Rocksmith’s gamification of guitar lessons
After 30 years of playing and occasionally teaching guitar, I was keen to see what I could learn from plugging into my Xbox. As it turns out, there was quite a bit.
What’s a Rocksmith?
Ubisoft’s Rocksmith is a video game that allows you to plug a real guitar into your computer, Xbox or Playstation. The game features a broad suite of learning tools that include:
conventional lessons
songs
mini-games, and
a virtual band for jamming.
Like most games, Rocksmith starts by taking you through how the game works. It uses rewards to encourage you to play through basic lessons that help build up your understanding of the game and your instrument. However, if you want to jump straight into learning songs, you can do that too.
The game uses a form of tablature that will be familiar to anyone who has picked up a guitar magazine. It doesn’t teach musical notation, but the lessons and mini-games provide opportunities to learn more about musical theory...if that’s your thing.
Riff repeater to the rescue
Rocksmith teaches songs by offering you only the basic notes to begin with. As you successfully hit more notes, the game adds more, increasing the complexity. It took a while to calibrate myself to this approach. I would crank up the settings and quickly find myself in over my head.
The riff repeater feature saved me from myself. This feature allows you to focus on a small section of a song. You can slow it right down and add as many or as few notes as you like. You can also turn other instruments up or down, without the other musicians complaining! I use this feature to find out what the guitarist is playing without waiting for the machine to approve my progress. It lets me quickly learn the more complex parts of a song without having to slog through the bits I’ve already mastered.
Learning to listen
Learning songs this way has had some unexpected side-effects. When I first started, I wasn’t great at reading the notation off the screen. It was an unfamiliar habit for someone with limited gaming experience. But, because I was impatient to learn the songs, I tended to resist slowing them down. This meant that I had to rely on listening to the guide tracks to know what to play. I gradually found myself getting better and better at playing ‘by ear’.
As you get into the more advanced levels, the game starts to take the visual cues away. This meant that I had to listen more carefully to the other instruments to make sure I was playing in time and hitting all of the right musical cues. As a lead guitarist, this was a whole new consideration. Listen to what the other players are playing!? Aren’t they supposed to be following me?
What’s that chord called?
There are a bunch of mini-games in what they call the ‘Guitarcade’ that focus on other elements of playing guitar. They range from techniques, like bending strings and sliding between notes, to theory, like playing chords by name or playing scales in different keys. Apart from being a fun way to kill some time and earn ‘rewards’, the mini-games allow you to practise the stuff that you should know without boring you to tears.
It’s probably the game’s most obvious use of teaching through play. As you whizz through traffic in the car racing game, you’re actually improving your ability to play up and down complicated musical scales. You even get to learn chord names by zapping zombies and other ghouls.
Get it right!
The Guitarcade also challenges you to play songs for points. I’ve had a few tussles with the scoring system, feeling robbed and persecuted by the game’s interpretation of my playing. It’s amazing how you can convince yourself that you’re playing a song right, only to find out you’re not quite hitting that riff the way you should be. At first, I assumed the game was just wrong. But, as I improved, I realised that I had a few lazy habits that needed tightening up.
Jamming
One of the modes I haven’t really explored allows you to play along with ‘virtual’ musicians. In this mode, you’re not restricted to playing actual songs. You can play whatever you want and the rest of the band will play along. It’s a cool tool for getting used to making things up as you go along, but it’s not something I’ve spent a lot of time with.
Join a band
The best thing about Rocksmith is that it lets you learn songs by playing along with great musicians. Licensing and availability means that they don’t have every song you’ll ever want, but the selection is astoundingly broad. It’s a thrill to play along with bands like Muse and Iron Maiden, even when you only manage to hit half the notes!