I played a lot of Rocksmith over the weekend. I started Saturday night when I got home with Scott’s borrowed guitar. By the end of the night, I decided that I wanted a guitar. So, Saturday, me and the kids played some, and Saturday afternoon, I went to Guitar Center and bought my first guitar, an Epiphone Les Paul Special II in Vintage Sunburst.
I recall being at dinner on Saturday night and people asking if I could play anything. At that point, I couldn’t.
Sunday brought more playing, and by Sunday afternoon, I was able to pick out Jingle Bells by myself, and had memorized a bit of Smoke on the Water.
I had also learned a small set of power chords and was able to jam with myself a little, picking out a nice little 3 chord tune of my own devising. Sounded a lot like some kind of surfer rock thing. It was fun to feel like I could just pick up a guitar and start playing a little.
Monday I took the guitar to work to show it off. Everyone was suitably impressed, but scolded me for bringing the guitar in the trunk of the car, because that had put it out of tune.
So I just finished another longish session on Rocksmith, and while I’m still pretty novice, I have started noticing that I can find my way around the frets a little better, at least frets lower than 11 or so. Also, I spent some time working on the hook in Peace of Mind. I can probably pick most of it out at this point, although not at full speed.
Chords throw me off quite a bit, I probably have about 3 of them memorized enough to just play them at speed. My scores at the arcade games are getting higher though. I haven’t beaten the first level of scale warriors yet.
I would like to get better at Don’t Look Back in Anger, but I have started avoiding songs that require me to retune the guitar a lot, so I spend a lot of time in E standard.
I am having a lot of fun learning a new skill. My fingers don’t hurt as much as I remember them hurting when I tried this last time. I like the way the game progresses and regresses me as I hit the limit of my current ability. I saw the first mastery sections today.
At this point, I pretty much have the string colors (at least, Rocksmith’s versions) ingrained and I can hit the right string at speed, usually. Red and yellow are pretty solid, I still have to pause to think about blue orange or orange green bits. I decided not to put the sticks on the guitar, so I am learning the frets the hard way, by the dots. It still feels like translation rather than fluency when I see the notes coming down the stream though. Frets 1 through 5 I can pretty much just glance down and get to, but 7 through 10 I really have to pause and think, and higher than that I usually have to pause the game and get to the right one or risk missing it.