After taking a while off from the game, I have returned to playing Rocksmith 2014 regularly. I didn't quit playing guitar altogether or anything like that - I was practicing off-line. Well... Strumming, running scales, and learning the tabs to simple songs I was interested in learning anyway... The word "practice" probably doesn't work there. Just fooling around I guess.
I got a little bored with the music selection, even though I have close to 160 songs to choose from. The songs I liked I played a dozen times but I never really practiced them offline (or even online using the Riff Repeater tool) so I plateaued in the 70% - 85% Mastery range. The songs I hated I played maybe once. Songs I was ambivalent about got a handful of plays. Thirty or so tunes went completely untouched - sure, some was just avoiding stuff I didn’t like but some of those songs I got as DLC!
I got bored with the mini-games because... Well, I guess because I didn't see the need to practice harmonics and my bends sounded just fine to my tin ear. In many of the games I was just getting crushed over and over and got irritated with seeing the “LEADERBOARD CHALLENGE FAIL” message pop up all the time. Besides, I wanted to make better use of my limited Rocksmith time by...
By what, exactly? Learning songs? I thought we just went over that...
After a while I came to the realization that I was just going through the motions. I wasn't getting worse, really, I just wasn't getting any better. I even stopped playing songs that required me to retune my guitar which severely pared down the catalog - it was just too much of a “hassle”. Listening to snatches of some of the offerings like Satch Boogie or In the Hall of the Mountain King was depressing because I “knew” that mastering stuff like that would be out of my reach even if I lived to be three hundred years old, so why bother?
Eventually I just didn't feel like digging the cable out of the drawer and hooking up the guitar and waiting for the software to load anymore. And, I knew, the more days that went by like this the less I would be able to recall, so the worse I would get, which would make it even less likely I would want to play the next day. Remember, I am not a musical person - stuff like this doesn't stick for me and without constant exposure my already tenuous grasp of the subject poofs into nonexistence.
Man...talk about a funk.
One day, my in-laws came to visit and I showed my wife's father the 3/4 size Strat Squire I got for $40. He used to play a little about a million years ago so after a bit of messing around with it he asked if I had an amp. I said I did and fetched it and my bass. I plugged him in and there we sat in the kitchen swapping instruments back and forth bickering about the chord progression to House of the Rising Sun. I think our free-form whatever-ing sounded... well, if it didn't sound exactly "good" it wasn't horrible to listen to, either. Since we both appear to play with the same level of skill it wasn't annoying or embarrassing when we stepped all over each other and it didn't turn into some sort of bizarre contest where the most obscure chord or hipster-iest technique "won".
It was a blast and gave me the boost I needed to lift me out of this most recent rut. Hey, I know there will be other ruts but, for now, I wanted to be better so that impromptu jam sessions would be even more enjoyable! Back to the software!
Ok, since I wanted to "get better" I was going to have to look at a lot of these songs for what they were - many of them were just there to hone techniques so I might as well make peace with that. Incubus (I Miss You) is pretty much all harmonics, Nirvana (In Bloom) is all about power chords, the Black Keys (I Got Mine), Tommy Tutone (8675309), David Bowie (Rebel Rebel) are mainly relentless grinds of a handful of notes that are there to test coordination in the face of boredom (I think).
Unlike the old version of Rocksmith, there are no gigs to strive to qualify for - there's just Percent Mastery, a pure number. There's no penalty for ignoring the Goals like "Achieve 75.42% Mastery in Pour Some Sugar on Me”, so the forced focus isn’t really there anymore. While this software is a better teacher then the older version the open-ended nature of the new version relies on a much larger scoop of self-discipline so, you know, not so great if you, like me, have the attention span of…
In order to gauge where I was with where I wanted to be I needed to pick a metric. It's all well and good to "master" (score 100% or more) some of the songs but some are so easy that it would be difficult to not master them. On the other side of that coin is stuff that is so fast and complex that hearing the little snatches that play when I am making my selection makes me wonder how it is possible that a single human holding a piece of wood that has six strings nailed to it is capable of making the noises I am hearing. I needed an "overall mastery" that made sense to me and that didn't require me to check out my stats online from a PC.
I didn't want to do a lot of math and I didn't want to have to write down all of the mastery levels for all the songs so I just counted them in groups of 5% and used the weighted average to determine my overall mastery. Here’s what I have so far:
I have played all the stuff in my collection at least once now. As you can see, doing so really kicked the average to the right.
You might be thinking, “Well, just download a bunch of new stuff and play the songs once and that will increase your average even more”. No, not really. Oh, at first, it would, since it seems that I average 30% or so mastery on any new song that I play once (see that peak there?). After a while, though, the peak in the 30% range would get higher and higher and begin to dominate the average, anchoring the overall mastery to that level.
Plus, for each song I add, the less of an effect each individual song has on the average as a whole. Huh? Well, let’s say I wanted to bump my average up by 10% - I would need to improve by 1600% (the number of songs I have times 10%). So each and every song would have to go up by 10%, or half the songs would need to improve by 20%, or I would have to bring 20 of the songs from the 20% and below level to the 100% level… Adding new songs (unless they are trivial to play) does nothing for the score, and, worse, doesn’t really make me a better player, which is the whole point of doing this in the first place.
So how long would increasing my mastery by 10% take, anyway?
With 160 songs increasing the mastery by 10% in one go is probably not going to happen. For every song that I have bumped from 30% to a whopping 65 or 70% in one or two attempts, there are a couple that I have seen pathetically inch up by one or two tenths of a percent. By my reckoning the best case scenario is 10 hours of game play (160 songs, 4 minutes a song), assuming the songs I make huge strides in balance with all of the ones that are kicking my butt. Although I guess this could be done in five days, a more realistic goal for me is a 1 or 2 percent improvement per week.
Also, I don’t mean to imply that in six weeks time someone could go from my level of mastery to somewhere near 100%. That’s ridiculous. At some point the whole “diminishing returns” thing really kicks in and the only way to go up is to actually learn the songs note for note, not just plow through them in a general, unfocused way. I’m not sure I will ever get to that stage.
I guess what I will try is to bump one song in each category (like the 20-25% range) up into the next category (the 25-30% range) each time I play. This should sloooowly push the graph to the right while making sure I am not leaving any songs behind. Looking at my song list I see that’s gonna require a lot of re-tuning.
Since I still don’t like having to retune all the time so when I need to play a song that is way out from E standard, I grab my old Strat Squire. It doesn't hold a tune as long as the Ibenez but it’s way quicker to get on point - the changes in mechanical stresses don’t de-tune the other strings as much for whatever reason. Also, I can just leave it in Drop D or whatever. For stuff that is slightly sharper or flatter than E standard I stick with the Ibenez.
So (until my next rut, that is) that’s my plan for the guitar. The bass is another overly-long story. I need to wrap up this post for now but here’s a quick summary: 1) many of the arrangements for the bass on Rocksmith 2014 are really, really easy 2) I think the software might be a wee bit too forgiving in some cases and 3) As generally unskilled as I am, I may be “faking the funk” in the pit band for a play at some point a few months from now.
More later.
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