Rocksmith's Reimagination of the Rhythm Genre

It seems like every holiday season there is the one game that I never expected to care about, or buy or love. One hidden gem among the big-budget blockbusters and cavalcade of bombast that permeates the Septembers, Octobers and Novembers of our gamer lives. Every year, I look forward to that inevitable game, because it is like a secret surprise. It’s like finding hidden love in a seedy singles’ bar or a forgotten twenty in your coat pocket. It’s the kind of thing that restores your faith in an orderly, functioning universe.

This year, that game for me is Rocksmith. This was a game that I didn’t care at all about even a week and a half ago, and which now seems like something I’ve been looking for ever since I picked up my first Guitar Hero plastic controller some six years ago. Even as everyone pretty much agrees that the music genre is dead or dying, this is a breath of fresh air in a dusty crypt, a refreshing lemonade stand in the middle of Death Valley.

It’s not game of the year. Heck, I’m not even totally sure it’s a game. It is a niche item within a niche genre, and it suffers too often from a lack of fully polished features, but it builds from a solid platform of phenomenal functionality and accessibility. Beyond all else, it feels like the product of people who genuinely care about teaching people to use and get value out of their guitars. It is refreshingly authentic, and that earnestness helps it rise above its shortcomings.

I admit that my language before the bump there sounds suspiciously like, “Rocksmith is just kind of an OK game, but darn it if they didn’t try really hard. Let’s give ‘em a round of applause.” Let me distance myself now from that kind of perception. Rocksmith is, in fact, very good at accomplishing most of the goals it sets out for itself. The problem is that most of those goals are not in the vein of a traditional game.

Rocksmith if looked at from a distance looks like any other rhythm game, except that instead of using a uniquely crafted controller, you use your own electric guitar. Fundamentally, you still do things in time with music, cued by a graphical interface that tells you what buttons (where in this case buttons means frets) to press. If you’ve played a Guitar Hero or Rock Band game in the past, you will immediately understand how to play Rocksmith. The actual “note highway” is reasonably different from Rock Band, but in many ways more intuitive because it creates a better visual representation of your guitar neck and hand shape. The result is that you are playing real notes on a real guitar in unison with a song or exercise.

When talking about Rocksmith, I find myself describing game elements, but trying to differentiate those from the fact that ultimately this is a piece of teaching software. The mission of the game is not to see how many points you can score on STP’s Vasoline. It’s not even exactly the mission of the game to teach you how to play that song. (Here’s a hint: 1st and 3rd fret on the E string. Repeat.) The mission is to teach you the basic fundamentals involved in playing a song like that. Where, in a game like Rock Band the goal is to get some arbitrary number of stars through pattern recognition and dexterity, in Rocksmith the goal is to get better at your instrument.

There is no overdrive. There is no whammy bar to fill up points faster. There are no stars. There are no difficulty settings. There is no singing or playing drums. The only lingering remnants of those trappings are some points and leaderboards that, frankly, seem more like what I imagine a vestigial tail would feel like, though they have some purpose in giving you an approximation of how well you've learned the song. In Rock Band I have countless times chased aggressively after person X’s score or those elusive 5 Golden Stars. In Rocksmith I haven’t once cared about my score on a song unless it unlocked some new distortion pedal for me to goof around with.

What I care about is whether what I played sounded right. And no score, no stars, no new venue, no well timed overdrive comes anywhere near being as rewarding as hearing yourself play a cool guitar lick just right.

Maybe the right way to describe Rocksmith is as an educational toy. This is like those despicable noise-making toddler toys — the ones covered in letters, numbers and shapes, the ones that now-disavowed members of the family have given my kids in the past — except this is for grown-ups. This is a grown-up’s noisy learning toy, a thing of joy for the one using it and a thing that makes it impossible to think for everyone else in the room. This also probably explains why I cry when my wife takes the guitar out of my hands and tells me it’s time to come to dinner.

