albatross213

@ - If GPA isn't an option, the other thing I'd recommend is starting with some easy stuff. Start with something reasonably slow and with a simple drumbeat. A lot of 60s rock (e.g. Beatles, Rolling Stones) is good for this. Then gradually build up towards faster/crazier drumbeats, more time signature changes, and so on. I probably synced and resynced 10 songs before I actually released anything, and didn't figure out most of the tricks I have for syncing until doing something like 50 customs. And there are things that I still have trouble with (old Kreator is one of them). If you have any syncs you want feedback on, send me the .psarc or the notes.eof and guitar.ogg files together, and I'll try to make screenshots or something to show where to improve them and hopefully help you pick up a few tricks. Don't give up!

@@Brutus Erectus

@@dantrag28 - It depends on what types of things you want to do. If all that you want to do is to change the song volume, tones (and tone volumes), or scroll speeds, all that you need is the Toolkit to import the .psarc and then make the edits in the toolkit. If you want to change the "tab" that is played in Rocksmith (including the sync and everything), that's a lot more complicated and also has a lot of caveats. Among the caveats, the Rocksmith import in EoF doesn't import time signatures (at least from older files: I believe it's actually put in nowadays), and all chord techniques except palm muting. In some songs restoring that kind of stuff can require more effort than starting the song from scratch (unless you can get the creator to send you the notes.eof file, in which case things might be easier). Anyway, if you want to edit the tab, you'll also need EoF. After importing a .psarc with the Toolkit it generates a folder, with an "EoF" subfolder. This contains the .oggs and the .xml files, so you can point EoF to the .ogg do a Rocksmith import with the XML files, then go from there. Then when you're done editing things (this skips a lot of things that are covered in tutorials), replace the XML files in the toolkit with the new ones, and generate the new .psarc.

Or one of these... http://i.imgur.com/7Y7hI8E.png

Gender is sometimes confusing in other languages. I remember hearing about an Andrea who was once introduced at a talk as a female because the person introducing him didn't do their research. Anyway, phrases aren't really something that you have to worry much about adding manually. They should be taken care of when you add sections, and to do that you -Right-click on the beat markers (arrows) above where the notes are entered. This will define the beat where the section starts. -Open up the section menu with Shift+S. -Make sure the "Also add as RS phrase" box is checked. -Choose a title from the list for your section. They don't really matter (so I tend to just call everything riff), but the first one on a path should be called "Intro". -If you want to be lazy but still have pretty useful sectioning, adding a section every 4 measures through a solo and 8 measures throughout the rest of the song usually works pretty well (sometimes if the tempo is slow or the solo or any riffs are exceptionally technical it can help to have more). For syncing, the main things I'd recommend are: -Get the big, obvious things in place. The beginning and ends of many pieces of the song are pretty easy to figure out. For example, the start and finish of the song itself, verses, chorus, solos, pauses, big tempo changes, and things like that are often pretty easy to pinpoint in the audio. -Once the big things are in place, you should only need to make relatively small adjustments to get everything else in place (though time signature changes that change the bottom number might cause problems). -Learn to use spectrogram view. Kick, snare, and tom drums all have pretty obvious signatures in spectrogram view, even in saturated mixes. Drums being drums, they're usually pretty regular throughout most of the song. -If your computer can handle it, a playback rate of 50% can help out in particularly troublesome spots. But a lot of it is just experience. As you do more songs, you'll get better at it and better at recognizing small cues that help with syncing.

@@dantrag28 - The easiest way to use only a bit of the audio is to select (via click and drag) the portion of audio that you want to use, then export selection as a .ogg. Might also make sense to put a little fade in/out if necessary.

