me immensely when they mix up with fretted notes). When this happens, I use the riff repeater to practice separate sections, slowed down for example to 50% until I understand which notes to play, then gradually increase the speed up to 100%. With the guitar, typically I just can't sight read at all because there's too many strings, too many notes, chords and solos... Unlike with bass, I do not accept the idea of playing less notes than the full score, with the exceptions of (1) removing non-essential notes from chords and (2) cut corners in sloppy or improvised solos. So the only way for me is again to slow down the tempo, but I then actually prefer to learn a song at no tempo, meaning without following a specific timing, be it background track or metronome. I just like keeping the transcription open in front of me and learn different sections at my own pace, then when I feel ready I jump to play on top of the record. In brief, I very rarely use Rocksmith with guitar at all, because it doesn't really suit my learning habits. And by the way, I've been overall playing guitar for 30 years, and bass for 6 month. That probably explains the huge difference for me between the two.

Thank you! I have never used such tool before, I will take a look.

Yes it's very possible I don't know what I am doing... so if I want to make CDLC by R.E.M. to show up in my in-game song list at the top the "R" section, instead of showing up between "Red Hot Chili Peppers" and "Rod Stewart", what should they have in the sortable artist field? What I was trying to do, is change "REM" to "R.E.M." but the dots get removed automatically.

That could be a very useful idea, for those songs that start quite suddenly. As for "figuring out a way", I think the way could be very simply to mix the count-in sound (e.g. a sampled drums stick or hi-hat sound) into the audio track, using an audio editing software such as Reaper, nothing special needed in the chart itself.

There's a bunch of CDLCs for 5-strings bass such as Toto's "Pamela" and Billy Joel's "We didn't start the fire". I am not even sure if RS currently supports 5-strings bass, and because I only own 4-strings, I can't really verify it. Anyway, I think these CDLCs normally have custom tuning on bass, with all strings tuned down as if they were the first 4 strings of a 5-string? So how do you normally play those CDLCs with a 4-string? Do you really tune it down that much? Doesn't it make the strings wobble a lot under such low tension? Is it just better to give up and buy a 5-string? Originally I though people used the pitch shifter in CFSM, but then I found out that it doesn't work on bass, or more precisely it does work but it always applies to the bass whatever shift should be applied to the lead guitar path, so unless the guitar part is for a 7-string then it would never shift the bass correctly.

I doubt it... I checked the story and their customs were removed before I even joined. The Wuthering Heights I have is full-band (lead + rhythm + bass + lyrics) and it appears I downloaded it only 1 year ago, but author info is only a generic "Custom Songs Creator" But you're a hero for posting requests so fast. Also, one of my favourite charters Thanks a lot!

Mmm... I already had this song in my collection, with bass chart, was it removed from the database for some reason?

I noticed that the CFSM "edit information" section doesn't like certain characters to be used in sorting rules, and wipes them away automatically. For example, I have a bunch of R.E.M. CDLC, which appear in two different places in the game list, because half of which are sorted as R.E.M. and half as REM. In CFSM I can see they have different sorting rules, so I tried to change them all to R.E.M., but the CFSM doesn't let me, it wipes away the dot character! There is no reason why the dot character shouldn't be allowed, in fact it just works fine when the CDLC author has set sorting to R.E.M. already, so I think this qualify as a bug.

I endorse this comment I myself really don't have a solution, but as a (lousy) workaround, I have resorted to have CFSM pointing to a "sandbox" dlc folder, where I basically copy only the bunch of CDLC in need of fixing at a given time, which I then copy back to the real dlc folder. This way I can deal with a much smaller number of songs at once and CFSM is much faster.

I think there's many ultra-fine details to adjust when using any slapping techniques, and these will vary a lot among individuals... just because we have different fingers, hands, wrists, arms and so on. I am a bass beginner myself so I shouldn't shell out much specific bass advice, and in addition the "thumb up" technique seems to be the only one that doesn't work at all for me yet I can produce a decent slapping sound using "thumb straight", "thumb down" and "hit through" techniques, but when I try "thumb up" my wrist inevitably ends up muting/muffling all the strings unless I raise my arm a bit, but then I am not relaxed anymore. In more general terms, coming from decades of practicing guitar (but not bass), I can only suggest you to take some time off, like an hour or so, to investigate the technique in the most mindful and analytical possible way. No exercises, no metronome... just plug into an amplifier and try every small variation of your posture and movements that comes to mind, in order to seek the sound result you aiming for. If that requires you to aim a little higher, so be it! Remember to test it around with various notes across the whole neck, as the strings respond differently when you are pressing a high fret rather than a low fret or slapping an empty string, and of course try the techique on all the strings.

Hello, I have several CDLCs with excessively loud audio (read: borderline deafening) compared to the usual average volume. I checked my collection with CFSM and in fact, while most CDLCs have a negative SongVolume (LF) between -5 and -9, those deafening CDLC have all positive values like 0, 1, 2... I recalled seeing an option in CFSM related to adjusting the volume, and I was planning to decrease it by a couple of points for those loud CDLC, but then I noticed that the "Custom Mods" > "Auto Adjust CDLC Volume (POC)" function has a series of preset values including a "Target SongVolume (LF) = -7". Is it just supposed to be left like that default? Should I try with -7, simply test it in-game, and then adjust further down if still too loud, or up if too low? Does the function actually change the audio file itself? If that's the case, I guess it's best to first backup the CDLC, just in case the audio gets too low the first time and boosting it back may result in a more noisy audio. Or does it simply tell the game itself to apply a volume change when playing the audio file (like it happens for example in Rock Band games)? Thanks! EDIT: I went ahead and tried to start the audio volume adjusment feature in CFSM but it asks me to download an FFmpeg setup file at a certain URL, which however leads to a deleted website...