That’s not to say this is a toy for everyone. In fact, to someone with a healthy knowledge of how to play guitar, this probably will seem a lot like a child’s toy, and a woefully inadequate tutor. Again, sort of in the same way that if you know how to read, you don't need something that wastes time electronically telling you that C makes the Kuh sound. Yes, Rocksmith teaches you about fingering, anchoring, bending, slides, hammer-ons/offs, alternative tunings, scales, chords and other beginning concepts, but it doesn’t teach you at all about … well, I don’t know because I’m completely a beginner.

And that’s the whole point. I’m the perfect candidate for this game, the rare target market that is just the right niche within a niche. I’ve a long record of joy with rhythm games. I’ve an interest in learning to play casually. I’ve got a decent Telecaster ready to go, and I barely know how to play it. I have some disposable income to spend. I’m interested in spending the time to learn. I have reasonable expectations of what that learning looks like. I’m not looking for all the bells and whistles, and I can deal happily enough with the occasional imperfections of Rocksmith. The fewer of those things that describe you, the less likely you are to have anything like the experience I’ve had.

Let it not be said that I’m Pollyanna about this game/tool/toy, though, because there are some problems with it. It suffers from an all-too-familiar problem of video lag. You are likely to get audio delay unless you pipe your audio direct from the console to an analog output. Most of the 50 songs included probably aren’t all that familiar, and it’s clear that Rocksmith doesn’t have the same cachet to get the same kind of popular music as Harmonix. The game is not exactly feature rich, and you’ll never break Rocksmith out at a party to play with your friends.

But, what it does right is far more interesting to me than the relatively minor misses that, as a player, I’ve gotten completely over. Not enough can be said about how beautifully the game detects what you are doing with nothing more than a relatively unassuming cord. It’s nothing like the occasionally sketchy performance and detection of Rock Band’s Squire. It just works, and it does it so much better than I’d have any right to ask for.

The visual representation of the note chart makes more sense by mirroring hand positioning on the neck across the horizontal, so that the information looks like the shape you need to make with your hand. The dynamic difficulty, which matches the song difficulty to how well you’re playing, is basically genius. There is no penalty, no failing a song, and if you want to do your own thing between notes — add your own flavor to the songs — then by all means, go for it. And, if you want to just play around with distortion pedals — even getting down to the level of adjusting the settings on the distortion effects just like you would on the pedals — then you can just about turn your Xbox and TV into an amp. The mandate of Rocksmith above all else seems to be do what you want to do with your instrument.

That’s a rare philosophy in the modern sphere of gaming, and it is exactly the kind of innovation and fresh idea that this genre needs to survive.

Comments

Put me in the target market too. And I'd go so far as to say that this game is DESIGNED specifically for folks who hit RB3 and hit a wall -- a wall of interest. That point where you felt a little weird that you weren't just playing guitar. The lag thing I guess I'm just immune too, as I run my Xbox to VGA to a monitor, and the audio right into a headphone amplifier. THere's the *slightest* delay from when I pluck a note, but 90 seconds in, I stopped actually noticing it, and it certainly hasn't made me feel like I'm having to compensate.

Of note: you can use the cord as a mic cord for your guitar into your PC. Just plug it in, and its a Microphone.

I didn't think you guys liked music games.

Spoiler:

{troll face:)}

Of note: you can use the cord as a mic cord for your guitar into your PC. Just plug it in, and its a Microphone.

This feels so much opportunity to me. C'mon internet, make some cool toys that take advantage of this!

So glad to hear you're enjoying this "game", Sean! I'm in the exact same boat as you. Coming at this as a total beginner, Rocksmith has really impressed me. There seems to be a lot of confusion over exactly what Rocksmith is trying to do. It's not trying to be Rock Band. It's trying to be a learning tool, which despite the fact that you can (and I did) learn stuff from Rock Band's pro guitar mode, is actually much better than RB in several ways. I say this as someone who owns both games, and plays them regularly. I have the plastic Mustang pro guitar button controller, and I have the Fender Squier RB guitar (which despite the cool fret sensing tech in the neck, isn't actually a very good guitar overall).

Yes, the presentation while actually performing songs is pretty terrible. The crowd looks like ass, there's no character customization, and it's guitar-only for now (they said they're working on adding bass support post-launch). It doesn't matter. That isn't the point. I think it should really stop even calling itself a "game". It's a practice tool for learning guitar skills, if nothing else.