Tried the Skreamska song. Got a miss or two on my first couple of takes, but decided I couldn't let @@fiddlesticks stay at the top of the leaderbaord. http://i.imgur.com/e1ZEO8A.jpg

Adding tone changes in EoF isn't too hard. The real art is actually producing good tones. As you've done a lot of playthroughs, you probably know some tones that you like, which is always a good start. For tone changes, here's what you need to do in EoF: 1) Whenever you want to place a tone change, press Ctrl+Shift+T, then enter the tone name (you can edit these later). The tone name is case sensitive, and the tone change is placed at whatever time the green bar is at. 2) Set a default tone, which is the tone that will be used at the start of the song. (I also usually place a tone change with the default tone at the start of the song). You can do this by going to Track -> Rocksmith -> Tone Change -> Names. You can also rename the tones here. You can only use at most four tones on each track, so keep that in mind. And here's what you need to do in the toolkit: 1) Add tones with the desire settings (easiest way to get something started for me is to import a tone from a song, then if I want to, make edits from there. You can also load a tone that you've saved in Rocksmith), and the desired name for the tone that you have in EoF. 2) When you add the Rocksmith XML files everything should be set up. If you didn't add the tones previously, the toolkit will add default tones with the appropriate tone name, which you'll then want to edit so that they're no longer default.

I'd also add that most of the people who post pretty frequently in the big EoF thread tend to be charters who care more about making good products than most. Anyway, I also trust people like Chlipouni, GetTheLedOut, Teinashu, Firekorn (who himself seems to only chart In Flames himself, but helps Teinashu a lot), PC Plum, cdeath, and a few others reliably produce charts that are good enough quality for the Championship (and have a pretty good amount of output).

@@SkullRock - The absolute minimum that you can get away with is just learning how to sync. There are several tutorials tailored specifically to this subject, and some of them are in videos (so hopefully easier to understand without being fluent in English). If you have trouble syncing, you can try using GoPlayAlong to do it for you. I'd also highly recommend doing riff repeater sections because it doesn't take too long to add (you can even do it while syncing) and actually makes it possible to practice the song. Playing through songs at full speed can be fun, but it's not the most effective way to improve at playing the song (or practicing guitar techniques in general). But most other things I'd say aren't really necessary to make an enjoyable DLC. You definitely don't need lyrics. Some of the most downloaded (which does not mean best) CDLC don't have lyrics, and many of mine don't since lyrics aren't really what I'm looking for when I'm trying to play guitar or bass. I'm not a huge DD fan, but you can also add DD with very little effort (go to DDC tab of the toolkit, add the .psarc, then generate DD and you're done after a brief wait) for anyone who wants it. Also, for converting the audio, I recommend not using Wwise directly. Use a recent (beta) version of the toolkit, and after installing Wwise, point the toolkit to it and add the guitar.ogg file as the audio file and the toolkit will convert it to a .wem file when you generate the .psarc. It's much more convenient and intuitive than using Wwise directly.

@@raynebc - It looks like palm muted tremolo picks still get truncated. Would it be possible to make it so that tremolo picked palm mutes still export with sustain?

@@Gamut - For the most part, I don't expect much out of any DLC that hasn't been updated since sometime in 2014. There definitely are some good ones, but for the most part the quality is lacking, whether because of community standards, improved tools, or whatever. And I also have a few charters who I'll trust to produce decent stuff, and there's stuff I sometimes see in streams that's old and good that I'll check out, but otherwise I've been burned to many times to trust them. Anyway, here's my score on MC bass: http://i.imgur.com/rzqOuDa.jpg Edit: @@Nacholede - I didn't transpose the bass chart at all. What's in the chart that you currently have never uses the G string. I just played it (and there's note detection issues for some reason, especially in the chorus. Weird.) to confirm, and also checked the tabs on UG, which also never use the G string.

@ - I just looked at the tab and imported it into EoF just to make sure, and it doesn't used the G string (I can move everything two strings higher, which you can't do if there's a not on either string), so all it needs is BEAD just like with The Looking Glass. I don't want anything to do with that solo, especially if it's only one section, though.

The link for the Grease song is for "We Go Together", not "You're the One That I want". Is that intentional? Also, is RR buggy for anyone else on "Court of the Crimson King"? RR sections don't correspond to what's displayed, which isn't a big deal, but when I tried to switch to another section after practicing one briefly my game crashed.

