Rocksmith Championship players - how long have you been playing?

[missis sumner]

Mods - please move if I've posted in the wrong place, but the intention was to see how my progress is "measuring up" against the Rocksmith Championship players, rather than everyone else, in general.

 

Myself - I had acoustic guitar lessons as a child, probably about five years worth, between the age of 8 and 13 approximately (the memory is painful, therefore I try to erase it from my memory :) ).  I never "got on" with it - never enjoyed the songs I was supposed to be learning (La cucaracha, Mull of Kintyre, etc - nuff said), never really practiced...

 

Twenty odd years later I bought an electric guitar, and played this for a couple of years, on and off, before losing interest, never having learnt to play a song, or any chords for that matter.  A long time passed… ;)

 

Last Christmas I was given a bass (after dropping enough hints).  I didn't actually get it until January, then Rocksmith followed in February, and I've been playing pretty much every day, for on average, I'd say an hour a day.

 

I'm pleased that 10 months later, I can play quite a few songs (as long as I have Rocksmith firing the notes at me), and even remember a few riffs (I find Rocksmith quite bad for actually "teaching you the song").

 

So, Rocksmith Championship players, what's your learning experience been like?  Or shall I just cut to the chase and ask "how long have you been at it?" lol.

[fripponomic]

sorry, was wrong here and just posted my score :wacko:

but I play for a long time before RS appears. RS is just a funny and useful tool to me

[missis sumner]

sorry, was wrong here and just posted my score :wacko:

but I play for a long time before RS appears. RS is just a funny and useful tool to me

 

I guessed that from some of your scores. :)

[KJParsley]

 

 

So, Rocksmith Championship players, what's your learning experience been like?  Or shall I just cut to the chase and ask "how long have you been at it?" lol.

 

 

It seems my story is very similar to yours...  though my stretch of 'a long time passed' is probably significantly longer!  I got a guitar for Christmas last year along with Rocksmith for the PS3.  Later figured out that you could get custom DLC, but not for the PS3 unless you mod it, so switched to Rocksmith PC.  Got hooked and got a bass guitar for my birthday. And this year's 'early' Christmas present is a digital piano (need the piano for the days my fingers are sore!)

[NoonyDeloony]

Exactly the same story as yours @missis summer, more or less though I still play guitar a little bit now and the when I get my hands on one :) been playing bass for almost 2 years, every day for at least 2 hours, sometimes up to 10 hours when I can seize the opportunity of grandma's having their GK's for 24 hours :). I found at first that rs wasn't great for actually remembering the song but then I realised I was partly responsible for that so I memorise short phrases play songs through on hard SA and look away from the screen when I get to the memorised sections, I'll do that with every phrase until I can play it in master mode... That said, I still can only play 7 songs on master :D... But I reckon muscle memory is improving as a result of that :)

[Mortalo]

I always wanted to play guitar, but never got a chance to get my hands on one. Many years later in January 2011, I bought Guitar Hero Warriors of Rock and Metallica (as a big fan of thrash gods and rhythm games). That experience was making my desire to play real guitar stronger. It was enhanced by Rocksmith, as I was big fan of it, since first previews, but did not wanted to get it on console. I was not a fan of tracklist in original game, I didn't pick it up, but when RS2014 came out (and I learned about cdlc) I had no choice but to get a game and guitar. That was late November 2013. So that's one year with my Jackson.

[Smile]

I play guitar for almost 1 year without Prerequistites to have.
What struck me, I can re-enact in Rs songs, but on my amp I'll no longer together the song. That is why I am now learning the songs that I really like and try to memorize the songs with backing tracks replay on my amp. Meanwhile, I'm ready, I know at least where roughly the sounds I hear are.
I am very pleased with RS. If you only learn when aware that you tried what you want to play memorize without looking at the screen. When you learn songs from a book via tabs, not indeed the book drags with in order to play something.