The ability to use any guitar is extremely important. The RB Fender guitar simply isn't a very good stand-alone guitar when you get right down to it. Now here's the trick: for RB itself, this doesn't matter. You don't actually hear yourself play. It just detects what frets you're pressing down and what strings you're strumming. It still just mutes and unmutes the guitar track as if you were playing the normal five lane mode. This also means that it's impossible for the game to detect certain techniques properly, such as palm muting, bends and harmonics. Yes, take a moment to chuckle at the fact that you can't play harmonics...in a game by Harmonix.

The point being, if you want to actually learn guitar, you need to unplug the game and plug into a real amp to hear yourself play. You could be accidentally pressing against some of the strings when you play a chord and muting them, but you would never know from inside RB itself because it only knows whether you're pressing down the frets or not. With Rocksmith, you will know, because it's actually listening to what you're playing. The fact that they can do this in realtime in software fast enough for gameplay is frankly astounding. There is professional software that can't do this accurately.

The ability to hear yourself playing along with the song makes a huge difference in both enjoyment and learning potential. I really can't over-emphasize this. The minigames in the "Guitarcade" section are basically practice exercises disguised as arcade-style games. The note tracking interface is a little confusing at first, but there are a few subtle touches I really like. The notes appear as an outline on the actual neck as well and get larger in size as they approach on the lanes. The crowd and venue presentation is ass, as I said before, but for a first attempt, all the important stuff is there and it actually works.

They were at least smart enough to realize that the "Amp Mode" is a big draw and provide a dedicated button on the menu to jump straight into it from any point in the menu. This mode lets you play around with the huge number of amp and pedal effects available in the game and combine them however you want. This is ridiculously cool. This game, along with my Xbox, is my new amp. I'm not kidding. It's that good. They have specific presets for each song (which are automatically activated when you're playing that particular song in the game) so that your guitar sounds exactly like the song you're playing along with.

Another thing the game does that I really, really like is having multiple charts for each song. These are basically broken down into a "single note" (i.e. lead) part, a "chord-only" (i.e. rhythm) arrangement, and a "combo" (lead + rhythm in parts, depending on the song) arrangement. You can play the chord-only arrangement, and play it at whatever level is comfortable for you. This is awesome because what basically every beginner guitar player does when first learning a song is look up the chords and just play those. I know I do!

It's definitely a fun way to practice, which is the most gruelling part of trying to learn guitar. You can pick up techniques, but you have to pay close attention to the instructional videos. Obviously, no game is ever going to replace an actual real teacher who can take your hands and show you exactly what you're doing wrong.

One caveat though: make sure you have a proper audio setup to avoid lag! This is true of any music game (and others like competitive fighting games), but Rock Band and Guitar Hero could at least mask their lag behind software tricks and offsets. Because you're actually hearing yourself play, that isn't an option for Rocksmith. The only thing the game can do is add all the pedal/amp effects in software and pump the audio directly out of the console, and it does this very fast. Basically about the same as other software amp/effects solutions on a PC, about 5ms. This is so small that it's basically imperceptible when you're playing.

They did think to include a little card in the case that explains the recommended setup for audio. For best results, you want regular analog audio directly to your sound system or speakers. I myself use component cables for everything, and my audio cables go directly to a pair of PC speakers so the audio isn't affected by any delay introduced by the TV, and I have basically zero lag for this game. Do not use HDMI for the audio! This is laggy as balls in general, and actually people who play competitive fighting games like Street Fighter refuse to play on such modern setups precisely because of this.

Sorry I'm clogging up your site with such a huge-ass comment. I really like this game! I am a RB nut, a huge Harmonix fanboy. RB is still the better overall package for all the other instruments and gameplay it offers, as well as the huge library it has going, and for just busting it out at parties in general. I love what they were trying to do with RB's pro guitar, but as a learning tool and just for playing a real guitar itself, this is better. Period.

Thanks for all the discussion about Rocksmith. I've played guitar for 20+ years now and I consider myself fairly decent. I am no SRV (who is?), but I can keep up with some fairly complicated songs.