@@NunoJBSilva.Guitarist - I played it a few times on guitar and bass, and things did feel a bit off in places. Never checked it super closely, though. Anyway, an update on lead: http://i.imgur.com/rXWZDg4.jpgSolo still destroys me, and there are some other things that I didn't do as well as I could, but I'm reasonably happy with that. Might give it another go or two tomorrow after a bit more practice. And on bass: http://i.imgur.com/5lEYUbU.jpg Had a decent number of really silly misses on this one. Not sure if my bass was slightly out of tune or I was actually playing some of the easy parts wrong. And since people are playing long songs, here's a really long one. (I was using it as an opportunity to practice 3-finger plucking, so it's not as good as I could have done). As for the discussion on long songs in the Championship, I agree that some songs are far too long and complicated to practice in a week. However, this is not one in my opinion. The solo is relatively short, while there are a number of riffs throughout the song many of them don't need much practice for someone at the MC level. It's definitely not easy, but it doesn't feel like an insurmountable challenge (technique wise, the chords are mostly simple variations of power chords, so the main challenges are picked speed and precision, fretting hand shifting, and tapping, and as far as tapping can go, the intro isn't too crazy but the part in the solo is), and IMO much more interesting to practice than songs that are basically trivial riffs with a ridiculous solo. Short songs can be require much more practice if they have complicated structures with many difficult riffs (many Between the Buried and Me songs could go here. Some tech death could as well) and long solos, or are essentially just one long solo (guitar virtuoso tracks). Either case has lots of things that need practice but few that ever repeat for any significant duration, which make them very hard to make significant headway on in a week (or a month, or longer). So, I guess my point is that Iconoclast, while a 10 minute song, still has lots of sections that have riffs repeat a few times, and these sections then repeat throughout the song (and there are also a few pretty trivial sections that I've never felt the need to practice), so it's not that much more onerous to practice than a reasonably complex 5 minute song. I'm not out here to be an asshole to the other MC players, but to try to provide a reasonable challenge that's not solely due to a crazy solo (and nothing else) or the heavy use of an unusual technique. Maybe it wasn't the best to choose a 10 minute song, but hey, we had 8 people play it on lead with a few doing multiple attempts. That's not that much different from most weeks.

@@Billkwando - Most of the time when you have something that's consistently 4/4 all of the the measures but the first have time signatures of "No Change" or something like that in EoF, but it looks like in your project each measure was marked as 4/4 (so you have 4/4 above measures 3 and 4 in addition to measure 1). So when you push the offset back, the beat that's at, say, 7.5ish seconds "remembers" that it should be the start of a 4/4 measure and enforces that, interrupting measure 2. If you push the offset back a total of 4 beats it shouldn't be a problem.

For the lead: http://i.imgur.com/OfeqbMW.jpg Or I guess for the rhythm. Still have significant room for improvement on the tapping and on the pre-verse riff. Obviously not perfect on the rest, but pretty solid. The tapping trips me up between the rhythm changes (length between taps, so 4 4 3 3 3 3 2 3 3 3 4 ... or whatever it is) and the position changes. The pre-verse riff I just can't do that weird ass spider walk you need to do at full speed, especially since a couple of the groupings of notes require a bit of a stretch. I'm pretty good at 85% speed or a bit higher, but the wheels fall off at full speed. Also noticed the FHP shortly after the tapping got messed up on rhythm, so I'll try to fix that. Also some harmonics that should be pinch harmonics. Will try to check out the other songs tomorrow.

