Week Five

BY Vincent PollardPublished Jan 20, 2014

In addition to the library of songs available to play, Rocksmith 2014 also has a range of lessons you can take and I'd broken my promise from a couple of weeks back to divide my time between lessons and playing songs. To rectify this I started out trying the Bends 101 lesson, then Legato 101 (which includes hammer-ons and pull-offs) and finally Palm Mutes 101, which I had a moderate amount of success with. I found the lessons easy enough, but for some reason just couldn't fully get past the practice tracks. Still, it's good to balance learning songs with some tips on technique as the techniques crop up in the songs I'd been playing, specifically palm mutes and slides.

After a couple of days of lessons began to feel a bit dry, I went back to "Cold Company," the Minus The Bear song that I'd been enjoying playing. My highest accuracy score in the week was up to 81% and after several attempts I broke the halfway point with 53.7% overall. The overall score is calculated to take into account the difficulty level you are on, so 81% accuracy is good but it's only 81% of an incomplete song. As you improve, Rocksmith 2014 feeds you more notes and greater complexity to push you forward.

For the sake of variety — and because my roommates were gonna kill me if they heard "Cold Company" blaring out of the living room one more time — I went back to some other tracks. I only got 13.4% (71% accuracy) on the Kinks and 25.4% (and 92% accuracy) on the White Zombie track before dialing down to something mellower with La Sera's "Love That's Gone," which started off easy but became pretty crazy very quickly, with far too many notes all over the fretboard. After a few attempts at La Sera I felt rested enough to go back to Slayer's ludicrously fast "War Ensemble," and after several plays, I broke 60% with a new longest streak of 80 notes and 78% accuracy! Slayer are still around, right? I wonder if they need a stand-in guitarist.

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