After reading and listening to the podcast yesterday, I think I will be picking up Rocksmith even if it sounds like it's aimed for beginners to the guitar. I really want to support the company who released it and hopefully they'll build the brand and release more advanced tracks later on.

Anyway.. just stopping by to say thanks for the all the discussion about it.

Fredrik_S wrote:

Thanks for all the discussion about Rocksmith. I've played guitar for 20+ years now and I consider myself fairly decent. I am no SRV (who is?), but I can keep up with some fairly complicated songs.

After reading and listening to the podcast yesterday, I think I will be picking up Rocksmith even if it sounds like it's aimed for beginners to the guitar. I really want to support the company who released it and hopefully they'll build the brand and release more advanced tracks later on.

Anyway.. just stopping by to say thanks for the all the discussion about it.

You might be a little bored having the "level up" the songs the first time you play them, but you'll get to the top level pretty quickly. At least you can play whatever you want in between notes without being penalized. Even if you don't want to practice the actual songs in the game, being able to create your own pedal/amp custom combinations basically turns your console into a giant amp and pedal board. That in itself is pretty fun to mess around with. I have a little Roland Micro Cube, and this game is basically my new amp. You could easily run the audio from your console into some kind of recording device and actually record it. It sounds that good.

Awesome write up and I'm in 99% agreement with you except for this:

Most of the 50 songs included probably aren’t all that familiar, and it’s clear that Rocksmith doesn’t have the same cachet to get the same kind of popular music as Harmonix.

If the Rocksmith song selection fell into my tastes any more than it does now I'd swear Ubisoft was scraping my Last.FM list and catering the game to me. Hey Ubisoft, I'll buy every Dan Auerbach slash Black Keys track you put out. All I could ask for is more surf, rockabilly, and psychobilly. There's a seed there so hopefully it grows.

Here's the on-disc song list. Oooo, just noticed the unlockable tracks after that list. Now those are some unknown songs. I wonder if they're the Ubisoft tracker's bands.

[Edit] I paused in the middle of typing my post and realized I lost my point. I'd argue that the vast majority of the bands on Rocksmith are big artists. Maybe not so much on Clear Channel radio, but they're far from unknowns.

If this game were named Jazzsmith I'd be all over it like fleas on a hobo. Even so it seems worthy of purchase because of the 1/4" to USB dongle alone; what a novel idea! Dec. 13th cannot come soon enough for us fledgling PC guitarists.

"It’s not game of the year. Heck, I’m not even totally sure it’s a game. It is a niche item within a niche genre"

You know, at this point I use my gaming consoles for gaming less than half the time I use them, I think. Just like people hardly use their phones as phones anymore.

I wonder if it's a 'horseless carriage' thing: sell it as a game because people like buying games. Like I'm not sure if Kinect is supposed to make me into a controller or it's supposed to keep me from buying an Apple TV with Siri. I just know I'm conditioned at this point to sit down in front of my Xbox and expect good things to happen.

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's bought the bundle with a guitar -- I have a long-neglected acoustic guitar, but not an electric one.

You know, thinking even more on this line of "Is Rocksmith even a game?" I have to say even the title of this article isn't really accurate. I think Rocksmith isn't a "rhythm" game at all, in the way that Rock Band and Guitar Hero are about matching coloured notes to play a rhythmic abstraction of a song. Rocksmith may actually be the first true music video game I've seen. You're not just matching gems to make a pre-recorded song play, you're actually making music.

DorkmasterFlek wrote:

You might be a little bored having the "level up" the songs the first time you play them, but you'll get to the top level pretty quickly.

There's an option in the game settings to increase the difficulty level to max, which simply sets the "level" of all the phrases to maximum. So you could start out playing all the songs with full note charts, without having to spend time leveling up each song.

As someone who's played guitar for a few years and musical instruments for over two decades, I haven't used a lot of the tutorials in Rocksmith, so I don't have much of an opinion on how it serves as a tutor. What I can say is that it does what nothing else I've found does, and that is it makes practicing fun.

I can sit down with the tablature to a song, plug into an amp, and try playing the song for awhile. It's kind of boring just hearing yourself. After a short time it gets old. Your hands start to cramp. You look for excuses to quit.