 

translated Goggel :)

[Gamut]

I picked up the first Rocksmith as a Christmas present in 2011. At that point, I knew nothing whatsoever about guitar. I was experienced musically, I had been a drummer in touring bands, but a guitar in my hands felt totally foreign and I had no idea what to do with it. Started plugging away on Rocksmith to change that.

 

I've been pretty consistently playing it ever since I got it, but I got a lot more serious when Rocksmith 2014 dropped. Since then, I've played almost every day, for anywhere between 15 minutes and 3 hours. 

 

Here I am 3 years later! I supplemented my learning with Youtube videos and such but for the most part, I'm Rocksmith trained.

[MaZtoR]

Tried to teach myself to play guitar when i was 16 years old. It did not work and i quit after a few months.  14 years later (dec 2013) i found Rocksmith 2014, so drove over to my parents house and dug up my old crappy guitar and tried it. Loved it from the start.

Then in February i found this excellent championship.

 

So its:

1 year played

42weeks in this championship

[Joey]

I started to learn to play guitar when I was 13 years old when I was living with an Aunt in Puerto Rico. Since I was 8 or 9 I had always wanted to learn to play and I even had an old acoustic 12 string guitar that was given to me by who knows who lol but at that time my mom couldn't afford to pay for lessons so I just strummed the guitar and twisted the tuners without knowing what they did or were supposed to do (broke many of the strings doing this lol). When I moved with my Aunt she had an old beat up acoustic guitar lying around and my cousin also had a nice acoustic but he didn't know how to play it and he just lent it out to the church guitarist to play in church. My aunt let me have that old beat up acoustic and I started to learn a few things here and there. My first song I learned (or should i say attempted to learn) was La Bamba by los lobos and I learned it like how RS tries to teach you in the beginning with only a few notes at a time and that was cool with me. I had no professional instructors really but just a few friends that did know how to play and they would teach me a few of the basics like tuning and some chords but no scales. A few months later I finally came back home to live with my mom and she ended up buying me my first electric guitar bundle package(an Epiphone Aria Pro II which had a whammy bar and a small amp). 

 

I loved that guitar and used to take it everywhere with me lol (was only 14 at the time) but the only things i knew how to play were the basic chords and some simple songs here and there. Still not being able to afford lessons and not being able to buy books to try and teach myself with I hit a plateau and got very discouraged with the guitar. So i moved on to other things and would just basically pick up the guitar once a month or so.  

 

Then 2 years ago I saw a Deal of the Day from bestbuy that showed the original Rocksmith on sale for 29.99 for the PS3 and I was intrigued. I bought it that day and picked it up and immediately tried it out. I loved it from the moment I tried it but due to the interface and the game pretty much forcing you to tune the guitar after every song I quickly ended up falling back into the same pattern of picking up the guitar once a month again. I had found Smithyanvil back then but even the huge amount of customs just wasn't enough for me to keep going through the horrendous tuning after every song crap.

 

It wasn't until Rocksmith 2014 was released that I was finally able to actually become serious with the guitar. The first month it was released was a pain because you could only play the songs that they had officially released with it but I stuck with it and kept going to Smithyanvil every day checking the status of the customs project and when they finally released the dll and the customs started coming I was hooked. 

 

I finally mustered up the courage to join the championships back in the early weeks and have since been improving because of RS and this CS. I have purchased around 5 guitars this year alone and will be adding more to my collection lol. So in essence I am pretty much a combination of self taught and RS taught. The lessons mode and the Guitarcade are some of the best tools you can use to teach you guitar and I am so happy that I made the investment in this game. 

 

So to cut the story short I am now 35 years old so for over 20 years before RS came out I was a guitarist who only picked up his guitar  maybe once a month and sometimes not even that. So even though RS isn't perfect it is however an awesome tool to help someone learn to play guitar. 

[missis sumner]

 

So to cut the story short I am now 35 years old so for over 20 years before RS came out I was a guitarist who only picked up his guitar  maybe once a month and sometimes not even that. So even though RS isn't perfect it is however an awesome tool to help someone learn to play guitar. 

