Guitar Status: November 24, 2013

I had a great time practicing guitar this weekend. I finished the (non-unlockable) Rocksmith 2014 songs; a solid collection, though there aren’t too many I’m madly in love with, and maybe it has a little more metal than I’d like? (But it’s by no means actively metal-heavy, don’t get me wrong.) And I dipped into a couple more lessons; I think I could probably benefit from doing those more.

But what impressed me the most about the game is that I finally started taking Riff Repeater mode seriously, and it’s really good. It’s super-configurable, for better or for worse, but once you get the options right, the result is great. Some of the configuration lets you mimic the different modes from the original Rocksmith; but some is new. I appreciate having control over how few mistakes I have to make before it bumps me up a speed/difficulty level: the original game’s desire for almost-perfection as something I found annoying, but it also seems reasonable to put that under my control because sometimes I want to be asked to hit every note in a section. And, no matter what, I appreciate having not only a count of how many notes I missed but also being shown the specific wrong notes on the repeat, so I can see where I need to focus more.

I think that combined with the vast number of tracks I have available to me means that I’m going to spend more and more time working on individual songs; I still like being confronted with random songs, I can easily imagine me spending more than half of my practice time in one of the more random modes (either recommendations or nonstop play), but I want to dig into individual songs more. (And the fact that the game lets me flag some songs as “favorites” helps with that, too.)

I’m also coming to terms with alternate tunings more. I don’t exactly like having to change my tuning between songs, but with new strings, it’s not nearly as bad as it had been. So I’ve stopped fleeing alternate tuning songs when I run into them in nonstop mode.

Lots going on with the game, I should probably gather my thoughts write another post about it on my main blog…