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How would you make Rocksmith better?


pmm_fin

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There is one thing I really hate about Rocksmith and that is drop-d tuning on some songs. On way too many songs to be exact. Playing mostly with a floating tremolo guitar I hate to swap it out every time I come across a drop-d song. My other electric guitars have 009 sets of strings that are too loose when tuned down and the 6th string bends easily and registers badly. Drop-d is a gimmick anyway and nearly every song with it is too sucky to be included anyway. The game should adapt for normal tuning in drop-d songs as the sound is digital anyway.

 

I'd also like to see standard tablature scrolling from right to left instead of the (or as an opition to) endless neck scrolling down the screen. It's way faster to read once you grasp it and it also would be more educational for new players. The down the screen way has an additional issue of chords blocking each other and the need to zoom back and forth. 3D effect makes it hard to see which fret you are supposed to play from.

 

More blues, heavy, hard rock, prog and other essential guitar music. Less White Stripes, Black Keys, Sigur Ros and other bullshit there's so much of in this collection. There is at least a handful of tracks here where it's hard to pick out ANY guitar melody if you listen to them on Spotify. Any drop tuned stuff (Guns'n Roses, Kiss, Black Sabbath etc.) should be digitally transponed though or it'll be a huge pain to retune all the time.

 

Option to turn up the difficulty instantly. Some songs like House of the Rising Sun and Rebel Rebel have such high qualification limits that you need to grind them just to get them hard enough to be possible to qualify for a gig.

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I vote for some AC/DC songs. Their songs have rhythm, melody, they aren´t too hard and they are damn good :cool:

 

It´s quite hard to learn song you don´t know and without possibility to hear how the guitar part should sound. They could add some training feature where you can watch and hear how mastered guitar part should sound (for single notes, chords, combo). That would be really helpful.

Edited by voleman79
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My thoughts, ALL DLC! Buy the game, with no songs, have hundreds of songs on the store, you choose 25(?) songs that you download for free. That way it's more personalized and they would probably sell alot more copies. Plus, people would buy more DLC too, more songs on the in your specific genre, the more you buy. I'm sure that alot of people didn't buy this game due to the setlist.

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  • 2 months later...

Although I love rocksmith I'm still disappointed. Since I found the option to invert the fingerboard so its more like guitar tab I'm happier but why didn't they just have scrolling tab or at least have it as an option, or it could be at the top of the screen with the lyrics?

I won't be buying anything from the store at those prices but what's really frustrating me is the poor music. Why didn't it ask you what type of music you like at the start. Learning a song and having to play it ten times when you hate it is not fun. I will carry on with it as playing the guitar and gaming at the same time is awesome, I'm just hoping for a better selection of songs. Maybe a rocksmith 2 will have everything we want? Or a Rocksmith (insert favourite band name here) will be better. And not to impressed with the 2 player trophy or I guess the singing one.

Edited by sith
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gonna agree with the tablature request (or regular music since that would actually be the most practical method). or if there's no scrolling tab i'd like the colors and shapes to be replaced by numbers/notes. again it'd be way more practical, funny enough when i go to a website or store for sheet music i don't see an option for color-coded music.

 

i won't complain about the default selection of music (or the prices since having some of theses artists available is better than not having them) so i will instead just say if they want to add more music i'm all for that.

 

the only thing i could think of which would be really fun, and im sure others have mentioned this, is online co-op support. and off-topic a drum-dlc XD

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  • 4 weeks later...

I think it's a really good effort and I really enjoy it, but if they had another go at it I'd want more of a focus on rhythm. Maybe it's just me but I often find that the game will say I played a chord late when if anything I played it early. Also the free speed riff repeater is pretty useless for anything fast (ironically) but should be a useful practising tool, so that would need a quite a lot of changes in my opinion.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Well, I've lost at least 20 set lists by now due to it crashing :mad:, so apart from fixing that....

 

I think they need to get rid of the adaptive notes, and just do easy/medium/hard arrangements or something. I mean, it's insane to qualify a song on your first go around and then have the arrangement change right in the middle of your event performance. Before picking up Rocksmith to learn guitar, I've played piano nearly my entire life. And not once has someone run onto stage to swap out my music arrangement with another during a performance.

 

I'd also like to get to practice a song more before it gets added to my master mode encore list. I hate having a song come up as an encore that I am good at with sight reading, but don't have committed to memory yet.

 

And a bigger DLC library would be nice. It's kind of lame to see how many tracks get added for RBN each week while we get 3 if we're lucky (though it's good to see the past few weeks get a regular stream of 3-5 songs...)

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  • 3 weeks later...

It would be nice to have a scrolling TAB option, similar to Guitar Pro. I'm sure I will get used to it, but playing by colour just confuses me.

 

I also agree about master mode, mastering by sight reading and committing to memory are very different things.