I can queue that same song up in Rocksmith, plug in, and play it over and over for hours. It never gets old. I feel great, and I look for excuses to keep playing, even when it's 2am.

I wonder how well it would work with my acoustic/electric Gibson. I sold my straight electric.

Should work fine as long as the pickups are decent. I've not heard any complaints about working with acoustic/electric vs straight electric.

DorkmasterFlek wrote:

You know, thinking even more on this line of "Is Rocksmith even a game?" I have to say even the title of this article isn't really accurate. I think Rocksmith isn't a "rhythm" game at all, in the way that Rock Band and Guitar Hero are about matching coloured notes to play a rhythmic abstraction of a song. Rocksmith may actually be the first true music video game I've seen. You're not just matching gems to make a pre-recorded song play, you're actually making music.

You mean like the karaoke games?

Also: I'm a drummer and I resent the insinuation.

Mixolyde wrote:

I wonder how well it would work with my acoustic/electric Gibson. I sold my straight electric.

I have used it with 3 guitars so far

Taylor acoustic 412ce
Fender American standard Strat
Gibson ES-335

Works well with all of them.

Elysium wrote:

Should work fine as long as the pickups are decent. I've not heard any complaints about working with acoustic/electric vs straight electric.

I'm going to try it with my guild thinbody tonight. Doesn't even have pickups, just an internal bridge mic/preamp.

LibrarianX wrote:

I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's bought the bundle with a guitar -- I have a long-neglected acoustic guitar, but not an electric one.

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/1...

Check out that thread. Several people have already posted comments on the guitar bundle.

In short, it's a pretty decent starter guitar, and the same price as you would find in a music store if it wasn't on sale.

I just finished putting in another 2 hours, and I still love the experience when playing and practicing. The UI on the other hand is really grating on me. It's pretty bad. Am I missing something? Is there no way to go back to previous venues when you choose the Continue your journey option? I feel like the game is pushing me forward to other songs when I am no where near good enough to play the previous songs properly!

Since using the special RB Fender with Rockband makes Elstree crazy because of how it mis-detects his playing, this may be the perfect way for me to get some use from it.

Especially as I'll have access to a human teacher, too!

I think you just have to distance yourself from the Rock Band concept of locking songs to venues. Just go to the Song section and play it there. There's no difference, right?

[Edit] I just noticed you can use Event Manager to play other venue Events, but I don't see that you can just play the individual songs that way.

wordsmythe wrote:
DorkmasterFlek wrote:

You know, thinking even more on this line of "Is Rocksmith even a game?" I have to say even the title of this article isn't really accurate. I think Rocksmith isn't a "rhythm" game at all, in the way that Rock Band and Guitar Hero are about matching coloured notes to play a rhythmic abstraction of a song. Rocksmith may actually be the first true music video game I've seen. You're not just matching gems to make a pre-recorded song play, you're actually making music.

You mean like the karaoke games?

Also: I'm a drummer and I resent the insinuation.

Well if you count singing, then yeah the karaoke games too, as well as RB vocals. Fair enough.

Also: I drum a bit myself and while RB is pretty close to the real thing (especially on pro drums in RB3), you're still actually just hitting pads that don't make actual drum sounds in order to unmute the drum track in the song. It works exactly the same as the plastic guitars. Granted, it is a lot closer to what you're actually doing on the real thing than the guitar gameplay, but you're still not making the music yourself. That's the big difference in Rocksmith for me, personally.

Boudreaux wrote:

There's an option in the game settings to increase the difficulty level to max, which simply sets the "level" of all the phrases to maximum. So you could start out playing all the songs with full note charts, without having to spend time leveling up each song.

As someone who's played guitar for a few years and musical instruments for over two decades, I haven't used a lot of the tutorials in Rocksmith, so I don't have much of an opinion on how it serves as a tutor. What I can say is that it does what nothing else I've found does, and that is it makes practicing fun.

Woah, that's good to know. My brother is a much more accomplished guitarist and he'll probably like that. I totally agree about the practicing aspect. That, to me, is what this piece of software is really about. It's a practice helper.

So how are the training minigames?

