Odd Chords - am I reading it wrong?

[Moony]

I have downloaded some songs from CustomForge - and i'm having a few issues.

 

I am trying to play "Highway to Hell" by AC/DC and have learnt a few basic chords from a book I have.  Whilst the A chord in Rocksmith for this song looks the same as what I learnt - the D chord looks totally different.

 

The D Chord is played on the A, D, G, B and e strings - with A and D open, G and e on fret 2 and B on fret 3.

 

However - this screenshot from inside the game seems to show the chord being played on all strings except e - with A muted, E and G strings played on fret 2 and the B sting on fret 3?

 

Looking at some online tabs for this song - it starts A A A  D/F# D/F#  G

 

However from the chord charts I have found the D/F# chord shouldn't mute string A and also frets the e string on fret 2 just like the normal D Chord.

 

Am I reading it wrong - or is this Chord mislabelled in the song?

 

 

Thanks

[raynebc]

The name is correct. As long as any combination of D, F# and A notes are played, it is considered a D major chord.

[bullbuchanan]

Rocksmith seems to incorporate a number of standard chords in extremely difficult fingerings that require you to mute strings in the middle. I don't really understand why they do that. 

My personal opinion is that you have to take certain things in the game with a grain of salt, especially when they do things like split up a G chord into less notes, because they think it's too hard, and it's actually more difficult to play it, because they don't tell you to just play the chord. 

I don't think there's a lot of educational value in just playing through the songs as full speed, but I use rocksmith as a sort of interactive metronome, where I get to work on techniques using backing tracks I like. I always keep a pen & paper handy to work out things like strumming patterns and work out chord progressions.

[raynebc]

I think it's a matter of authenticity. Variations of chords sound different from each other.

[BHMath]

The actual name of this chord imo is D/F#. But that's not a big deal

[Moony]

Ok thanks - seems like it's better to read the Chord letter and play the chord you know - than to look at the fret/fingering displayed on the screen.

 

Is there any way to turn off the fret markers for Chords?  Given the chord shapes displayed in RS can be uncommon variants - it's just confusing things for a beginner.

 

It might be better just to have the chord name displayed - then show fret markers just for single notes.

[Mortalo]

@@Moony Or don't read the chord name and just play what is shown on the fretboard. Besides that D chord shown is legit. instead playing with high e, you play note on low E.

You need to understand 2 things:

1. Chord shape (what you see on fretboard) is exactly how tab looks like in the cdlc (it might be inaccurate, yes) and what you should play to make ROcksmith happy.

2. Chords can be played in multiple ways (like open G can have either B0 or B3 in it).

 

You can listen to what is played and then decided whether the chord displayed is right (as I said tabs might be wrong, tabs also might be overly complicated, and AC/DC official ones proved that point).

[MaxxxPower]

I think it's a matter of authenticity. Variations of chords sound different from each other.

Agree, but I think most of the time it's a lack thereof.

 

Some old customs are charted incorrectly because the author did not fix the fingering when importing the song into the FOF editor.  It tends to default to the lowest fret possible for every note, rather than a chord that makes sense.

 

GWAR - Saddam-A-Go-Go comes to mind.  For whatever reason they charted power chords at the 3rd fret as having an open G string instead of fretting the 5th fret on the D.

[Moony]

@@Moony Or don't read the chord name and just play what is shown on the fretboard. Besides that D chord shown is legit. instead playing with high e, you play note on low E.

 

For a beginner though - that method does seem overly complicated.  

 

Most beginner lessons in books etc seem to start you on a few of the easier open chords (A, C, D, E, G), progressing onto the minor and seventh chords a little later - gradually building up a repertoire

 

A beginner will practice these chords over and over until they become second nature and therefore reading the chord name and playing the learnt chord or fingering it from muscle memory is much easier than trying to interpret and implement the fast moving diagram on the in game fretboard for a chord you may have never played before.

 

Whilst authenticity might be key for a more advanced guitarist - being able to play something close to the original, albeit not exactly authentic is what most beginners would probably be aiming for to start with.

 

Given the game has different difficulty settings - it would be good if the game could look at chords that are in a song and pick the easiest or most common variation of it when set to beginner level - especially since the game would appear to accept a standard D chord as acceptable anyway - even though it wouldn't match the fret diagram displayed.

[firekorn]

@@Moony the problem by learning one way of playing a chord is fucked up in the first place, works well for campfire acoustic guitar but it won't work for all the variation of jazz, blues, rock or metal where you can find chord that are getting more twisted and with tons of variations.

 

Lots of chord have basic variation, the G can be played with or without the 2A, with or without the 3B or even the high 3e and the game is about accuracy compare to the recording used. If the guitarist used one kind of variation of the chord it will indicate the variation used, not the common one cause even though you could use the common variation in a campfire session to be close enough to the song, it doesn't mean it's the right variation to sound like the original.

 

I never read the chord name and if you are adventuring in the CDLC world, never do! The name are not defined by professional and EOF, even though is pretty accurate for some basic case, might get completely lost when there's inverted chord or complex variation.

 

About making lower difficulty displaying different chord, that would be very weird for real beginner that never even played acoustic guitar before and if you have to suddenly switch from one variation to another because the difficulty went up, that would be incredibly weird and difficult to follow.

[Mortalo]

For us, who started learning to play guitar with Rocksmith (and only with Rocksmith), the way it works is plain perfect. In game lessons teach you that way, so it makes sense.