I fixed the things that I mentioned on Iconoclast and put it into the download folder. It's version 3.2 now. Apparently some of the time sigs got messed up somewhere, but I'm OK with that for the moment as I don't want to recreate things from scratch on something this big. Anyway, here's how things have gone for me. Lead: http://i.imgur.com/JIBeXW8.jpgThis was my second time through, with my sightread around 88%. Will definitely practice some of the riffs more. Not sure how much working on the :blink: solo will help, but I'll probably try to at least get the hand positions down. I think I can get to 94% on this by the end of the week if I really apply myself, but I will probably fall short. Bass: http://i.imgur.com/YtCs1Y7.jpgThe big problem for me on this are the tapping and pre-verse riffs. Should be able to get this above 99% with more practice, but I'm not sure how far above that I can get. @@NoonyDeloony - I understand if you feel things are too far above your level for playing the whole song through to be worthwhile, but I'd definitely recommend working on some of the riffs in the song. In particular, the pre-solo, solo, and chorus riffs (and maybe the verse riff) should be tricky but somewhat manageable and good to learn from. The pre-verse riff might also be good to practice at a slower speed. Now turning to a sadder subject. You may know I'm a pretty big Riverside fan, and as you may have heard, their guitarist Piotr Grudziński passed away yesterday. His playing was rather reminiscent of David Gilmour's in that it's much more about phrasing and emotion rather than sheer technicality. Anyway, here's one of my favorite solos of his (through to the end of the song). https://youtu.be/QLhLKLLJOnA?t=12m39s These past few months have sucked.

@@johnwgw - There's a sidebar on the main forums page, but there's also the Donate page.

Sorry for being MIA a bit the past couple of days. The weekend was pretty busy. Anyway, I played through Iconoclast on bass and lead, and while bass looked pretty much OK to me I noticed a few things that I've messed up or want to take a closer look at on lead, including 1) Fret hand mutes in the chorus outside of the current hand position (and maybe fretboard logic in general during the chorus) 2) Chord slides late-ish in the song (I think after the solo) that I forgot to linknext. 3) There were still a few unpitched slides that I did rather lazily, and probably some slides in the solo that I'll want to doublecheck. I'll try to get these fixed tonight. DId anyone notice anything else that was off? Are there any things you want to practice that aren't near the start of sections?

@@theomey - You'll want to use tech notes. There's an extensive tutorial. If you still have questions after reading the relevant sections, let me know.

Oh boy. This week will be quite interesting for me on guitar. Needless to say, if you're going to score attack Iconoclast, I'd strongly recommend doing it on easy. It's pretty unlikely that we'll have any score tiebreakers on this song, and it's probably pretty easy to fail out on harder difficulties. Also, kind of nice that 3 of the songs are in D standard. It's quite likely that tones can be improved on Iconoclast, so let me know if you have any recommendations. I'll try and check out @@cdeath's recent uploads and some other songs for tones, too.

Alright, I added @'s updates to mine and hosted it in the same folder as before. Most changes are to the solo, but I also found some of the missing palm mutes, fixed some FHPs, and put "ignore" status on the 3rd fret harmonics since I had a 0% success rate with detection on those. Not sure if it was in the previous version or not, but somehow I was missing a tone change to the clean after the solo before going back to the distortion for the outro chorus, so that's back in there. Also tried adding a DD version, but it seemed to have some weird bugs with some of the slides. Lastly, a scoring update: http://i.imgur.com/OsoILNG.jpg The hard parts of the solo still pwn me, but I'm getting better.

@ - Sorry if I came off a bit dickish. Most of those things are things that can happen if you're not used to them and don't know what to look for. The first three problems that I mentioned are solely due to the Rocksmith import, while the last can easily happen if you're not used to editing a song where FHP are already entered (which Rocksmith import always takes, and I often put FHP in my files now to make solos and other tricky bits more easily readable and playable). Anyway, if you want, if you send me your notes.eof file I can incorporate your changes to the solo into mine, which might be the easiest way to finish things off. Or I might be able to grab it from the Rocksmith import and copy/paste, since the solo has no chords.

@ - You did a good job with the solo, but the entire reason I also uploaded the source files was so that you didn't have to unpack the .psarc and deal with all the crap that the Rocksmith import misses. Here are the things I noticed that are missing/slightly messed up from your version. -Time signatures are somewhat wrong. -Some chord slides and linknexts didn't import or weren't fixed up after import. -Arpeggios didn't import. -FHP during the solo are messed up now. I think you just changed the notes but not the FHP. Anyway, here's an improved score. http://i.imgur.com/x3NeChk.jpg Still need lots of work on the second to last section of the solo, and I think I also didn't do nearly as well as I could have on the last one. Also, happy birthday to @@Berneer! How is the Blaze Bayley track coming?