 

I couldn't agree more.  It's an excellent tool to get you going.

 

And I'm glad I've joined the Championship, even if I don't like some of the songs, or I'm not overly fussed about doing well in some of them because of this.  It adds another aspect to the learning opportunity - a chance to play songs I would never otherwise attempt.

[MonstaS4]

I've always wanted to learn guitar but never had the motivation to go through with it until my son got an acoustic for christmas last year. His hands are still a little small and struggled to play anything so i picked it up and googled for online lessons.

 

Found Justin Guitar and was instantly hooked. Ordered a Yamaha electric less than a week later, then stumbled across Rocksmith 2014 a few weeks after that. With the exception of a few weeks working away from home, i've been playing a minimum of an hour a day every day since. Unfortunately, this amount of practice doesn't translate into good scores for me......think i'm a little too unco!

[missis sumner]

I've always wanted to learn guitar but never had the motivation to go through with it until my son got an acoustic for christmas last year.

 

Did you buy it for him?  ;)

[MonstaS4]

Surprisingly.....no. It was from an auntie.

[jdallman]

Great question. I've been playing off and on since 15....just turned 38. Sadly, there are years of not playing (not worthwhile, anyways) and a ton of bad habits I'm tryinhg to break. Thanks for asking and sharing everyone. Remember: Practice doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent. So if your practice time is bad...

[MilkmanDan]

I have a very musically talented family.  My father sings and plays trombone, my mom plays piano and organ, and several of my aunts / uncles / cousins are music teachers or professional musicians (Opera singer).

 

...But that skipped me for quite a while.  I never had any interest in learning an instrument until a friend got an electric guitar when I was 16-17 or so (I'm double that age now).  Then I played his (strat clone) and liked it, so I requested one for a birthday present.  My parents wanted me to try something similar to make sure I was going to actually work at it, so my music teacher aunt loaned me a ukelele.  I didn't really like that anywhere near as much as the guitar, but I guess I put in enough effort to get the go-ahead because my folks and grandmother bought me an Epiphone Korina Explorer (Metallica fan so I like the explorer body style, and that was the cheapest one available at the time).

 

I got decent-ish for being entirely self-taught.  No lessons, just tabs and sharing notes with 2 other guitar playing friends.  I never got any good at chords other than power chords, but I got almost ok at single-note riffs and solo stuff.  But, I gradually lost interest since I never got any skill with chords and therefore couldn't really play many whole songs that I was interested in in their entirety.

 

Went to college and played only very sporadically (2-3 times a year), but I think somewhere around age 21 or so I decided I should try bass so I bought a cheap Ibanez.  I immediately clicked with that much much better than I ever had with guitar, even learning some songs all the way through which I never really had with guitar.  Like a Stone by Audioslave was my first "I can play that whole song" moment.

 

However, even though I enjoyed bass quite a bit, I didn't put much consistent practice into it.  More than I had done with guitar, but still only played maybe 2-3 hours a month.  That lasted 5 years or so, and then I decided to come to Thailand "for a year" to teach English since I wasn't finding the kind of employment that I was looking for with my degree in Computer Science post dot com bubble.  I enjoyed it here, so one year turned into 8+ so far, with a wife, kid, and house here in Thailand now.

 

I bought a very cheap acoustic guitar my first year here so I wouldn't be completely without, but only played it a few times a year.  Then after 4 years here I took a trip back home to the US, and brought my Ibanez bass back here with me.  Still played it some but not a great deal.

 

...Until I discovered Rocksmith 2014 about a year ago.  Got me completely reinvigorated and hooked on playing again.  I just play for my own pleasure -- I don't have any aspirations to be in a band or play in front of people really, so I don't mind that Rocksmith seems to be less naturally helpful at actually memorizing a song the whole way through than learning from tabs.  I'm happy to use Rocksmith as a sight-reading tool, and in that way it is actually far superior to tabs at least in my estimation.

