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Trouble with setting sections


dan4k

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Greetings, forum.

 

 

I'm pretty close to publishing my first CDLC, but I want to do some final adjustments. I'm having trouble setting the sections (orange lines at the bottom) so that they are grouped in actual sections of the song. (i.e. Intro, Chorus, etc.) Here's my current section & phrase arrangement:

FkxgXDE.png

Each phrase is also a section. I've even seen this kind of charting (or what looks like this) in some ODLC, but mine has an issue when you use Rocksmith suggestions, such as "Riff repeat this Intro." It doesn't select all of the Intro sections to repeat, even when multiple of them are next to each other. Sometimes it even decides to "repeat" one of the empty sections, which serve as breaks and purposefully don't have any notes. I have them separated to give the track a cleaner look, so I'd rather not include them as part of a phrase with notes in it. In my interpretation, what should happen is that it RR selects all of the green-underlined phrases, even if some are empty of notes, because they're still part of the intro.

 

Under the actual sections, I've added colored lines for how the orange sections should be grouped. Green is Intro, teal is Chorus 1 and 2, blue is Verse/Bridge, doesn't matter with regards to the song, and pink is Outro. The best I've gotten is to have the second chorus and outro to be like in the image, but the rest is never aligned.

 

Also, in case it's relevant, I've color-coded some of the phrases that have the same "phrase" in EOF. (so that when you change the difficulty of one in RR, the others follow suit, because they're played identically, even if used in different sections) The phrases marked green don't start with a note in the first beat, and the first note isn't on a beat, but rather between two beats, which I've heard may cause problems, (does it, though?) but I'd rather avoid altering those phrases if possible.

 

Question #1

Is what I'm trying to achieve even possible? If someone could show me how to make this work, or, if it isn't, explain to me the logic of how and when RS decides that two phrases are or aren't in the same section, that would be great. In my experience, sometimes an empty section belongs to the non-empty section before it, sometimes after, sometimes neither, and I just don't see the consistency, there's no reference material to figure out what makes it do what it does.

 

I've done way too many variations of setting P, S and PS markers in different places in EOF, way too many to remember, go through and analyze. Suffice it to say, if I succeeded, you wouldn't be reading this. If you have spare time, it would be cool if you'd create & send me an example track to show that it works, because I've read a lot of topics on other people's' problems and after trying all of the suggestions, I still haven't arrived at my goal.

 

Question #2

Does it matter to RS where you place which section? Does Rocksmith/RR care if you, for example, put an Outro before an Intro? Or a post-bridge, bridge, and then pre-bridge? If yes, any guidelines or rules on how RS interprets the sections would be useful. I don't have any formal ed. in music, guitar or anything related, so all I can do is make a slightly educated guess, but I don't even know what half the sections mean. For all I know, that could be one of the reasons I can't chart the sections correctly, but my assumption is that they're just user-friendly labels and, under the hood, are identical. I know I'm not supposed to make my song unreadable, but that should be at my own discretion. I know you can make your own, not predefined ones with Shift+P and ticking the "section marker" box, but EOF complains about it not being a real section most of the time I use it, so I don't create sections that way and use Shift+S for them instead.

 

Question #3

Unrelated Q that I don't wanna make a separate topic for: is there a "best practice" for altering a track's volume? Mine is way too loud and the Loudness Factor settings in the Song Creator Toolkit isn't doing enough. I've set the LF to 0, but it's still way too loud. Best to set it to the default and make the song quieter. The original song is an MP3, but there's no point in doing anything with it because EOF already auto-generated a SONG_NAME.wav. My guess is to use Audacity on the .wav, make it quieter, and then re-do the Wwise part. Should that be good enough?

 

 

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

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For sections with no notes use a "no guitar" section, then it will be skipped by riff repeater and not recommended by rocksmith to practice.

 

Pretty sure rocksmith only recommends one section so if you want it to do all the "intro" you need to make it one section? And phrases only link sections DD values so they shouldn't affect this? I just give each section the same phrase with the "also add an rs phrase" checkbox when adding sections so they all match.

All sections need a phrase, but can you have multiple per section?, what would it do, if anything?, maybe that would be worth testing? (maybe you've already done it tho)

 

So you could either have a long intro section or lots of smaller ones with no guitar sections in-between the rests. I don't think you can have "sub-sections"

 

"The phrases marked green don't start with a note in the first beat, and the first note isn't on a beat, but rather between two beats, which I've heard may cause problems". I haven't had any issues with that but sometimes it can cause the section to be unselectable.

If the issue happened to me I'd change the time signature of the tab so the notes started on a beat.

 

For Q2, pretty sure it doesn't matter too much. "Intro" and "outro" might manage the portal fade in effect, and other sections might make the crowd cheer more/less, but if you use all "verse" sections it works fine. You can have any section anywhere, I think it mostly just does the name in the rocksmith recommends bit.

