Anyone had any success with this?

Hey gang,

I've been lapsed from playing my guitar for 15 years, and at this point, I might aswell be going in fresh.

Is Rocksmith a decent place to start learning?

I found the barrier of getting used to the interface quite high, but once it clicked it's an easy thing to follow. I am a fairly okay guitarist so dived in a bit too deep at first and found it way too hard. Turned everything down to the lowest settings, sucked up the pride and got to learning Rocksmith and not rely on my self taught strumming. So, if you're mind set is to start fresh, and your goal is to learn some songs to play rather that the theory/technique - I think it's a pretty good place to get going, especially if you can pick it up cheap. The cable can get a bit pricy if you haven't already got one though, not looked recently but there were no new producers last time I looked.

My biggest issue was most of the bundled music wasn't really what I was interested in playing so I had to wait for a Steam sale to pick up a few packs to make it a bit more of a draw.

I think Mister Caravella used it to learn to play.

If you are truly starting from zero, I don't think it's necessarily the best option for learning the fundamentals. I remember the original game having some lessons about those things (fingering, chord shapes, etc.) but there are other resources that will probably get you started more quickly. However if you have even just a little experience, which it sounds like you do, it's a great way to make practicing & learning songs more enjoyable. The dynamic difficulty stuff can be a little annoying -- generally I would like to start with all the notes and then tone it down if I need to, but it makes you work your way up through progressive difficulty as you play -- but for some people it might be really constructive. Another great thing is being able to easily play around with guitar tones & effects.

Another thing I will say is that getting the adapter to work on PC can be really annoying. After I rebuilt my PC in 2016 it stopped working and I was never able to fix it so I stopped playing the game. I think I heard recently that a powered usb 2.0 hub can fix the issue but I have been too lazy to try it.

From the very little amount of time i spent on it 6 years ago it worked very well, i just didn't like much of the music in it so i wasn't inspired to keep playing.

Rocksmith was a HUGE help for me, just a fantastic program, but its critical flaw (besides sometimes sketchy detection) is the total lack of fundamental training. Just ultra-basic but critical stuff like technique or keeping your guitar healthy (and theory? Fuggedaboudit). Granted, the program can only do so much, but it's worth noting. Still, Rocksmith and Justinguitar are a pretty formidable duo of learning tools.

I really wish we could get a 2021 Edition, imagine a VR release that can see your finger positioning, track your actual guitar, etc. It'd be amazing. (although the tracking would have to be dead-on, and finger tracking is still a bit wonky)

*in in a similar position as the OP*

*looks though the track list*

Doesn't seem to cater to death metal fans, huh?

I have played something like 350 hours of Rocksmith 2014 with a guitar and bass with both passive and active pickups. Never had too much trouble with detection, as long as the guitar is properly set up, calibrated in game and the cable has the right settings. You're also going to have a bad time if you have a lot of audio delay in your setup, going through an HDMI is a no go, for example.

I obviously like it, but wouldn't use it as a complete beginners tool. Like others said, there are some lessons that teach some basics of fretting, chord shapes and picking, but they're not very good, and especially chord detection picks up even very sloppy playing.

I hated the dynamic difficulty and maxed it out, but that's probably down to your preferences. I find it more intuitive to see the whole note/chord pattern, then rewind it and possibly practice it slowed down if it's too much. The easy difficulty simplifies things too much for me and ramps up too slowly. I'm not that good at playing guitar, it just confuses me when notes are clearly missing from a part, what I'm playing sounds all weird and then I have to relearn fingerings when the rest of the notes start to come up.

As a metal fan the song list doesn't offer much, but there's a ton of DLC available, and I find it satisfying to expand my tastes and skills by tackling some different genres as well.

I do like it as a way to keep playing interesting. It's an easy and fun way to learn and play along to songs once you get used to the UI. I also like to play around with the tones and effects, and there's a pretty nifty session mode where you can choose a scale and see it on screen with metronome/drums/backup playing while noodling around.

So, I would recommend it as a part of your practice, if you can have low audio lag, are willing to accept some of it's limits and get some lessons elsewhere as well if you can.

Nah, Vinny got into Rocksmith already knowing how to play. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure he said that he thinks that RS is not a good learning tool but rather a good tool for practice - which I agree with.

I've found Rocksmith to be a good tool for general practice and also for learning specific songs, I wouldn't rely on it for fundamentals.

My mistake, you're absolutely right.

I played it for quite a while on PS3 and made quite a bit of progress. It's a good learning tool.