DorkmasterFlek wrote:

Also: I drum a bit myself and while RB is pretty close to the real thing (especially on pro drums in RB3), you're still actually just hitting pads that don't make actual drum sounds in order to unmute the drum track in the song. It works exactly the same as the plastic guitars. Granted, it is a lot closer to what you're actually doing on the real thing than the guitar gameplay, but you're still not making the music yourself. That's the big difference in Rocksmith for me, personally.

I bet that if I weren't on an electric drumset, the distance would probably seem larger.

This might be a useful adjunct:

Amazon has a guitar tuner/metronome/tabs app as their free app of the day.

Coldstream wrote:

This might be a useful adjunct:

Amazon has a guitar tuner/metronome/tabs app as their free app of the day.

Thanks for pointing that out! DL'd.

Coldstream wrote:

This might be a useful adjunct:

Amazon has a guitar tuner/metronome/tabs app as their free app of the day.

Damn form won't do anything when I try to submit my e-mail address or phone number.

Btw, if you or someone you love plays any stringed instrument, this is the greatest gift in the world: http://www.amazon.com/Snark-SN1-SN-1...

Mixolyde wrote:

So how are the training minigames?

The foundation is solid but they could use some presentational work. They need to be less "game-like" in a lot of cases. For example, why does the "ducks" mini-game knock me out after a certain amount of time? So it can support leaderboards, which are already hacked? Why have that at all?

Why does the "riff-repeater" only have a set number of lives, so if I am struggling I get kicked out? Why does it kick me out when I finally succeed? What if I want to keep practicing? In order to keep practicing I either have to get kicked out and restart (which due to the loading and many menus, can take a stupid long time) or pause and restart before it kicks me out to the main menu.

There are number of nuisances like those I mentioned - I can only hope that Ubisoft is listening and considering some changes to tone the gamey parts down a notch. It's clear that people are buying this more as a innovative practice tool than a rhythm game and hopefully Ubisoft responds to the desires of the market.

That’s not to say this is a toy for everyone. In fact, to someone with a healthy knowledge of how to play guitar, this probably will seem a lot like a child’s toy, and a woefully inadequate tutor. Again, sort of in the same way that if you know how to read, you don't need something that wastes time electronically telling you that C makes the Kuh sound. Yes, Rocksmith teaches you about fingering, anchoring, bending, slides, hammer-ons/offs, alternative tunings, scales, chords and other beginning concepts, but it doesn’t teach you at all about … well, I don’t know because I’m completely a beginner.

The two most negative reviews I read of this were both from experienced guitar players who dismissed this because "it doesn't REALLY teach you the REAL way" or whatever, which is crap. The thing I need help with is not music theory or 5th fret tuning method, it's making my fingers strong enough and quick enough to control the instrument, and I can tell Rocksmith is going to help me a lot. Frankly both reviews came off as snobbish.

imbiginjapan wrote:

The two most negative reviews I read of this were both from experienced guitar players who dismissed this because "it doesn't REALLY teach you the REAL way" or whatever, which is crap. The thing I need help with is not music theory or 5th fret tuning method, it's making my fingers strong enough and quick enough to control the instrument, and I can tell Rocksmith is going to help me a lot. Frankly both reviews came off as snobbish.

I've taken professional music lessons before. If this helps encourage and reinforce things while building technical ability, then it's a great aid for the time between lessons.

imbiginjapan wrote:

Why does the "riff-repeater" only have a set number of lives, so if I am struggling I get kicked out? Why does it kick me out when I finally succeed? What if I want to keep practicing? In order to keep practicing I either have to get kicked out and restart (which due to the loading and many menus, can take a stupid long time) or pause and restart before it kicks me out to the main menu.

There are number of nuisances like those I mentioned - I can only hope that Ubisoft is listening and considering some changes to tone the gamey parts down a notch. It's clear that people are buying this more as a innovative practice tool than a rhythm game and hopefully Ubisoft responds to the desires of the market.

You'll be interested to know that according to a recent interview on Reddit with the Rocksmith developers, they are looking at just such a change. They admitted the 5 lives thing was a bad idea, and they're going to patch it, among other things. They're also looking at some ways to improve the high level player's experience, like levelling up songs faster and such. Oh, and bass support in 2012! W00t!