Guitar Players – Rocksmith – Yeah or Nay?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have to say I’m really pumped about a program/game that lets me use a real guitar.

The real drawback I see is that it doesn’t teach you to read notes or tabs(?).
I’m not even sure what tabs are but apparently it has something to do with notation specifically for guitar?

So, am I wasting my time getting into guitar this way? I’ve never picked one up but this just looks so cool and fun I really want to get it. Am I going to realize I wasted my money and time or is this really as awesome as it looks?

2

I picked a used copy to try as my playing routine had gotten very stale and I wanted to shake things up a bit. I had a difficult time with the latency and essentially found that the instructions were telling me to rewire my whole entertainment setup, at which point I threw in the towel.

3

Played the first one. Hated it. Latency was horrendous and ruined the game for me. Even the slightest latency will ruin a game like that.

I’ve played guitar for 17 years and really liked the guitar hero and rock band games. This was unplayable for me.

4

They supposedly solved the latency but I completely understand how that would ruin it.
If latency wasn’t an issue would it be worthwhile? I can get it off Amazon and return it if the latency is a true technical issue, but I’d feel bad returning it just because I didn’t look into it enough and plain old didn’t like it.

5

Is this a musical instruction program or a video game?

6

Yep, it’s just a shorthand way of describing what you are playing. The basics of it is you have six lines, each representing a string, and a number on the line which represents which fret you are playing. A group of numbers aligned vertically means you play them all at the same time (a chord). You basically go from left to right, playing the strings where the numbers are.

That’s probably not very clear, so here are some tutorials on it:

http://guitar.about.com/od/tabchordslyrics/ss/read_guitar_tab.htm

Looks like an instructional program to me, but I have no experience at all with it.

7

I have both Rocksmith I and just got Rocksmith II. Rocksmith one was…alright. I found that I didn’t play it much as it was very slow on the reload.

I just got Rocksmith II and they changed it a lot so that it is not near as annoying to play and it will teach you to play your guitar. There is a whole section of really in depth lessons as well as the actual music/play part of the game.

It does not use tab which is the music notation used for guitar music. Instead it feeds you the notes similar to Guitar Hero or Rockband in a vertical format. I find it really hard to get used to that.

However, a new game, Bandfuse, will be released on November 19 (I have it on preorder from Amazon). Sells for around $70.00 with one required 1/4" game guitar cable and feeds the notes using actual tablature notation. Has about 60 songs on the disc with future downloadable format songs. I can’t say more about it until I can actually play it but it does have Slash as an instructor and he is a pretty good guy when it comes to the products he endorses so I would say that it would be a better product of the two.

In a nutshell, pass on Rocksmith I unless you can get a cheap second hand disc. One advantage of having the copy of Rocksmith I is that all of those songs are importable to the new Rocksmith II and will operate in the less annoying Rocksmith II environment and all of it’s improvements. So I would advise, buy either Rocksmith II or wait until next week for Bandfuse and learn with actual guitar tablature that will enable you to download or buy actual guitar music as you want to play outside of the game environment. I want to add that I am on a PS3 system. Any other systems, I cannot speak to and your mileage may vary.

8

I have the original Rocksmith, for PS3, and I like it. There was another thread a couple weeks ago asking about the new version, Rocksmith 2014, so I started playing Rocksmith again. I do not have RS2014, but will get it for Christmas. RS1 has a lot of frustrations, e.g. long load screens, and a couple mini-games that seem to give everyone trouble, but playing songs works well.

If you are learning electric guitar, you should get this game. It’s a lot more fun playing with the songs in the game than just practicing on your own. You’ll almost certainly play your guitar more, and that’s probably the most important part of learning guitar. It won’t teach you to read music or tablature, but there’s nothing to stop you from doing that yourself.

For a new song, RS1 starts with a few notes, and adds more of them as you do better. It probably pushes you too hard, which is one of the frustrations of the game. You never fail a song, so you can just ignore the additional notes, or play a single note when a hard chord shows up. The downside is you never feel like you nailed a song. RS2014 is supposed to be better about this.

