Five Tips to get Better at Rocksmith (and Guitar!)

I read an interesting blog post the other day, called “How I Didn’t Learn Guitar by Playing Rocksmith 2014.” Rocksmith can be a great learning tool and I can say that it did turn me into a guitar player.  When it comes to whether someone can learn guitar by playing Rocksmith, It’s not enough to say that you need to “want it” (even though you do!) there are also some tips that I can share.  These will hopefully help you in getting the most out of your Rocksmith guitar practice.

Fāng’s 5 Rocksmith Tips
1.  Don’t be afraid to turn the difficulty level down after you level up a riff.  This is done through the “riff repeater” menu.  I noticed something I was doing wrong after I had been playing Rocksmith for awhile.  I had begun to do what I will call “shotgun guitar” playing.  Shotgun guitar is when I’m trying frantically to keep up with the game, and I’m hitting the notes.  Then Rocksmith levels me up because I hit the notes.  Problem is, I likely hit 3-4 other notes as I was playing that I wasn’t supposed to hit.  My timing was probably far from perfect.  The notes didn’t have the same timbre as they do in the song.  Being a computer program, Rocksmith can only tell if I hit the right notes or not, then increases the difficulty level.  It doesn’t realize that I was practically mauling the strings.  A new version might be able to identify that but for now, you have to correct yourself if you start mauling the guitar.  If Rocksmith levels you up and you’re not ready for the new level, take it back down again.  Don’t let yourself fall into a “shotgun” style of playing because then Rocksmith becomes a game and not a musical experience.

2.  Slow songs down when you’re playing them, then write down the song as guitar tabs.  Once written down, practice those tabs at your own pace.  Rocksmith’s method for presenting guitar tabs is pretty good but it’s far from perfect.  Notes can come in too fast, there’s so many colors and waving bars and screen-filling chords.  Notes and chords will literally get obfuscated behind other notes and chords.  Writing out your own tabs can help a lot.  More than once, I thought a section was really difficult but once I had it on paper, I realized that it was really pretty simple.

3.  Get DR Neon Guitar strings:

These are available in my local Guitar Center, Sam Ash etc.  Though I eventually moved on from them, they just happen to match Rocksmith’s color scheme.  What a coincidence! Buying these things can make your Rocksmith playing a lot easier because instead of counting down to the 4th string when the orange string lights up in the game, you literally play the string on your guitar that is orange.  They look pretty silly but they also glow in the dark, which is a plus.  Oddly, the game may not be making them as loud as other strings, I think the color coating is interfering with the electric guitar pickups or something.  It’s not a big deal though.

4.  Do something with your guitar other than Rocksmith every once in awhile.  At one point I realized that I was getting pretty good at the guitar but couldn’t play anything without the game running, which was kind of sad.  There’s a wide world of guitar-ness out there.  Grab random songs you like, you might realize that a lot of good songs are actually pretty easy to play.  Rocksmith deliberately selects hard songs (for the most part) and most of the songs that I like which aren’t in Rocksmith are pretty easy by comparison.

5.  Buy DLC, possibly including the original Rocksmith.  As a Rocksmith fanatic, I bought the original game as well as the 2014 version and many DLC songs.  The more songs you have that you actually like, the more you will practice.  When I first got Rocksmith 2014, I didn’t genuinely like more than three songs.  I practiced songs I didn’t like but it wasn’t really inspiring me.  After expanding my horizons as much as possible (which wasn’t free!) I’m currently practicing eleven songs in Rocksmith.  It’s pretty nice.  If you’re adventurous, there’s also “custom dlc” songs out there, quite a few of them in fact.  I haven’t installed any myself because I have a mac these days and it’s harder to get under the hood with a mac, at least for me having been a PC person before, but custom DLC seems like it could be a good asset.

That’s it for my Rocksmith tips! I’d like to add that playing a musical instrument is a great thing.  Once you get good at it, it’s fun and somewhat productive.  I’m so glad that I picked it up.  It takes time before you start to really enjoy it but once you do, it’s a great experience.  I’m even branching out into learning some music theory, such as ear training and chord progressions, and am working on recording a song that I wrote.  It’s good times… rock on 🙂