Rocksmith

To slightly complicate matters further- not all pickups of the same type sound the same. For example, my guitar has 2 humbucking pickups. One is ‘clean’ and one is ‘dirty’, allowing you to pick how clean the input is before it’s amplified. Typically the ‘dirty’ one is used with greater amounts of distortion, but it’s just another way of refining the sound.

“our newest DLC now includes “Fear of the Dark,” “Run To The Hills,” “Aces High,” “The Number Of The Beast,” and “2 Minutes To Midnight!””

Picked up the Powerslave songs. I would have preferred “The Prisoner” from NOTB.

The phrasing of that sentence has made me feel older than ever.

lol, I think you’re going to have to elaborate on that! ;)

Neat stuff - the Rocksmith cable works great for recording. Plug it into a Mac and you can record straight to GarageBand, and apply whatever modeled amp and effects you want with monitoring through headphones.
Even cooler, you can hook a real mic to the thing with a 1/4in coupler and a mic-to-1/4 in cable.
A recording studio on the cheap for < 200 bucks. (Using a 99 dollar SM 57, cable and coupler about 30 bucks, 5 bucks for the extra GarageBand content)
The new drummer feature in GarageBand, in combination with all this, is truly sweet.

That’s awesome. Is there a good preferably cheap PC equivalent to GarageBand? I’ve never had a way of plugging my guitar into my computer before, but I would love to screw around with recording through it.

I want to say that Mixcraft might be cheap-ish - 50 bucks?. But I doubt it has the super-amazing drumming feature.
There’s Pro-Tools express, but I’m not sure how much that is either.

Reaper is probably the best sequencer/recording software you can get for the price. It has an unlimited trial, and costs $60 to buy.

Personally, I use Reason Essentials, but that’s a bit more expensive. Great program but has a learning curve.

I think it’s connecting 1900s with Rock and Metal (at least it was for me). Usually one hears 1900s in the meaning of 1900 or 1910, not 1970-1990 (the rock and metal connection). So connecting something I know with 1910 implies it’s super old.

Dunqan

Yep, that’s basically it :)

I have my first full blister, thanks mainly to the opening slides on Give Up The Funk. This version seems to be much better at holding my interest, especially with the ease of using Riff Repeater. I find myself putting in a full hour of practice when I fire it up.

I wish I knew if the new version would hold my interest better. Unfortunately, the new version requires Uplay, and Uplay crashes immediately after I hit the login button, so I can’t even start the game. Instead I’ve been stuck since the Thanksgiving sale reinstalling, collecting info, sending files over to Ubisoft support as they try to figure out what’s going on. Words can not express my… distaste for Ubisoft in general and Uplay in particular right now.

Riff repeating the whole song should be something that gets pointed out right off the bat. Rocksmith 2014 can be a little … optimistic about your progress. For example, I am not nailing those open D and E chords on “Rebel Rebel” the way I should be. Nor am I hitting this high-string G and E semi-barres on “Say It Ain’t So”. Rocksmith is more than happy to think that my mashed-finger mutes are fine most of the time. So I’ll hop into riff repeater, select the whole song, knock down the difficulty and/or speed, and go from there.

Yeah, it’s somewhat accurate for position, but has no idea about the quality of the note/chord. Not really a big problem since it’s the difficulty/speed controls that are the bread and butter. I’ve completely mastered four or five songs (with the obligatory perfect first try on Pour Some Sugar On Me) and it starts me at a very high level on all other songs now. I wish it would tune down quite a bit since the first thing I want to learn is the anchor movements in the song, then start adding in complexity.

I finally joined the band and got Rocksmith 2014. Best game ever. Okay, maybe that’s a bit much, but I’m having SO much fun with it. It does so many things ‘right’ regarding the display that it is super-intuitive (having a Guitar Hero background anyway). I have tinkered with guitar before, so tablature notation and such aren’t foreign - just being able to play is. I was a bit worried that my 1992 guitar wouldn’t cut it, but it works fine (and I find that it isn’t a horrible quality guitar afterall…).

