Working Free Speed and Leveler to Max Phrases

I've now got 3 songs over 100k and 6 songs over 90k which I have not yet mastered. I've got 6 more songs over 80k. It's sort of a pile-up waiting for me to master something. Anything. As usual, when I look at each song to see what stands in the way of mastering it, it's almost universally the solos. But, not always.

I Want Some More - Points!
I started working on I Want Some More recently just to break up the monotony of Barracuda and Carol of the Bells. I also figured I might actually be able to master this one relatively easily since it has no solo. I'm within a few thousand of the 100k threshold, but there's a "pre-chorus" that's slowing me down. Actually, although Riff Repeater seems to treat them as one, there are really two distinct pre-choruses (similar, but in different keys or something). I leveled the first pre-chorus up to 93% and reached 98.2 speed at 100% mastery in Free Speed. I figured out that the second pre-chorus is different from the first one when I went to play through the whole song and got to that part. Still some Riff Repeater work to do there.

Barracuda Biting my Ass
Lots of Riff Repeater work on this one last night. But, I'm down to just Solo 1 and Solo 2 phrases.

After working the Interlude in Free Speed (100 @ 70% in 5 tries), I leveled this phrase up to 100% in Leveler. Like having an Easy Button.

Then I worked Breakdown 2 until I finally maxed that phrase. I ran it in Free Speed and got 100% at 88% mastery in under 10 tries. Then I forced the mastery up to 100% and got 98.4% speed in 30 more tries. When I went to the Leveler, I maxed the phrase in 10 tries on the nose.

[NOTE: It's possible to level up to 100% in Leveler without actually Maxing a phrase. However, outside of Riff Repeater, RS seems to treat 100% unmaxed the same as 100% maxed. I'll find out if that's true soon.]

Despite my improvements on individual phrases, I still fell short of my all-time high score when I played thorugh the whole song. I ran through it three times, increasing my score each time but still 4k short of my high score of 110k. That strikes me as sort of odd. . .


Symphony of Destruction
As Megadeth songs go, this one seems relatively easy. Good thing because I'm not exactly tearing it up. I've played it several times this week (four times through last night) and I have yet to break 30k. I'm not really working on it seriously - just playing through and seeing if I can keep improving. Usually I get a much higher score before I hit the wall and have to dig into Riff Repeater, though!


I'm very grateful to the forum member who turned me onto the fact that you can force the mastery level in Riff Repeater up or down as needed. (Just hit the Start button on your controller once you get past tuning and then scroll over to Set Mastery. Click A or the PS equivalent and adjust the mastery level just like the audio lag correction tool.)

This has been a working strategy for me on mastering phrases. I highly recommend it. Just play through the troublesome phrase in Free Speed and keep forcing the mastery level up until you have it at 100. Even if you don't get to 100% speed at that mastery level, you'll be able to level the phrase up much faster than by just working step by step. I really think working with ALL of the notes in a phrase as opposed to just a few of them helps. You can run as fast or slow as you want in Free Speed, which is what so many people complain about not being able to do in Rocksmith. You can. Just not the whole song at once. But, I don't see working the whole song being a very practical approach. One phrase at a time works for me.

I don't, however, recommend Accelerator for this purpose. Accelerator tends to accelerate me faster than I want to go. I only use Accelerator when I just can't seem to get a phrase up to speed even after I know all the notes .