More ruination of songs

Further progress (sort of) with RockSmith - a game that helps you to learn how to play a guitar and fall out with your neighbours. You use your guitar as an input controller, and the game 'listens' to how you are playing and gives you a score.

When you play better (ie hitting most of the notes) you are rewarded by the game upping the difficulty going from, for example, single notes to chords. The downside is that if you mess up the difficulty level is reduced.

The best thing about this game is that you can always get to the end of a song, unlike games involving plastic guitar games that you can get. I use the PS3 version, but from what I understand the XBox and PC versions are very similar in operation.

Tonight was again a practice night. The next performance has the three latest songs Higher Ground, Go With The Flow, and In Bloom. I am planning on doing the next performance this weekend at some point and am going to focus on these three songs after tonight, playing each one at least twice and once for the other songs in the game (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, Angela and Next Girl.

I spent around an hour on the game tonight, but I think quite a lot of it was spent waiting for the PS3 to load the next section (or that's the way that it feels, anyway - I'm sure my neighbours feel different though).

Technique Challenges

Palm Mutes

The idea behind this technique is to use the edge of your strumming hand to lightly press on the strings nearing the bridge giving a more percussive sound to the note.

I earned 36137 points on that which is just short of a Silver.

Bends

A bend is where you change the note by pulling the string to make the note rise. This is where I'm having the most problems at the moment, so think I should practice it at least once each session on the game. I did achieve 15404 points which is still below my best for this technique. Silver is 45000, so I still have a long way to go with this technique.

Slides

A Slide is moving your finger from one fret to another causing the note to move up or down.
I scored 37462 for this which is just above the Silver level. Not much more to say about this one.

Rehearsals

I gave each song one run through, apart from In Bloom (my worst one to date).

Current scores for the songs with the highest I have scored in brackets:

Song	Band	Previous best	This Attempt
In Bloom	Nirvana	23960	25649
Higher Ground	Red Hot Chilli Peppers	47151	56803
Angela	Jarvis Cocker	65060	53583

What next?

I am planning on playing the three songs I know are on the next performance at least three times through. My plan for the moment is to have two runs through the Bends technique followed by playing through all six songs that I have played so far on the game.

What I don't know yet is what song will be chosen as an encore.

Lets see how I feel tomorrow night...