A deliberate practice app for guitar players who want to level up

I never quite got the setup right, but Rocksmith seemed to live up to the promise of "guitar hero on a real guitar". It came out during a time when spending my free time tinkering with computers became much more important than tinkering with guitars.

I really wanted to like Rocksmith, but the progressive difficulty didn’t feel quite right. I would get stuck on new chords, try the recommended arcade games, get stuck on those even harder and less satisfying tasks, then lose motivation. By the time I picked it back up it didn’t respond to the fact that my skills had regressed and I had to start a new profile. I spent more time noodling in the tone modeler than anything.

I found the best way was to use the lessons and then the riff repeater on songs you want to learn, turn on all notes and slow down the speed until you can play a section. Then increase the speed or add a section.

In retrospect, playing Rocksmith mostly improved my timing. And made me "keep the song going even if you miss a note". If you're just playing alone, without a metronome, backing track or a band, it's a habit to stop and repeat bad section.

I went into Rocksmith because of this promise and for me it worked out well. Though it did not greatly improve my guitar playing skills beyond some of the basics, I do enjoy that I can interact in some way with the music that I like. It's like whistling along with your favourite song but with your hands, so the experience is much more engaging and it's feels more rewarding than guitar hero as the sound that I'm making sound a lot more like music than that clicking of buttons.

Nowadays they have a subscription service, I don't know what the quality of that is. But I mostly still play on the "2014 remastered" edition with a "real tone cable" on macOS, but I think they updated that and you can play with any "audio interface" device you like. There is also the customsforge library for unofficial songs, but quality varies.

Between Rocksmith and Youtube tutorials, playing along with my favourite songs is the most fun I can get out off playing guitar that my skill level and time investment allows. I'll never play in a band or make a decent sounding song, but enjoying and getting enveloped by music is good enough.

The dynamic difficulty indeed sucked bad. And it was multiple settings to disable it.