In addition to just playing songs, there are minigames to work on individual techniques. For example, playing scales across the different strings in a single hand position. Another for working on moving up and down the neck on (mostly) a single string. There’s one for harmonics, but that’s one that has some problems.

If you want to just jam, you can use the game as an amplifier. During the course of the game, you unlock guitars and effects pedals, and you can use these when jamming to change how your guitar sounds. Real pedals are, well, pedals, and you can turn them on and off with your foot in the middle of play, and can chain them. I don’t think you can chain them, and the only way to switch while playing is probably to have someone else do the switching for you.

Latency:
I don’t have a problem with latency. If you use HDMI to connect to your TV, and use the TV audio, there is a large delay associated with decoding the HDMI audio, and the game is likely unplayable. You cannot use HDMI audio with this game. I suspect that’s the issue some of the posters above had. I have the PS3 analog audio directly connected to audio-in on my DVD/stereo set, which avoids that. I play RockBand a lot as well, and using the audio cables, our audio lag setting is about 25 ms. I tried using HDMI audio once, and the setting was, IIRC, about 180 ms. RockBand is still playable, because it just sends the game audio early to compensate. In RockSmith, you’re actually hearing your guitar, and that delay can’t be removed. Here’s a post/thread on another board discussing latency and lag that looks pretty good.

On preview: I probably agree with getting RS2014 instead of RS1, but you can buy most of the RS1 songs as DLC for RS2014 for $10. I think it searches for the RS1 game data, so you probably need to pick up a used version. They’re probably pretty cheap now. But that can wait until you’re bored with what you have and are ready for more songs.

As I said, I have RS1 on the PS3. Things are probably similar for the Xbox, but no idea about PC or Steam versions.

9

I was thinking of getting Rocksmith for PC from Steam, but the description says a special “Rocksmith Real Tone Cable” is needed. Is it a proprietary cable, or a fancy name for a standard one?

10

You will need the proprietary cable for Rocksmith.

11

It’s $30 purchased separately. Bundles for PS3 or Xbox with it are $20 more than without it.

12

Based upon my experience with Rock Band latency, I didn’t bother with the console version - I bought the PC version and have no issues at all.

13

I don’t understand the latency issue. I didn’t have that problem with Guitar Hero (though I was playing it on a TV that had RCA inputs).

14

You won’t have the problem if your audio comes into the TV through RCA inputs. If you use HDMI to connect to the TV, and use the digital audio that comes through the HDMI cable, you’ll have latency problems. Here’s a chart showing three ways to connect an Xbox to the TV (the PS3 version of that looks pretty much the same.).

15

Reading through this I see there’s a source of latency between the console and the TV.

Rocksmith uses a real guitar, so another source of latency could be that the signal from the guitar has to go through analog to digital conversion, do whatever it does for the program (which seems to be quite a bit), then go through digital to analog conversion to get the sound back out. To do this requires a fairly beefy processor and/or system tweaking. 11-13ms of latency is a decent balance between achievability and listenability. Actually I’m amazed they have something like Rocksmith at this level. It looks interesting.

Guitar Hero uses a dedicated game controller, as you know, so there’s none of that extra processing involved.

16

I have both versions, 2014 is much improved over the first. It has added very good technique lessons, and a streamlined interface that lets you get in and play very quickly. The original one had horrid menu navigation causing more time to be spent jumping around menus than actually playing.

Latency is much improved in 2014, near undetectable as long as you use the analog audio output instead of the HDMI.

There’s also a quite cool free-style jam session mode where a computer band plays along with you and adapts to what you’re playing.

W/respect to tablature, there is an option to flip the fretboard orientation so it reads more like tabs.

My only complaint is that the frivolous eye candy, crowds, venues, guitar skins, etc, is much reduced in 2014. Silly, but I like my digital bling, sometimes I just have to chase that carrot.