 

A good mix of DLC songs for all skill levels is also important.

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  • 1 month later...

I'm the same regarding the notation - why couldn't they just use standard tab?

 

PROS

You can go away and play to other songs, not on Rocksmith, that use tab

If you don't already read any kind of music notation, you'd end up learning tab

If you already read tab, you'll get better at it

Tab is easy to understand, so why the colours?

Tab is horizontal, which avoids clutter which is what we get with vertical 'tab'

 

CONS

Those brought up on a diet of Guitar Hero might feel more comfortable with colours, but honestly - this is supposed to be an educational tool, so the 'con' is a spurious one really.

 

The lack of tab is a huge disappointment. I felt the same when RB3 came out - why not just use tab? I've met lots of musicians that can't read standard musical notation; but I've yet to meet a guitarist that couldn't read tab (even slowly).

 

I still don't understand why they put the strings the wrong way round on the screen. I'm glad sith pointed out that you can invert it... it was driving me mad for a while because I kept playing the wrong strings.

 

pmmm... your point about drop-D. I can't say either way whether drop-D is a gimmick, as I'm not a guitarist; but I can see why Rocksmith forces you to turn/re-tune. You can hear what you play through the TV, and yes the game can play the E-string as though it's turned to D. But what if you're playing an acoustic guitar? The sound coming out of your guitar will be loud and clear - and wrong!

 

I personally agree that, so some extent, drop-D does seem gimmicky. It's like modulating on a synth just because you can't play a few notes in a 'difficult' key. I know people who've learned piano pieces that have been "re-tuned" to an 'easy' key, e.g. "Humoresque" by Dvorak, from G-flat major to G major. The funny thing is, from my point of view, the original (in G-flat major) is easier to play than the so-called easier G major version :D

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I still don't understand why they put the strings the wrong way round on the screen. I'm glad sith pointed out that you can invert it... it was driving me mad for a while because I kept playing the wrong strings. :D

 

Sweet, pleased I was of help, drove me mad to begin with.

Some good points there to.

We all seem to be in agreement about the tab at least, maybe it's worth posting a link to this topic on the official rocksmith website?

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Sweet, pleased I was of help, drove me mad to begin with.

Some good points there to.

We all seem to be in agreement about the tab at least, maybe it's worth posting a link to this topic on the official rocksmith website?

 

The thing is, what on earth made the developers think that we'd like to learn songs as if we're playing Guitar Hero? If we wanted Guitar Hero, we'd play Guitar Hero - simple as that.

 

Tab is pretty much universal... it took me all of a few seconds to learn the basics of it when I was 25. Six lines denote the six strings, the highest line also corresponds with the highest string on your guitar as you're looking down at it. And the numbers on the string tell you which fret to make the note, a zero means open string.

 

How much simpler can you get?

 

The Rocksmith notation is HARDER to learn, and you can't use it outside of the game. The first time I ever learned tab, my roomies (I lived with 2 guitarists in Melbourne, Australia in 2000) gave me a piece to try some finger-picking, the piece was Minuet in G by Beethoven. I finger-picked the whole piece at about half the tempo (i.e. twice as slow), and they were impressed as I'd never played guitar before. This is proof that standard guitar tab WORKS!

 

At the very least, they should've provided the game with both Rocksmith notation and standard guitar tab.

 

I bought this game in October last year, didn't play it long because then I got eczema on my fingers, so I couldn't strum/make notes without my hands hurting. I'd also started drumming at about the same time (pre-paid a year's lessons), and even had to give up two lessons, but fortunately the eczema got better so I could carry on with drumming - but I still couldn't do Rocksmith because the skin on my fingertips was really hurting (gripping a drumstick is far easier).

 

But today, I decided to dig out Rocksmith because my fingers have fully healed now. I've got to Rank 3 (I know, still early days), but I'm finding it not too bad. The notation style is still weird, but my brain's gotten used to it now. Kind of like when I was playing Rock Revolution/Rise of the SixString where they use a middle coloured gem for the bass drum (rather than long yellow bar a la Rock Band).

 

By the way, I'm playing bass guitar on Rocksmith. I actually have little inclination to learn electric guitar, but might well get one if I complete all the bass stuff in the game. I just find guitar playing tedious, not sure why. I know people probably feel that way about bass, but I love bass grooves (good ones), even simple ones :D

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  • 2 months later...
My thoughts, ALL DLC! Buy the game, with no songs, have hundreds of songs on the store, you choose 25(?) songs that you download for free. That way it's more personalized and they would probably sell alot more copies. Plus, people would buy more DLC too, more songs on the in your specific genre, the more you buy. I'm sure that alot of people didn't buy this game due to the setlist.