Then I tried to continue playing it on PS4 and PC and there was noticable input lag which kinda ruins the game. Don't know if it's my setup or something. Maybe I should try some other cable setup specifically for the game on my PC.

I went from nothing to minimally more than nothing with it. There was definite improvement and the scaling difficult helped a lot with that. If this was the traditional Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert like in Rock Band or Guitar Hero this game would not work.

What kind of killed it for me was the basics of owning a guitar. When my first set of strings broke, I didn’t know how to replace them. When I took it into Guitar Center and the guy handed it back to me to see if I was satisfied, I didn’t know how to, so the guy just jammed on it himself to see if everything was still good.

It’s really cool, but it fell apart after about a month or so due to the logistics being lost on me. I think if you had an external source, like if you took lessons or knew somebody who could play, and used Rocksmith to help practicing solo, I think that would work better. But with the pandemic and all that, that’s probably a decent way to mess around with it given the circumstances.

Edit: Went and read a few more responses, looks like @wezqape already covered most of what I had to say. I'll leave my post as mostly a +1 for Rocksmith and the comments of a beginner guitarist.

I have spent some time with Rocksmith. It works well enough as that middle step between guitar hero and actually just playing a song on a guitar. I had some fundamental lessons before I started playing the game so I wasn't coming in cold, but still very new. I used it as a more engaging way to practice chords and chord transitions than just sitting in a quiet room. The arcade games were good for that kind of practice, if a little verbose in their presentations sometimes.

It gives you a lot of control over the complexity of notes and speed of a song, which is great for dialing in trouble parts. I had a few moments of "hey, cool, I'm kinda actually playing this."

The last time I was playing regularly, I did enjoy the session mode. Just being able to strum along with a drum beat went a long way for me.

A couple things I noticed that are worth looking out for:

The game seems to have a hard time recognizing palm mutes.

The "campaign" jumps you around between songs as it measures your progress against their difficulty. It made it super hard for me to want to focus on just improving at one song, when there was always another pip of game progress to be earned elsewhere.

The way it simplifies the notes as you tune difficulty is arcane and I found it makes it very difficult to transition between the different difficulty levels. It makes sense from a game progress sense, but muscle memory makes it incredibly hard to adjust. I found it easier to play on harder difficulties to see the "actual" song and then turn it all the way down or just slow the song down instead.

I concur with @clagnaught, I currently am taking lessons after playing around with Rocksmith off and on. While Rocksmith is good for playing around with songs I found that I was doimg certain things...wrong I guess? In my case an example would be that my teacher pointed out I was bending strings with my fingers rather than my wrists for instance. I would never had figured that out myself with Rocksmith.

I went from never having touched a guitar to being ok at hitting single notes but literally nothing else. It didn't teach any fundamentals. When a friend saw the game he told me I was holding the pick weird and I had no idea.

@facelessryan: I mean if you’re a beginner you wouldn’t want to start with anything close to death metal I feel? I’d love to play Metal eventually but most of it is very difficult.

I’ve started learning guitar a month ago and I can do a few simple rock riffs, Rocksmith is good as a practicing tool but not as a learning tool I feel, it helps just getting used to the guitar and practicing changing frets and strings without looking, but as for technique it’s very lacking and what is there doesn’t feel well organized at all.

@fear_the_booboo: Technical death metal at the level of Obscura, Beyond Creation, Spawn of Possession and Brain Drill? That'll take a while. Not so technical songs like Scourge of Iron by Cannibal Corpse and Weak Is Your God by Illdisposed? Perhaps not fresh out of the womb new to playing/very rusty, but possible after some baby steps/relearning some things. Hell, I'll even throw in Rowboat by Coal Chamber as beginner friendly nu metal.

...Okay. My thing is that I don't want to learn Smoke on the Water. I'm neutral towards it, but I know it's a go-to for lessons, and I don't wanna end up hating it but hearing that riff ad nauseam.

Yep. Death metal has some wildly different subgenres. Basic downtuned chuggery and power chords might not be too hard apart from nailing the timing on some of the speedier stuff, and ridiculous downtunings for some songs might be a barrier. Now, throw in some of those techier bands or something in the progressive vein like Opeth, and you've got a challenge in your hands. Rocksmith has some Opeth DLC available, but after just a couple of months of learning on the guitar I dare not even look that way yet.

Smoke on the Water is available as DLC, but I also refuse to touch that. There's plenty of other less overplayed classic and more modern rock available that is fun to play and good practice, even if it's not something I'd prefer to listen to day to day.

