"Angela" Mastered, "Higher Ground," Video & More Christmas Progress

Before I forget, I verified that, in fact, you can see the guitars you unlock while you're playing. (This subject came up on the Ubi/RS forums.) You can see the back of the neck and the head when you tune. You can see the fretboard  - not the whole guitar, just the fretboard - when you play. The fretboards are different depending on the guitar, so depending on your preference for dots or inlays you might like playing with one better than another. Other than that, I still find them to be mostly useless eye-candy buried deep in the Amp menu. I switched from a G310 or something to a Flying V last night; if they sound any different I couldn't tell it. Anyway, I've unlocked the first batch of Epiphones and my next unlock will be a full-blown Gibson, for what it's worth.

Master Mode for Angela, Single Note arrangement in 8 plays!
Sounds amazing until you realize that the Single Note and Combo arrangements of Angela are virtually identical and I've been working on the Combo version pretty hard. (My play count on the combo version is 21, so far.) There are two differences between the two arrangements: the low E sustained before the solo is shorter by about 2 measures in the single note arrangement, and the solo in single note is, indeed, single notes - as opposed to the only slightly more difficult double stops in the combo arrangement. If you can play one arrangement, you've pretty much got the other one nailed. Except that for some reason I Mastered the Single Note version last night, but the combo version still refuses to give up 100k for me. The similarity between the two arrangements will probably make this a great multi-player song for my son and me to play together.

Just for yucks, here's a lovely video of my effort to Master Angela:

Actually, it's a terrible video in terms of production quality; there's a horrible reflection from the ceiling light fixture, lighting is generally bad, audio is awful, and the guitar playing is marginal. But, this was really just a trial run to test two things - 1) how to capture video of myself playing Rocksmith and 2) how to post video to my blog. On both of those counts, mission accomplished. Wasn't shooting for a film-making Oscar here.

It was really pretty simple to do this, which I guess is why nobody ever wants to bother explaining how to do it. But, I'll lay it out for those of you who want to know but were afraid to ask. I just set my little HDD camera on top of my home theatre receiver which happens to be just the right height. A tripod would be better, but I didn't want to drag one of those out. It helps to have one of those cameras with a viewfinder screen that you can flip around and look at yourself as you record; otherwise, you'd have to sort of guess where to stand to be in the picture. I already had the song ready to go on RS - all I had to do was hit Record on the camera and then press the A button on my XBox controller to get things rolling. As soon as I finished playing through the song, I grabbed the camera and shot the replay. Then I dumped the footage into Pinnacle, the video editing software I use. You could use any video editing application - MovieMaker, whatever. Pinnacle is what I'm used to using. It has a PiP tool that I used to overlay the two clips. I trimmed out the parts where I was pushing the Record button and tuning, and I disabled the audio from the track of me playing (just used the audio from the replay). That's really about all there was to it.

Decided to give the weekly Rocksmith Ubisoft Forum Song of the Week competition a shot this week, so I pulled up Higher Ground, Combo 2 and ran through it five times. I had played through it three times before, but it was over a month ago and my score was sitting at 7353 when I started. I made modest improvements on each of five tries last night and ended up with a score of 28627 (76/28), which I'll post on the Forum tonight. Just have to figure out which page of the forum to use for posting scores.

Got a very late start and didn't want to work that hard last night, so instead of working on solos I just pulled up my Christmas song and played that through a few times. This is definitely one of those songs where using all four fingers helps A LOT. I added about 10k to my previous night's best to end at 85,780 (87/52). Sometimes the dynamic difficulty thing is a little strange sounding on this song, but I obviously leveled up a bit because I've started seeing more notes and started to recognize what I'm playing as an actual song.