 

I like this...choose your own catalog. There were too many songs that I played once...hated...changed them out next time they showed up in the setlist. Looking back...I think that I only had like maybe 10 songs that I played more than 2 dozen times. If you had a slew of songs that you choose and liked...you would have no problem playing them a bunch of times.

 

I would remove the mandatory tuning before every song, which is very annoying

 

I can understand tuning before every song...but it got to be overkill after a while. It should give you the option to not tune...and then if you are missing a bunch of notes...you'll know that you need to tune up. Only mandatory tuning should be before a gig...not when you are just practicing.

 

The menu wasn't the greatest either. I kept backing all the way out to the main menu a lot...better navigation needed.

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  • 1 month later...

All of the a fore mentioned ideas are awesome, but what I want is the option to learn a song at half speed, at least in the beginning when I'm still getting used to Rocksmith's cluttered "tab" system.

 

...of course trophies and general progression would have to bet at normal speed.

 

This is a game that should be about learning songs and techniques. No teacher expects a student to play at full speed straight out of the block but instead would focus on technique and accuracy.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Damn, this game needs so many minor adjustments :facepalm:

 

First, I'd change the sizing of the on-screen fretboard to match a real guitar. IE, fret 1 wider than 2. 2 wider than 3 etc.

Not many would've really cared about this, but it annoys me every time. I see the 12, which is pretty thin, and then see the a 3 which is the same thinness.

 

Next, I'd remove the speed calibration on the speed trainer. That way, you can jump straight into the speed training with your own mastery and speed selected without tripping over the section full speed before finally getting into it.

 

On the topic of training, what's the point of having 'lives'? You fail 30 times and then what? You're forced to exit to the menu and re-enter the training. Uh, perhaps Ubisoft forgot what the point of training is?

 

Rocksmith needs a major overhaul. Looking forward to seeing how 2014 ends up looking.

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I really enjoy Rocksmith, however loading times are WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too long, it's like a PS1 game, if the game really needs to save all the time, it shouldn't be a square popping up for 5 seconds, it should be a small icon in the bottom, that doesn't stop you from doing anything. And finally, the game literally freezes at least once everytime I play, often I loose my last performance.

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Just finished playing skyrim for the last 2 weeks, rocksmith's loading is super fast :p

But yea, it does have a freezing problem. Usually when you choose the 'play again' option after a song. It froze on me twice tonight alone.

 

Another thing I'd change is when there is a position shift, it should label on the incoming squares (the first few at least) their fret numbers. It's so hard to get coordinated after shifting from 3-6 to something random like 10-13. Gets me every time...

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I played Dawn of the Chordead for the first time last night, and it annoyed the hell out of me. The on-screen visual of the chord is upside down, with the low E on the top instead of the bottom, I screwed up a lot of simple chords because the image confused me.

 

I get that they're trying to teach beginners and all and having the TAB the right way might confuse beginners, but maybe they should try to teach them the right way so that they don't get confused when they decide to make the jump from a video game to a real song.

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I played Dawn of the Chordead for the first time last night, and it annoyed the hell out of me. The on-screen visual of the chord is upside down, with the low E on the top instead of the bottom, I screwed up a lot of simple chords because the image confused me.

 

I get that they're trying to teach beginners and all and having the TAB the right way might confuse beginners, but maybe they should try to teach them the right way so that they don't get confused when they decide to make the jump from a video game to a real song.

 

I agree, I couldn't use the pic of the chord at the beginning, I just saw the shape and new where on the fretboard it was. It definitely should be the other way around. It also annoys me that sometimes when for example it says G and shows the chord on the 10th fret, I think any G should be correct. I failed alot playing the right chord at the wrong frets.

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I agree, I couldn't use the pic of the chord at the beginning, I just saw the shape and new where on the fretboard it was. It definitely should be the other way around. It also annoys me that sometimes when for example it says G and shows the chord on the 10th fret, I think any G should be correct. I failed alot playing the right chord at the wrong frets.

You can get away with any G in that octave.

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  • 2 weeks later...
I played Dawn of the Chordead for the first time last night, and it annoyed the hell out of me. The on-screen visual of the chord is upside down, with the low E on the top instead of the bottom, I screwed up a lot of simple chords because the image confused me.

 

I get that they're trying to teach beginners and all and having the TAB the right way might confuse beginners, but maybe they should try to teach them the right way so that they don't get confused when they decide to make the jump from a video game to a real song.

 

Just figured out you can change this in the options menu, i changed it to inverted and dawn of the chordead is much easier, I got a 400 streak before the game refused to register my perfect B7 three times in a row.

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Just figured out you can change this in the options menu, i changed it to inverted and dawn of the chordead is much easier, I got a 400 streak before the game refused to register my perfect B7 three times in a row.

You serious?! You're a life saver dude! This is the last guitarcade trophy I have left, maybe now I'll stand a chance.

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