As someone who will never play anywhere but my basement, I’m having a blast. It is even getting the kids to check it out, so it paid for itself instantly.

same here. I picked it up after thinking about learning how to play the guitar many, many years… taking slight break after about a 10 day straight run of 60-90 min sessions, letting my finger tips heal up.
really like it though. I almost wish though it had a stronger - learning how to play chords part. and/or working on properly holding the neck of the guitar and fingering. I often miss easier chords because I’m accidentally muting one of the strings partially.

My daughter wants 2014 for her birthday (which sucks, as I was hoping to wait for a sale). Torn between Steam and PS3 versions. Steam’s big advantage is having access to user-created songs, right? She loves Iron Maiden and was hoping that some more modern IM songs (like from “A Matter of Life and Death” or “Final Frontier”) would be available. I noticed there isn’t official DLC for it (there’s a 5-song pack, but it is classic Maiden), anyone know if there is a lot of user-created Maiden out there? Where do I find it? Thanks!

The custom content site used to be smithyanvil.com , but some drama caused it to be moved over to https://customsforge.com/ . You will have to make an account in order to access them. I haven’t used any custom songs since the OG rocksmith, and to be honest, most of them back then were kinda crappy. There were a few standouts, but I got sick of sorting through all the junk to find them. A lot of them didn’t have dynamic difficulty, which for me isn’t a big deal, as I’ve been playing for awhile, but for someone new I could see that being a bummer. I’m not sure if that’s improved for RS2014 or not.

The game does go on sale a lot, so if you keep an eye out you might get lucky getting it on sale price depending on when your daughters birthday is. It’s steamworks, so you can get the digital download version which is a steam code if you see that version on sale. You still would need the cable if you don’t have one, but a lot of times it’s cheapest to get the cable separate, and the game on sale. Not that the game isn’t worth it all full price, it most certainly is, imo.

There are 20 Iron Maiden songs over on customsforge right now (3 being from the two albums you list).

The official DLC is going to be higher quality than many of the songs at customsforge, especially when it comes to dynamic difficulty and tones. However, the custom editors for RS2014 now have an ‘automatic’ dynamic difficulty generator that a lot of the authors are taking advantage of, so more have DD now. That said, MANY of the custom DLCs are quite excellent. I wouldn’t base your entire decision on buying rocksmith around customs, but the fact it is there is really nice. I do find the official stuff somewhat better for learning (because the dynamic difficult is done by hand). However, I’ve read that many people think the best way to learn is to play at 100% difficulty and slow the song down. This may work if you can already play some, but I’m not sure I could do this as a pretty poor noob player.

Even customs aside, there is a LOT of content out there between the original rocksmith songs/dlc and the current RS2014 songs/dlc. And some of it is quite fun to play, even if not your usual taste in music.

Some price points to watch for: It seems to go on-sale for $50 (w/cable) semi-frequently. It was just recently on amazon for $33 (damn it, missed this). The game alone can sometimes be had for as low as $12 (though ~$22 is more common), but the cable can be hard to find on-sale alone - normal price is $30. Sometimes you can fine the original Rocksmith w/cable on clearance and luck out (the cable is the same). I’d say grab it at $50 if you have the time to wait, and absolutely jump if you see it for less. I got $50 worth out of it the first weekend.

Her birthday was yesterday so at this point I can probably just ask her to wait a little bit for a sale. She’s 17 so she’ll understand. =) We already have Rocksmith for the PS3 and love it, so we have a cable.
Awesome to hear that there are some songs (even if the quality sometimes is lacking) from Maiden – definitely makes us favor going PC over PS3 for Rocksmith 2014.
Ugh, hate that I missed the sale for $33. I’ll keep a look out for it, right now it is $60 and that’s just too much. If it turns out that I can get it on sale with cable I may even go for that – that way my daughter and I could play together.