Yeah, so I just spent the last four hours developing a painful case of RSI while trying to beat Green Grass & High Tides on expert guitar. The worst part about it is that I always fail at the exact same spot: Guitar Solo 2M. For those of you who are not suckers for punishment like I am and aren’t familiar with the section names of GG&HT, this is the very last portion of the song, with the Big Rock Ending literally seconds away. I’ve been booed off the stage at 96% completion more times than I care to count.
The worst part about it is that I can nail it in practice mode (98% notes hit at 100% speed on my best attempt), but because it takes 10 fucking minutes to get to that section when I play in career mode, my fingers are exhausted and they’ve lost any muscle memory they had gained from practicing by the time I get to it.
More than once today have I very nearly smashed my fake plastic guitar in frustration.
I can’t beieve people can get that far with the shitty strumbar. Do you know what guitar version you have? I have had the leaf switch one, it broke (no upstrum). now i have the uncaged magnetic one and it no longer upstrums as of yesterday.
I also only play bass on the thing on easy or medium…so it’s not like i’m abusing the thing. I do mostly upstrum alot as i play a real bass also.
I’ve also snapped 2 drum pedals in half (one just a minute ago). Also only playing easy or medium and not doing the “hoe down” on it.
On the RB controller you can do the solo sections on the solo frets without strumming, does it let you do that on the normal frets with the Les Paul?
The only way I was able to pass was by using my right hand to play the really fast parts, but that wouldn’t work if you need to strum to recover from a missed hammer-on/pull-off.
this is the very last portion of the song, with the Big Rock Ending literally seconds away. I’ve been booed off the stage at 96% completion more times than I care to count.
Ah yes, this section, right before the big rock finish.
First I had to practice the “sine wave” sections at about 85% to get far enough to fail at 95%. It’s a series of super-super-SUPER-fast triplets, like so… imagine them all on top of each other with almost no space at all in between:
- - x - -
- - - x -
- - - - x
This is what worked for me…
activate overdrive (star power)
repeatedly press O-B-Y as fast as possible
strum roughly in time with the triplets (so basically flail away)
Surprisingly this got me about 75% in practice mode, and with overdrive activated, I didn’t even go below 2/3ds on the crowd meter on this section.
You have to give up on the idea that you can actually PLAY these notes in any kind of pattern and just… flail. I know it sounds crazy, but if I tried to play 'em in time I couldn’t do any better than 50% (often more like 33%) and often freaked out when I got out of sync thus making it even worse.
The “flail w/overdrive” technique works. I completed it. You can too.
strum roughly in time with the triplets (so basically flail away)
Unfortunately, I need my Overdrive for the previous section, Guitar Solo 2L, which has the same kind of fast pull-offs only it’s a little slower than Guitar Solo 2M but has four notes instead of three, like so:
- X - - -
- - x - -
- - - x -
- - - - x
The red note is held down for a moment while the others are near-instant pull-offs. I’ve tried working on that section in practice mode, but I haven’t found a good technique yet. Should I put pinky on orange and do pull-offs with all four fingers? Maybe use ring/middle/index on orange/blue/yellow respectively (similar to how I beat the “sine wave” sections) and then slide index from yellow to red for the last note? Or maybe just wail away on the strum bar and hope that I hit more than I miss?
You have to give up on the idea that you can actually PLAY these notes in any kind of pattern and just… flail.
In practice mode, I was able to routinely get 65-75% on that section on full speed and even once got 98%, but I can never recreate that when playing the full song. :(
The Strat is the best guitar peripheral available, hands down. The Les Paul is definitely the best of the GH guitars thus far, but the Strat demolishes it.
need my Overdrive for the previous section, Guitar Solo 2L, which has the same kind of fast pull-offs only it’s a little slower than Guitar Solo 2M but has four notes instead of three, like so
You shouldn’t need overdrive for that. Those 4-note slides are easy, with lots of space in between each one. Practice more!
I can’t IMAGINE doing the very last section of the song without Overdrive. Not sure it’s possible… you need to set up so you have overdrive for that last crazy-rapid-triplets section, or you’re fucked.
I can’t say that they were key, since it might’ve been a coincidence, but when I finally managed to pass that song it was using the solo buttons up the neck. Since I never got good at switching between button sets – they’re spaced differently, so switching screws up my muscle memory – the way I did this was by playing the entire song using those buttons.
By the way, solo 2M is about four times as long as would be tasteful, in either game design or musical terms. I won’t claim 2L is easy, but you are going to have to suck it up and save your overdrive for 2M.
