Motorcycle Touring

Couple of updates here.

There are over 150 versions of the 72 or so songs. Since each song can possibly reach 100,000 points, you’re talking 150,000,000 points. I’m only just reaching 4,000,000 points so I have lots and lots of playing ahead of me 🙂 By the way, I’m at 6th level, National Headliner.

I did pick up some of the downloadable content. They’re a bit on the expensive side at 240 MS points (so about 3 bucks per song) but breaking it down in half (averaging it out), it’s about a buck 50 per song version so not horribly expensive.

One note there. You need to shut down your xbox360 after you finish downloading all your content and when you restart it, let every bit come up fully before moving about. The extra songs put some sort of load on the system which causes the songs to disappear if you go into it too quickly. When I first checked, I didn’t reboot and I only got to Deep Purple and the rest of the songs I had were gone. I restarted it and did my normal skip over the start steps and the song listing was pretty garbled seeing Blue Oyster Cult many many times (keep going left and it just adds another copy). Finally I let the game start all the way up and settle down before looking at the songs and it worked ok. You can tell if you watch the background on your Current Journey. It’ll be jerky until everything is loaded in memory then it smooths out and you’re good to go.

Now, one interesting bit. In the songs there’s a bar chart layout for each of the sections. As you complete sections, the bar is filled in and up. When you have it all, the bar is filled in completely. I’m working very hard on The Cure, Boys Don’t Cry. The outro (end of the song) has been escaping me. I can play it in the Riff tool to 100% but at the end of the song I choke. I’m at 98,500 points so I’m close, real close.

I also just updated the two song listing posts I did back in December finishing up the listed versions of the songs.

I do have a few other videos up of me practicing and playing but Rocksmith has been a load of fun. I should have a nice one of me fumbling along up on stage in February (OMG!) 😀

Anywhere, here’s the current list of songs I have up on YouTube.

Nirvana In Bloom

The Cure Boys Don’t Cry

Soundgarden Outshined

And here’s my channel if you want to see the other videos and of course, the stuff I like to listen to as well.

Carl’s YouTube Channel

I started getting better with the two songs I have for the next event. Soundgarden and Muse. They’re both sorta fast but with my initial not understanding of hitting the E too hard, they’re both starting out quite simple. Heck, switching from the Single Note version of the Muse song to the Event/Chord version had me adding in a lot of notes that were in the SN version and of course losing points 🙂 Once I got the other version out of my head and started playing what I could see, it started increasing the difficulty and I got up in the 40,000 point area on all three songs.

I have two more songs to get better at before attempting the event. Tomorrow night 🙂

I’m on the next set of songs for the event and three of the songs are tuned to Drop D. Normally your strings are tuned EADGBe. In these songs, you have to retune your low E string to D so you’ll have DADGBe. That’s not so bad however Rocksmith! seems to have a big problem with the tuning and “hearing” the strings or else I just am not using the right guitar for the game.

I first tried Muse – Unnatural Selection with the Stratocaster (Strat) and it just kept telling me that I needed to play a little lower (there are double yellow greater than signs that shift left and right pointing to the direction you need to play). It’s frustrating for two reasons, one of course is I’m using their tuning program to tune my Strat. Second is after a song or two, I take the Strat to my regular tuner and I find the ‘D’ string is pretty far out of tune and the B and e strings are a little off. So I tune it to spec expecting it to be better but nope. Still off.

Next I grabbed the Ibanez. It seemed to work a lot better however there are still spots where it thinks I’m not playing the right note. I again checked the tuning with my tuner and a couple of the strings are a little off but not like the Strat.

I think I need to try the Telecaster (Tele). Both the Strat and the Ibanez have floating bridges where the Tele’s bridge is mounted to the body of the guitar. I’ll try it again during practice tonight.

Update: Hah, I figured out what the problem was. It was still a problem on the Tele but while I was using my actual tuner to tune it, I noticed something. I’ve been hitting the low E string trying to make it louder so the game will know which fricking fret and string I’m hitting. But when I was tuning it, I found that hitting it that hard, and because it’s a lower sounding string, the note gets stretched out as if I did a bend. I actually made the connection about half way through the Muse song when it again said I did it wrong and was late (it kept saying I was late in hitting the note; the hard pick hit it off half a step high but it would drop down to the correct sound so I’d get a ‘late’ penalty). I played the rest of the song correctly and got above 13,000 points. A couple of more tries and I was up to 30,000 points so I was figuring out the correct method. Go me! 🙂

This is something I realized a couple of weeks ago but I finally went ahead and gathered all the details and will update the listing posting. But a majority of the songs in Rocksmith have more than one method for playing the song.

Single Note – No chords are in this playing of the song. In trying this a couple of times, I was confused because only the B and e strings were played and I know I was playing E and A strings when I was doing the Combo but then I realized. Rocksmith gives you the base note for the chord before giving you the chord. So initially I was playing just the A string but as I progressed, it changed into a chord and then eventually changed into the correct chord (so it’d show A string, then the A + D + G chord shape, then the A + D + G + B chord shape).

Chord and Chord 2 – A chord only song. I suspect, although I haven’t tried it yet, that it would play as noted above; the single A string and then build the chord until you have it down.

Combo and Combo 2 – This is the combination of the above two types.

So there are actually 116 songs, 19 with three of the above version and only 2 with just one of the above.

And additional notes. The Baseball game one still sucks. It does have a metronome playing to help you get your timing down but I guess I don’t have it down in my head yet as I’m either too soon or too late. It doesn’t help that it doesn’t recognize the F# (E3) when I play it and it doesn’t help that the timing is different if you’re stretching the note. 1, 2, 3, hit for normal. 1, 2, hit and stretch for stretch.

I activated the 3 month free Gold MS Live membership in part to see what was available on line for Rocksmith and to see if there are any patches. From the Ubisoft forums, I think the patch is scheduled for the end of January but I thought I’d check.

There are 5 selections once you get on line:

1. Features – There wasn’t anything in this section yet.

2. Songs – A list of songs available for purchase. They’re 240 Game Credits per song (100 credits = $1.25US). Bolded are ones added after the first listing in December:

3: Packs. There are three packs available. One is a free one with three songs. The other was Megadeth with the three songs listed above (it’s cheaper than if you buy the three separately). Finally is a Tone Pack with a bunch of effects pedals.

Rocksmith Holiday Song Pack: Free

Megadeth Song Pack: 640 GC

Tone Designer Time Saver Pack: 400 GC

4. Gear. The last one also didn’t have anything available yet.