Guitar Status: February 10, 2013

For the third weekend in a row, I haven’t played Rock Band 3; I still might get back to vocals, but I’m busy enough that I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon. So I’m declaring victory on Rock Band; it’s been a great few years, but I’m focusing on Rocksmith these days.

Which I played a couple of times during weekday evenings this week, actually. Once, I was in the mood to try out bass, so I gave that a run through; fun, though the bass emulation for guitar players sounds a bit odd. I’m not planning to dive into it more now, but if I do, I’ll probably end up buying a bass fairly soon after that.

I went through a couple more guitar events on Friday, and I was pleased with the results; I’m reaching 90,000 points regularly on most songs, and I was surprised at how well I did on Jules (one of the bonus songs without vocals); I’m still not up for the sorts of solos that Rock Band 3 is fond of (and that Rocksmith mercifully isn’t), but I’m getting better.

Even with that, I still have a ways to go with the on-disc songs, and there are more parts for the songs. (I’d assumed for a while that the game would eventually start throwing other parts at me on a regular basis, but by now it’s clear that it has one favored part for each song.) I am worried about getting stuck with Master mode with too many songs if things continue at this rate; what I decided to do was to enlarge the range of available songs.

So I spent Friday evening looking through the available DLC, and ended up getting 18 songs. A bunch of one-offs, except for Rush five-pack. And once I finished the last event that was in queue, the game promptly presented me with an event containing seven of the new songs. (Red Barchetta, My Girl, Message in a Bottle, Pumped up Kicks, This Love, Smoke on the Water, and More than a Feeling.)

And they were all great! Well, Message in a Bottle wasn’t entirely to my taste, and Red Barchetta was a bit tricky, but I think I’ll end up liking both of those eventually. Also, to my surprise, three of the songs involved harmonics, and Red Barchetta had a section full of them (that was the tricky bit); I’m not sure there are three songs involving harmonics on the disc, and certainly it’s something I could use practice on.

It was odd playing through More than a Feeling—I’ve played through that song a lot on Rock Band 3, but the part you play version in that game is a composite of multiple parts. Whereas in the part that Rocksmith gave me, I didn’t have to play the arpeggio part; but the flip side was that Rocksmith asked me to play techniques (harmonics and string bends) that Rock Band 3 didn’t model. I’ll have to go find the arpeggio part in Rocksmith; and, for that matter, I’ll have to see where in Rocksmith I can find the fuller chords that Rock Band 3 puts in its part.

Good times; I think I’m going to try to play Rocksmith more often during weekday evenings. Though I’ll be practicing more outside of game, too—I’m playing guitar with Joan next weekend, and she suggested I learn “12 bar blues”, so I’ll be spending some time on that first.