Rocksmith has been around since 2011 and started as an alternative to the 5 button rhythm guitar craze. It stands out by the fact that the player can turn the act of playing a real guitar into a rhythm his game and use his real six strings as a controller. Over the years it’s been touted as a guitar learning tool rather than a real competitor to other rhythm games, and that’s what Rocksmith+ is all about. Rocksmith+ is a subscription service for $14.99/month, $39.99/3 months, or $99.99/year, plus a library of over 5,000 songs and a comprehensive suite of lectures to teach you how to play the guitar. doing. At nearly every level, you have an incredible amount of tools to help you tweak from there to suit your level of guitar skill.
And it all works! After a few weeks of trying it out and a few guitar lessons as a teenager, I spent a few hours tinkering with previous Rocksmith iterations as a foundation. My code knowledge has definitely improved. , improved finger dexterity and learned proper guitar playing form.
I can’t speak to the value of Rocksmith+ for someone who already knows how to play guitar well, but for me the real reason Rocksmith+ makes its subscription money is its lesson plans. Basic, Intermediate Lead Guitar, Intermediate Rhythm Guitar and Advanced HE are divided into four learning paths, each of which includes a series of lessons separated by practice tracks to test your understanding of the lessons. is packed. To clear the lesson, at 100% speed he must hit 80% of the notes to score. This provided a nice game-like incentive to really practice until you mastered the technique perfectly before moving on. to the next one.
My one small disappointment here is that the lessons are completely separate from the song library. I wish I could find out which song or part of a song I can play with the chords I’m learning. Despite going through a good portion of the basic learning path, navigating Rocksmith+’s vast library of songs, trying to find something you’re comfortable playing without getting lost in a sea of unfamiliar chords and techniques. , lost direction. I was still told
Luckily, Rocksmith+’s adaptive difficulty actually works quite well. Each time you pick a song, you’ll be given a recommended difficulty target. This sets up a note chart that the game feels about your current skill level. Playing well adds extra notes, turns single notes into chords, or inserts slides. Similar to the lessons, they would play certain songs repeatedly to increase difficulty and increase their mastery rate, making it perfect for gamifying the process of learning a song. Doing all this with a customizable guitar neck and fretboard pays off, but honestly, the feeling of improvement alone is more than enough.
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Strangely enough, the weakest part of Rocksmith+ is its selection of over 5,000 songs. You can’t have that many songs in one game, but I had a hard time finding songs that even fit my basic rock music taste. Granted, this is a subjective criticism, but if you Googled the 10 greatest rock bands of all time, they’d most likely be missing from Rocksmith+’s song library entirely. No Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, Queen, Rush, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Metallica, Kiss. Not just classics. Even relatively modern and active rock bands such as The Foo Fighters, Muse, The Killers and Queens of the Stone Age are conspicuously absent. Some of the bands with the biggest hits are missing. It was a real shock that he has 11 songs in the Deep Purple game and none of them are smoke on the water.
The way Rocksmith+ compensates for this is by having a huge variety of different genres, and to be fair, it’s an impressive spread. there is everything. There are also some anime opening and ending songs, like Kesenai Tsumi from the original Fullmetal Alchemist anime. It doesn’t make up for the fact that the game is very focused on teaching you how to play the guitar. There are very few songs you can learn, at least for now.
That’s where Rocksmith+’s value comes into play. As a way to teach you how to play the guitar, it’s great. The interface is great, the lessons are simple and easy to understand, and there are excellent skill checks at every level to help you understand and repeat what is being taught. As a game to play, we’re not there yet. Of course, this is still a subscription service in its infancy, and more songs will undoubtedly be added over the course of its life cycle. Also, there are already a number of community creations on the service.
As someone who basically wants to learn how to play guitar at a basic level, without a schedule that allows for real face-to-face lessons, I’ve already seen progress and improvement in just a few weeks of using Rocksmith+. . I’d love to stick with it and see how the service evolves over time. need to do it.
Either way, all you need is an electric guitar and a Real Tone cable to connect it to your platform of choice, and starting today Rocksmith+ opens the door for you to try it out for yourself.