 

Huh you can make your own sections with shift + P, wonder if rs can display them, maybe its more for FOF and guitar hero?

 

Also for Q3, setting it to 0 makes it louder, if you want to make it quieter use something like -7. If you want to be fancy there's a tool to "measure loudness" so you can set the right value. I normally go for a -5.

You can change the loudness factor and rebuild the song after its made all the audio files so you can keep fiddling with the LF.

 

And finally "I don't even know what half the sections mean."

Me neither but this might be useful (scroll down till it says "A little information part about what section correspond to what in a musical pieces." with a big quote underneath). Some are missing so I guess eof added more sections overtime

 

Sorry if this is useless, confusing and rambly, I'm not too good at sections myself, never tried to do anything more than the basics with them. But hopefully it is of some use.

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Hi, coldrampage, thanks for your input! It was useful for sure.

 

I've taken the liberty of sobering up from Christmas and doing some experimentation with the section (S) flags in EoF and how they interact in Rocksmith. I'll write that below the response to your message.

 

 

Adding the "No Guitar" sections is something that, after my experimentation, I'll probably avoid almost always, and in the same vein, avoid the RS suggestions. (does anybody use them?) It's due to the results of my experiment, you'll see why I forgot while writing the post.

 

Rocksmith recommending exactly one section, that's true. Tested that myself. I don't know why I thought otherwise, either that was just an assumption I had, or I spend too much time in RR, where I usually repeat multiple sections at a time.

 

Multiple phrases per one section: it behaves like you would expect it to: the section swimlane (orange line) connects all of those phrases, which are separated by where you put each phrase, but, depending on how you name the phrases, they won't all change DD difficulty when you change one or have the same DD max level. Unless, of course, you name them all the same.

 

Subsections: indeed, they, unfortunately, don't exist. That would probably be the (easy) solution to the problem I have.

 

Regarding time signature: (and key signature, too, while we're at it) I haven't touched it at all. Any idea if it also does something in RS, or if it's just useful for EoF and you, the person, when you're creating a song? I can see the visual effect it has in EoF, but I have no music education, so to me it doesn't really help that much. I'm not educated enough in music theory to find it useful, even if it is. I just count the "position" numbers and go by those.

 

Shift+P sections: I've never tried them so far, mostly because of my phrase names are pretty much variable names, (intro_long, pre_chorus_1, etc.) and also because, if you make a section that way, it has strict naming rules. (try naming a section 'asdf') It basically limits you to what you can see in Shift+S, so I prefer to make sections in Shift+S and phrases in Shift+P. That way I find it easier to then manage them in the "Beat > Events > All events" menu, with the "RS sections" and "Sections (RS phrases)" filters.

 

And about the song Loudness factor working in reverse: that's also true, but counter-intuitive. The UI pop-up says "Softer 0, -1, -2 ... Default -7 ... -18, -19, -20 Louder," which implies that the closer you are to 0, the quieter the song should be. Hopefully that'll be fixed or explained why it's written that way. I say this because the tones say pretty much the same thing (0 = quiet, -20 = loud) but, I tested it there, and there it actually works the way it's described.

 

 

Experiment

Basically, what I did is, I took the original, modified the section (S) markers and guesstimated what the result would do, generated it, opened RS and looked at the orange swimlanes. Each column is a revision, (version, if you prefer that name) and the rows represent sections of the song, and what EoF section (if any) I put there. I made 101-104 first, then I just looked at the prev. revision's results and did what I thought could get me closer to my goal. I was too "in the zone" to comment why I changed what I did and with what intention/expectation, so the results will be pretty much visual-only. Whoops.

 

I marked with orange and "no color" backgrounds where the sections are separated in the RS UI. The first column, Goal, is how it should look like. The very light colors in A16 and A20 mean I don't care what color they are, as long as they share that color between themselves. Second column, P, is phrase names, which are meaningless here, but whatever. Third column, S, is the version I had when I started this post. No point in coloring it, it's already obvious from my post's screenshot what that looks like.

4zJEODD.png

 

Conclusion

What I can say about the topic of "what I learned from this:" my best guess is that RS wants the whole song to be one swimlane, and for each section to appear exactly once.

 

For example, at the start, non-identical sections are merged. (101: in, 127: (rv)nv, 112: icvn) Wherever the same section doesn't appear twice, the swimlane line (same background color in the table/image) continues. 107-111 have ii, so they all get separated. But, in all revisions, the second chorus doesn't get merged with the outro. That's because that's the second chorus trying to merge with the first outro, which is illegal, because reasons?