 

Before Rocksmith, I'd look for tabs for songs and 9 out of 10 times I would think "meh, that looks too hard" and give up without even really trying to work at it for more than a few minutes.  Now, with Rocksmith, I have a huge list of songs that I can sight-read and play to 98-99%+ accuracy, which is great fun for me.  I'm nowhere near as good as some of the upper ranks of MC-level bass players here in the championship, but I'm already way better than I was just a year ago, and way better than I ever expected I would get period before I discovered Rocksmith.

 

Before, playing bass or guitar was an amusing diversion for me once in a while.  Now, I'm actually enjoying it much more and motivated to play for 30 minutes on up to 3-4 hours plus pretty close to every day.  So, I think I owe a big debt of gratitude to Rocksmith (and the Championship here of course) for lighting that fire under my ass and getting me back into playing bass/guitar as a hobby in a big big way!

[missis sumner]

 

Before Rocksmith, I'd look for tabs for songs and 9 out of 10 times I would think "meh, that looks too hard" and give up without even really trying to work at it for more than a few minutes.  Now, with Rocksmith, I have a huge list of songs that I can sight-read and play to 98-99%+ accuracy, which is great fun for me.  I'm nowhere near as good as some of the upper ranks of MC-level bass players here in the championship, but I'm already way better than I was just a year ago, and way better than I ever expected I would get period before I discovered Rocksmith.

 

 

 

I was doing this with Rocksmith to begin with as well - I'd see the notes come up and if it looked too complicated, I'd quit the song immediately.  I think the competition helps with that - I'm more likely to work my way through a whole song in the Championship, even if I do only get 70-80%.

[slooker]

I've been playing for 2-3 months now.  I'm loving it.  I'm playing bass.  I'm close to where Milkman Dan used to be though, where he finds tab and thinks its too hard and quits...  I'm at that point with a lot of Rocksmith songs.  I'm still really enjoying it though.  

[2groggy]

back in high school (35 years ago - yikes!) i bough an electric guitar and practice amp at a pawn shop, and learned a few songs from a fake book for the Bowie album Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars.  I never really practiced enough to get good and put it away totally when I started university.

 

For Christmas 15 months ago I bought "the kids", including me RS for the PS3.  I bought them an cheapo electric guitar and built myself one from a kit.  Last summer, I built a bass from a kit and have been playing that while my guitar gathers dust.  So over the last while, I'll play RS or work on scales or exercises for at least an hour most days.

 

I got the PC version of RS a couple of months ago, when I found this site.

 

Now maybe it's old fashioned and nerdish of me, but outside of the Championship, I only download CDLC for which I have an existing LP or CD.

 

Greg

[Rodman]

Hmmmmmm....

I remember the day - i was 13 - a schoolmate borrowed me his original copy audio tape Iron Maiden - No Prayers for the Dying - put it in, never heard anything as beatiful till then, and that was it for me, fell in love with (mainly melodic) heavy metal, later added hardrock, a little death, ... Since my youth Maiden, ´tallica, Acdc, Helloween, Amorphis, Slayer, Sepultura later also Deep Purple, Billy Talent, System of a Down, Unearth, Volbeat. However, always hooked to the guitar lines, always wanted to be able to play that stuff...

When i started studying i finally bought a ibanez gio hanging at a pawn shop, tried to learn my favorite songs from tabs, had no chance because they were all much much above any beginner level, though i would have had the time then just played sporadically cause NO progress, bought my gisbon sg spec as a huge Angus fan (o.c. i thought a bad guitar is the reason for being lame ;) ), didnt change anything, bought my B.C. Rich - Warlock from a friend cause he didnt want it no more, but overall couldnt play any song then, stopped and didnt play for 15 years.... Meanwhile wonderful gf, 2 kids and a very demanding job.