No. I play on Expert and Hard and I use the Strat and the Les Paul about 50/50. Once I got mine replaced with one with a working strummer I’ve never had another problem with it. In fact, if I do manage to eventually beat GG&HT on Expert, it’s going to be thanks to the solo frets on the Strat. Specifically, doing a motion like drumming your fingers on a table is a great way to do those BYRBYRBYRBYR bits as well as the OBYROBYR. It’s the sine wave (assuming that referred to the GRYRGRYRGRYR shit) that’s currently fucking me up, and my current strategy on that one is to hold green on the main frets, hammer red as fast as I can on the solo frets, and let the yellows pass by. I’ve tried every other strategy I can think of.
I don’t really give a shit how widely regarded it is, people either have broken ones and aren’t getting them RMAed for free for some bizarre reason, or they’re just whiners.
I will admit that last freakish section on GG&HT, the part directly before the big rock finish, is probably easier to do with the solo (eg, auto-strum when you press) buttons. That’s about 2% of one song in the entire game. I can’t think of any other place they’re really necessary to do well. But as Jim pointed out, the spacing is different, which is one of the same criticisms I listed way back when in the guitar comparison thread.
I don’t really give a shit how widely regarded it is, people either have broken ones and aren’t getting them RMAed for free for some bizarre reason, or they’re just whiners.
Every serious (read: expert-level) fake plastic guitar player I know hates the strat. I’ll just repost my specific list of criticisms here, in case you’re too lazy to read it in the thread.
Strum has no click, which makes it very difficult to keep sync for long repeated sections
Strum is mushy, so up/down action is hard to gauge. It is very sensitive, too, which doesn’t help matters.
I’d SWEAR I was having the downstrum problems others have described!
There’s no clear delination between the buttons-- GH guitars have lines on the fretboard between each button-- so sometimes my finger wanders just slightly over to the wrong button and I miss chords. The lack of negative space between the buttons means you don’t ever get a good tactile sense of where your fingers are at any given time.
I like the idea of solo buttons lower on the fret, but do I really want to learn a whole new hand position, with different button spacings? I think not.
I like the idea of an effects switch, but the positioning makes it impossible to change during a solo, which is the only time the effects are active. I suppose it’s within reach if you are playing the solo fret buttons, which don’t require strumming… but, well, see my previous point.
The yellow button has an incredibly subtle set of dots on it, not the nice solid tactile raised line on the middle of the yellow button on all GH guitars. So that’s another mistake I’d make; I couldn’t tell where my damn fingers were because the yellow fret markings are so subtle.
I do like the shape and size of the strat, but the buttons and the strum are a fucking disaster on that thing. There’s a reason Sluggo listed it as his least favorite guitar, down with the craptastical third party flying vee.
What’s expert-level? Is it sluggo-level supremacy, 100%ing songs within 24 hours of their release, or is it playing on Expert and very rarely failing? If it’s the former, I’m clearly not cool enough for my opinion to count, but if it’s the latter, I’ve been playing Expert since day one (although I usually play on Hard when multiplaying so I can devote more effort to helping out my friends who are trying to play above their comfort level). There are only three songs in the game that I did not pass on my first attempt on Expert, and only Flirtin with Disaster and GG&HT managed to cockblock me for any length of time.
I don’t think the Strat is perfect, but I like the feel of the strum bar (I’d rather not have it making noise and distracting me from the song) and the surface design of the buttons (makes sliding easier, and I stopped having trouble with wandering onto the wrong buttons after a few days of play). Pretty much the only things I really don’t like are the action on the buttons (specifically the clickiness) and the size and shape of the whammy bar. I also enjoy the effects switch and the solo frets, and I do miss them when I’m using the LP.
OK, let’s take a poll. Your opinion is valid, of course, but I think it’s a tiny minority opinion.
Also, if you don’t like the click on the Les, mod it out. At least that’s possible, whereas changing the fundamentally broken design of the strum and buttons of the Strat is impossible.
I don’t really have a major problem with the strat. I prefer that the strummer makes no sound and that you can pluck it without having it double-strum. Also I’m a sucker for the FX switch.
It’s less precise than the Les Paul for exactly those reasons.
So it’s harder to keep combo going, but more satisfying when you do.
I keep dying at around the 70-75% mark, trying in vain to scrape enough OD to survive. And here I thought if I somehow made it through that nightmare that I’d have a shot at actually finishing this song. DAMN.
I don’t even care so much about finishing all the songs on expert…I just hate the way that when I try to play a gig on Expert it always jumps immediately to this stupid song.
I spent about 15 minutes in practice mode working on Guitar Solo 2L so I could beat it without using Overdrive, then I completed GG&HT (with 4 stars, no less) on my third attempt this evening. Having a full bar of star power for Guitar Solo 2M made all the difference. I was either flashing red or barely in the yellow when I finished 2L, but I got to the Big Rock Ending well in the green.