 

If you look at 112 or 113, they have different sections until Column 21, so they all get morphed into a Introchorusnoguitarverse Frankenstein. And then the second chorus doesn't get merged with the prev. swimlane, because it already has a chorus, and the second chorus doesn't get merged with the outro, because it's not the second outro.

 

I tested this out in 128, which isn't in the pic because I'm severely running out of steam here, but I'm not writing a thesis, so that's my excuse for not being thorough being lazy. You'll have to take my word for it. For 128, I split the song up like this: icvovco. In Rocksmith, icvo appears as one swimlane, cvo as another/the second. (icvo)(cvo). I'll bet money if I put an Intro after the first outro, it would be merged with the second swimlane. So, the second outro got merged because it was being merged with the second chorus and verse.

 

 

I was gonna say something about not using No Guitar, but I forgot while writing this. Hopefully someone finds this half as interesting or useful as I did testing it. The more I'm writing this, the more scatterbrained I get, so I'll end my comment here.

 

 

Thanks for reading and happy charting!

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I'm sorry what?

First do you use DDC? If so, what is your phrase length setting there?

That is going to be totally skew your testing because DDC will use that settings to add/alter sectionning.

 

You can look into my tutorial to maybe understand more about what sections and phrase are exactly about.

http://customsforge.com/index.php/topic/35318-cdlc-creation-for-rocksmith-2014-remastered/

 

In your case, if you set the sections in EOF as you want them to be and set the phrase length settings in DDC high enough for DDC to not break what you did in EOF.

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Hi, firekorn,

 

 

I watched your video and am using all the info I found useful. But I don't use DDC. I tried it, but I find that what it generates is kinda weird. Some sections are cut in the wrong places, others are too long/short, etc. I prefer to make the difficulties by hand in EoF. So far, it works exactly as I'd want it to. I was just curious about what the orange lines under the difficulties are in RS. Turns out, they're pretty pointless, at least to me.

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@@dan4k Orange bar are sections and they define what you can select in Riff Repeater, they are largely more important than phrases and difficulty for most people. Too long sections will make using riff repeater less practical because you'll have to play through large part when you might want to focus only on a specific riff inside of it. It is what matters for 99% of users.

 

DDC should not cut sections off if you generate with the proper settings and have set your sections yourself properly. Yes, the level can be weird but that's how it is when you generate something out of a basic algorithm but it's also a massive time saver cause creating difficulty by hand is by far the most time consuming part of creating a CDLC.

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firekorn I get what you're saying, about sections being the right size and whatnot, and I agree. I think we're not on the same page about what we're talking about, though.

 

I'm pretty sure you are talking about the sections you see while you're playing, but I was talking to the sections you see in the song list/menu, when you just pick a song and then can play an RS suggestion, switch instrument/arrangement, etc. Here's a pic of my CDLC to demonstrate: you (I assume) were talking about the pic on the bottom, (in-game) I was talking about the one on the top. (menu)

 

Notice that the section lines aren't the same on both pictures:

VDAG42M.png

I was just wondering if the section on the top image mean anything, which I think they don't. Because, as soon as you start playing, they get separated so that each phrase is also a section. Also, I tried setting the empty sections as "Intro" sections and, as I expected, you can't select them, RS will just select the next non-empty section. So "No Guitar" is only useful when you don't want RS to suggest you to play an empty section.

 

I think I'll make each phrase a section, too, instead of how I have it now, where I only put sections to distinguish actual sections of the actual song. From what you see in the picture, the first 4 purple blocks are in one "Intro" section. That doesn't work well because when Rocksmith wants me to play that part of the song, it suggests riff repeating the "Chorus," for some reason. It's starting to confuse me.

 

And I also agree about charting difficulties by hand in EoF is a big time sink, but I'm a perfectionist so I morally have to do it by hand. :)

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That's a change that have been made with the Remastered where the game will automatically have phrases be selectable as sections. It probably also is why it causes bug if you have phrases shorter than section and end up with wrong name cause the game don't have any name to pick from to show the suggestion. The safest bet for you is to have section set like the second screen is, it's only way to make sure both screen will be the same and you won't have weird suggestion too.

 

Yes, the no guitar is only for non selectable section and should only be used for empty part (where there's no guitar to be played). Always been like that and it's quite clearly specified in my guide.

 

 

And I also agree about charting difficulties by hand in EoF is a big time sink, but I'm a perfectionist so I morally have to do it by hand.

Been there done that and i've stopped cause it's just not worth it at any point in time.

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Aha, good to know that the phrase = section thing is something new in Remastered. Yeah, in that case, I definitely agree that it's better if I just make the same amount of sections as phrases.

 

And, well, I'll stick to me hand-made difficulties until I also decide to stop. Otherwise I'll never learn :D

 

Thanks for the clarification!

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