Bought RS (PS3) was thrilled by the surprisingly good recognition, but the song selection kept it from being the real deal to mke my schedule... June 2014, age 36, somehow i stumbled upon the CS google docs file (yeah - before knowing about cdlc and cf) and 2 mins later i had decided that i was at home :) - instantly got RS14, registered, didnt miss a week since then, always thinking about how to push the competition and keep the players playing, was invited to join the organizers, and am more than happy about the progress - playing about 7-10 hours a week, 270 overall. Very happy Motive practically forced me to buy a bass, and bought my wonderful ESP JK-1, and lately a Fender Squier strat mini since i restarted...

 

Today i dared tryin a few of my purchased dlcs, and achieved 90+ maiden 1st tries rhy - still shocked, no way this would have been possible without the CS!

[missis sumner]

For a games forum, we have quite a few oldies here (I include myself), don't we?  :lol:

[Latsch]

started with 17 (am now 24) as i got tired of just listening to the music i love and

wanted to make silly noises too!

From then on i teached the guitar and musical theory to myself.

Went to university in 2011, joined my first few bands and had some gigs.

Bands broke up and around the same time rocksmith 2014 came out...

replaced the lack of a band with rocksmith and it was more fun than i expected.

Right now im using it as a fun tool to jam to some songs of other bands(championship)

when im not working on my on stuff.

[Van-Blurten]

For a games forum, we have quite a few oldies here (I include myself), don't we?  :lol:

I love having "older" people around :) same musical taste and views on crap, always seem to end up in a guild full of the decrepit lmao

 

I'm 40 now and never played guitar until about 2 years ago, I always bought guitars then promptly put them in a cupboard only to give away to friends and family later.

Anyway I hurt myself quite badly about 6 yrs ago so all my hobbies went out the window, bought an acoustic 2 years ago for £60 (cant work so no fancy gear for me now i want to play :P ), then a knockoff strat for £80, so unimpressed with it I took a saw to it to see if it was even wood... MDF in 4 layers, badly cut at that, so into the bin that went. Got an EPI LP "special" for about 80 after a few months and still have it, it's not great but at least it intonates lol.

 

About 6 months ago I discovered I had torn tendons on my fretting hand (no luck) even tho I have been to physio etc there has been no joy in sorting it out. Any prolonged power or barre chords just kill me. I've been building up the neck thickness of the EPI and it seems to be helping slightly so I plan to buy http://www.thomann.de/gb/harley_benton_l450plus_honey_burst.htm in a few months, if they confirm the neck depth. Seems to have rave reviews and sounds very nice from the vids I can find.

 

Hope to be able to keep the championship entries flying :)

[genobadass]

I'll be 40 this year.

 

I started playing when I was about 25. All my friends were musicians. One group of friends needed someone to play bass, so they talked me into it. I was horrible, but kept to very basic bass lines, so it worked out. My girlfriend's uncle sold me a 79 Fender P-Bass. for $200. The bass is worth around $2500 now. I am not sure what it was back then, but I got an amazing deal. The band broke up after about a year as some people moved and such. I rarely touched it since.

 

Feb of last year I decided I should try and learn how to really play, so I looked for online resources and found RS. I bought it, tried it, and immediately loved it. I bought the original RS as well as RS14 so I could have a better selection of songs. I then figured there had to be hacked songs, I was looking for a Tool song I believe, and found this wonderful place.

 

I try to play everyday even if it is only 15 min. I usually get an hour in until my fingers are putty as I tend to enjoy the faster musics.

[tupoloflyer]

I rolled 50 last year, and unlike so many of you had no experience until coming across RS in 2013.  I'd always thought it would be fun to play, but as we had moved multiple times over the years, finding teachers was difficult.  when i got RS i put in the 1-2 hours a day for about six months and then summer hit and my time waned.  but i was pleasantly surprised when i started hitting it more regular how much i had improved.  now i've reached the point where i can really start to see improvement, especially thanks to the championship.  before i would bounce from song to song and it helped with muscle memory and note recognition, but not song retention.  now when i'm focusing on a song, especially after a few tries, i really see improvement.   i'm doubly excited as this weekend i was able to get my first personal cdlc to work, so now i have to find time to play and create....hmmm