I already knew how to play tabs when I tried Rocksmith and the pace at which it tries to teach you was just not for me. I find it easier to just break things down slowly and work up to the proper speed rather than having the game expect you to play at full speed and constantly shift difficulty on the song as you're playing. That having been said, the fact that it works at all is kind of amazing and there are certainly things to pick up from it, it just did not click with me personally. If you can grab it for cheap, might be worth trying.

I've got around 285 hours in the Steam version and put a decent chunk into the PS3 version as well. As a training tool it has limitations, there is not much in the way of teaching fundamentals (although they did release some DLC to address this around a year ago), but the core of playing songs works 95% of the time.

I mainly use it as a practice tool for specific songs because it allows you to replay specific phrases repeatedly at super slow speeds. I would suggest that you go into every song and immediately set the difficulty to 100% because otherwise you will be learning bad habits/finger positions which won't apply once you are playing every note.

My main criticism would be that there is no way to just look at the tablature of a song, or have it as a static image as you play through the songs. That means you are essentially having to commit each song to memory which can be difficult when you don't play daily and have as much of the DLC as I do. It also means that for me personally, I can't really play a lot of the songs outside of the game unless I pull up some tablature because my brain refuses to remember the songs in the way that Rocksmith presents them (imagine trying to remember the specific buttons to press on a Guitar Hero song without having the visual prompt and you'll get the idea).

I also think the audio mixing is pretty inconsistent, there's some songs where my playing seems completely drowned out by the music and others where it's all I can hear. I'd suggest playing with headphones as well as that will help cover up the natural sound of your guitar which can be quite distracting.

As someone who has used Rocksmoth consistently for almost a decade, yes. It’s awesome. It helps emencely. I love it and still play it consistently. It helped take me from literally never touching an instrument to being pretty good. I love it and would swear to it in court.

As a fan of Rock Band this was the next step for me. I got the Rocksmith 1 a year before 2014 came out and was playing guitar for 2 years at that point. Now I have been playing for 10 years and still put in Rocksmith 2014 a few times a month. I think it is a lot of fun once again get that same feeling when I play Rock Band, I think it does let you learn the songs as well they are essenially moving tabs and since you ahve been playing for 15 years once again it is just fun to jam out and play it like Rock Band once you get used to some of the songs. Like other stated the soundtrack with the game isnt great but the DLC songs are better

@clagnaught: “ What kind of killed it for me was the basics of owning a guitar. When my first set of strings broke, I didn’t know how to replace them. When I took it into Guitar Center and the guy handed it back to me to see if I was satisfied, I didn’t know how to, so the guy just jammed on it himself to see if everything was still good.”

I feel like this is kind of a weird criticism. It reminds me of a criticism I saw of a painting program for iPad, one day. A guy reviewed the program poorly and complained that there was no digital ruler in the app for drawing straight lines like he used with his paper sketchbook. Someone then replied that he could just... use the same physical ruler with his iPad. There didn’t need to be one built into the app.

Why couldn’t you just Google “how to change strings?” With or without rock smith, that’s how one would do it. (Or buy a book.)

I feel like people are complaining that not everything you need to be a musician is in the box. Being a musician is a lifelong commitment and, in some ways, a lifestyle choice. (Hello, calluses). Not EVERYTHING is going to be in the software.

Got two super important words for ya - input lag

So on a very fast monitor and good PC it can work pretty well, and you can use it as an amp modeler too (that part is fun!), and I agree with everything @ramone said above as well. AND the "AI-based jamming" feature is so weird and kinda fun too!

But on consoles the input lag is just a huge dealbreaker, you'll lose the connection to your guitar sound and you need that as a musician, there can't be any perceptible lag when you're learning an instrument. It's much different than say setting the lag on rock band, it's like as soon as rock band drums goes into solo mode, even if you play your solo perfectly on beat, it will sound way off... it's THAT part that you gotta worry about

I have dabbled with guitar playing in the past - I took lessons for a short period of time when I was in middle school, and then again for awhile after getting out of college. I never gave it enough time to really improve though and didn't make it much past the basics. Now it has been 15+ years since I last touched the guitar and I'm getting the itch again. I do own Rocksmith, but as others have mentioned, I don't think it is the best option for learning proper guitar techniques.

With that said, is there any particular online program (paid or free, doesn't matter) that DOES do a good job of teaching? I can't really see myself taking in-person lessons from a 16 year old kid at this stage in my life, but I would be interested in online lessons.

I've been using the Fender Play app and for helping me focus on something that isn't /life/ it's been just what i needed to escape for 5-30 minutes or however long I need