Well it actually didn't seem to change anything in CDLCs without sections in the first place, but it's not the end of the world and it is a much less common case than CDLCs with sections but without DD.

Not at all What you described with those little pictures are usually called 'outside picking' vs 'inside picking'. When used on a long sequence of notes between the same two strings, the two techniques aren't really different in terms of economy of movements, you're in both cases pretty much drawing the same 8-shaped trajectory. Usually, when learning the general alternate picking technique on the guitar, you try to keep alternating downpick/uppick everywhere at all costs, and this results in some outside picking and some inside picking when moving to a different string, depending on whether the last note on the current string is a downpick or uppick. The benefit of alternate picking is that the right hand movement is rather automatic so no need to think much about it. But back to the case when you have a long sequence between the same two strings, the choice is yours, depending on what feels most comfortable to you while delivering the result you want, each song specifically.

It makes sense, without manual action the CFSM can't make a decision on its own whether e.g. a verse or chorus starts.

Yes the CFSM repair DD function worked and fixed the problem thanks! Some of the CDLCs I have don't even show the orange lines below where the difficulty boxes would be... does it mean the song is missing sections in additions to missing DD? And I guess not even the CFSM can add sections... would it screw up the song badly if I tried adding DD anyway with CFSM?

Oh ok... I didn't know they were the same thing, I thought it might be a separate issue... I'll try using the CFSM functionality to create DD and see Thanks!

Larger than a typical guitar pick, and fairly thick. I am currently using a .60mm and I think it's on the soft side already. Since picks are very inexpensive, you can choose some with different thickness and try them all out, half a dozen picks should not cost more than a couple of bucks. What kind of music are you into? Bass is played with the pick when you want either long fast sequences of the same note (for example 16ths, triplets, shuffle rhythms or 'galloping') or rapid bursts of notes typically close to each other: this is typical in heavy metal genres. It is also used when you want a 'snappy' sound throughout the whole song, though not as snappy as when using slap'n'pop techniques: example genres might be dark/new wave and grunge. You can find thousands of CDLCs of these! That said, I personally feel like bass is at its best when played with fingers The pick makes faster runs of notes easier, especially if you come from guitar playing, but if you start using it as a shortcut in every song, it'll hamper your progress with fingerstyle. EDIT: I just noticed you posted a request for Litfiba - re del silenzio > I think that's pretty much an example of using a pick with the bass to get what I called a 'snappy' sound (Litfiba was in fact pretty much a new wave band in their early albums)

Every now and then there is a CDLC where the "difficulty bars" on top of the notes highway appear to be empty for all sections of the song. Is there some simple option between the CF Song Manager and the Custom Tool Kit that can fix or restore those bars, or can they only be fixed by manually editing and rebuilding the whole CDLC? Thanks!

I am new, but I think it's just a way for the website to help you remember which CDLC you have downloaded. You can see your current list by clicking "collection" at the search bar. IIUC adding is triggered by clicking the download button on the search page, which takes you directly to a CDLC's download page, but it cannot know if you actually download the file for real, and obviously it also cannot know if you later delete the file from your drive, so sometimes you need to adjust your collection list manually.

Thanks! I just made an experiment and it seems that MuseScore does open gp5 files, maybe it's a feature only in recent versions? It doesn't even look bad! Personally I like the resulting "tabs merged with classical notation" look, and it even includes fingering indications. There are of course a bunch of steps involved, that's why I was wondering if there is an even a more direct option from PSARC to PDF somewhere Edit: it doesn't seem to include the lyrics unfortunately, but maybe that would be asking too much

Hello, I already have many favourite CDLC which I would like to practice also outside the RS game, and for that I would like to print out the tabs. What do you think could be the easiest way to go from a CDLC PSARC file to a PDF file of the guitar/bass chart so that I can print it out? At least I noticed that the Custom Toolkit seems to have an option to export to gp5 format. I do not have Guitar Pro, but I have MuseScore that maybe can also read gp5 files, and convert them to PDF, so hopefully one option would be to load the PSARC file in the Toolkit -> export to gp5 -> load gp5 in MuseScore -> export to PDF? Is there even an easier method? Thanks!

Hello, not sure how much active is the development and bugfixing of the CFSM, but I have just started to use it and noticed the following issue with the pitch shifter functionality, which I have been using typically to convert Eb tracks to E. When a CDLC is either bass-only (no guitar lead or rhythm track), the pitch shifter correctly changes the notes on the highway but does not actually apply the shift on the bass tone. When a CDLC has a bass with different tuning compared to guitar, the pitch shifter applies to the bass the same shift as guitar even if it should be different. These results in the bass tone being out of tune with the song audio all the time, and seem to share the same cause. coldrampage was kind enough to double-check this issue and suggests that the cause of the problem might be in the CFSM to analyze only the guitar lowest string tuning, and apply the same to the bass as well, leading for example a CDLC with guitar in Eb and bass in E to end up with bass tone being unnecessarily shifted up, and in case of a bass-only CDLC with the bass tone not shifted at all (perhaps treating the lack of a guitar path as a default E that doesn't need shifting).

Ah ok! What a pity, I think I have quite many CDLCs in either situation... Is the CFSM still actively developed? Should I create a post in the "Issues" subforum and hope that this might be resolved in the future?