Bass Guitar in Rocksmith 2014 - First Plays

14 January 2014

Played until 2:00 again this morning. This is killing me. It’s that damn Score Attack mode! I can’t just let it go at “good enough.” I’m totally exhausted after doing this for at least 3 nights in a row.

Monday night I pulled out the PRS Tremonti (SE) and had a crack at Smooth and Carol of the Bells. I could tell that I hadn’t played the PRS for a while – it just felt really different. My numbers sort of reflect that, too. I pulled off a pretty lame 34/77/50 (NS/accuracy/mastery) on Smooth, with a 56.5% overall. But, I did alright on Score Attack, Easy level; I ran through twice and ended up with a 236,470, 127 NS/99.32 accuracy. That was good for #3 (out of 82) on the Leaderboard.

Carol of the Bells didn’t go all that great. Not only did I torch the second phrase of the solo as usual, I didn’t play the scale runs very well either. And I totally botched the ending (which means about the only part I played right was the really easy part that even non-guitar players could probably figure out in minutes). Ended up with 124 NS/84% accuracy/89% master, and 90.7% overall. I should be much better on this song than this. 

Score Attack – No Tuning Allowed

Something I noticed about Score Attack which Ubi’s developers might want to look at: Apparently players cannot access the Tuner directly from Score Attack, at least not without getting penalized. If you pause a song more than 2 times in Score Attack, your score doesn’t count for the Leaderboard rankings. If you want to tweak a string or two using the in-game tuner, you can’t do it without using one of your 2 pauses. You can’t just press the <Back button on the Xbox controller in the middle of a Score Attack run. You have to back out of the effort first and then resume the song after tuning. Just something I ran across the other night when my guitar sounded way off and I went searching for the Tuner.

Bassin’ Around

After those inauspicious performances on Monday night, I pulled out the old Yamaha bass for the first time in ages and switched my path over to Bass just to mix things up a little. This will NOT turn into a bass-blog; I’ll be focusing on the Rocksmith angle, so bear with me.

The first song I pulled up for bass was Pour Some Sugar on Me, by Def Leppard. Before I comment further, here’s the numbers to back up what I’m about to say: First run through (EVER) – 179 NS, 98% accuracy, and 98.7% overall. From somebody who hardly ever plays bass. That tells you something about this song, right?

The bass arrangement for Pour Some Sugar on Me makes Angela seem complicated. Seriously. My very first run in Score Attack (Easy) was a Platinum run. Same for Medium. And Hard. I’m not even sure why I bothered playing the Easy and Medium levels. Playing the Master level was a little more challenging, only because you have to have the song committed to memory and I’d only played it five times before attempting a run from memory. Still, I managed a Bronze performance – 202,208/66 NS/94.56%. I tried two more times from memory and improved to 330,874/85/97.07%. Good enough for 108^th out of 195 players on the Leaderboard. From memory. Easy song.

Unlocked a Square Fret Inlay, the Prophesy Fret Inlay, and some skins for the HG-180 amp.