Rocksmith+ | Learn Guitar Fast 12+

First off, I want to thank you for creating an app that has allowed me to begin learning to play the guitar at the ripe age of 42. I had tried a few others but with no success. I’m really enjoying the program so far and just have a little critique regarding the note detection, particularly when using the play-by-play feature. Sometimes, it moves on before I have found the notes and other times, it gets stuck long after I have already played them (and have doubled checked to make sure they were correct). This makes learning more difficult, especially when it moves on without me. I want to make sure I can play every note so I can learn it. So, if you could fix that, I would greatly appreciate it. Also, could you please add some more Brit Rock song choices, including Oasis? Thanks so much!

Hi Anoncabaretfae, we appreciate your feedback. We're always looking to continue to refine and improve our note detection and that extends to features like note-by-note. In the meantime, don't forget that you can always manually skip ahead to the next note with note-by-note if you're confident that you're playing it correctly so that you don't get stuck too long on any single part. As for it advancing before you're ready, you can try muting your notes after playing them so that they don't ring out too long. Those two tips may improve your experience in the short term while we see what improvements we can make in future updates.

As far as more Brit Rock we'd love to see it also and we've noted your interest. Please stay tuned each month to see our new song drops of at least 50 new songs. If you don't already follow us on social media @rocksmithplus on Instagram to see the newest announcements or check the song library site at www.rocksmith.com/songlibrary.

I was very excited to try this program. But it is completely frustrating. The catalog of songs is incredibly limited. And the software itself has a hard time registering my notes, perhaps due to the fact that I did not have the right sound engine loaded, so that is on me. However, it became quickly very clear to me that it is very difficult to watch the screen and play the guitar. I have always played by feel, but I'm realizing that I look at the neck and the strings more often than I realized. I cannot imagine being a new guitarist trying to learn and having my eyes glued to the screen the whole time. Learning to listen, and to watch what your hands are doing are the most important things about learning the guitar. Staring at the screen and trying to match little blips as they go by has absolutely nothing to do with learning to play music. Some things cannot and should not be gamified.

I cannot read music and so I learned to play by ear. And as a professional guitarist for 25 of my 35 years playing the instrument, I was always very glad that I had developed the ability to play what I was hearing. Much better to spend your time developing your ear and spending your time with your eyes on your instrument than staring at the computer screen.

Unplug from the computer if you want to learn. You'll be so glad you developed skill and love for one of the few activities we have left that is not digitized.

Hi Dashielblades, everyone learns differently so we completely understand if you don't think Rocksmith+ may be a good fit for you, but we encourage you to give it time even if it seems uncomfortable at first. It's definitely a new style of interface which may take some time to get used to but that was the same case when scrolling tab was introduced and even the case for tab itself when compared to sheet music. Heck, classical notation itself is a form of music notation that requires a lot of looking at something other than your hands & instrument (in this case a paper rather than a screen) when getting started. So I'd be wary of attributing this learning curve as something unique to Rocksmith+ and not something inherent to learning any new 'language.'

The goal of all of these visual (rather than ear-based) forms of learning is not only learning to react to visual stimuli, but to also start building associations between the music you're hearing as you watch the display and to train your muscle memory to understand the layout of your instrument by feel. These aren't random blips and symbols (just like sheet music isn't random dots and lines), these are real representations of the fret and string you're meant to play, specific skills and techniques like bends or slides, and the timing of each note as it appears in the song. And from an audio perspective, It's one area in which our use of officially licensed master recordings really shines as you can be sure you're listening to the track as it was originally recorded when learning arrangements to build that real-life context instead of having to further adjust from a soundalike or MIDI cover.

Still, we do also have a variety of practice tools that further help people get accustomed to the noteway that you might want to keep in mind. You may see value in the note-by-note feature (which stops at each note during practice until you play it correctly) or our MIDI playback feature which further isolates the arrangement by playing back the arrangement as a MIDI track. If a guitar or bass part seems lower in the mix, this helps isolate the part and really accentuate the part if you're someone who learns well by ear. Also, while you mentioned not reading music, if you learned tab at all during your time as a guitarist, the RS Tab display option might offer a more familiar visual interface for you as you get acclimated.

In the more than 10 years that the Rocksmith brand has been around, we've helped over 5 million players start or continue their music learning journey. We've seen real results from players of all skill levels including those with decades of experience who see value in how Rocksmith helped them learn new songs quickly once they learned the interface. There is a reason that a previous research study indicated that 95% of Rocksmith players reported an improvement with their skills. So while it's possible you might be part of the 5% who simply doesn't find it helpful, I'd really encourage you to not write it off too early, and to not write off the idea of using technology as a learning aid either.

You also mention a note on your thoughts on the song catalog. We know that taste in songs is subjective, but we do aim to add at least 50 new songs each month so we hope that we'll soon add music that better fits your taste. We've already now moved to having at least 7,000 songs available worldwide and even more than 9,000 in countries like the US so we're confident that we'll only continue to grow the library and try to address everyone's tastes. Our full library can be found at www.rocksmith.com/songlibrary.

Finally, on your note on note detection, we do recommend using a clean tone if you're using an amplified electric for the best recognition using an on-board microphone. If you're using a mobile interface, we also recommend a clean tone since the app offers visual effects and tone modeling built-in for each song. But if you'd like additional help or tips we encourage you to reach out to www.ubisoft.com/help/contact and we can make sure that your setup is optimized for the best note detection or we can record your feedback and try to address any outliers or problems in a future update. Our team is always striving to offer high quality note detection through our live support so your feedback is welcomed on that front.

The new Rocksmith+ offers some “quality of life” improvements over its predecessor Rocksmith 2014 Edition. That said the use of a microphone to detect the guitar means that there’s some lag when it comes to what you’re seeing and what you’re playing. The microphone also means it has to be close to the source or it will have difficulty picking up the sound. Which itself is an issue on a phone with a limited screen size, since you can’t always sit close to the source and have the phone at an appropriate viewing angle. Then the use of a Real Tone cable is insufferable since you’d need to buy a Lightning to USB 3.0 Adapter at an additional cost (without counting the cost of the Real Tone cable itself) And you might think “Well, the subscription works across platforms so I could play on my laptop” Well, not if it is a Mac. The computer version doesn’t run on Mac, so if you’re an avid Apple consumer don’t expect to use this on any device other than an iPhone/iPad. So in all you’d be paying $100 a year for an ambitious app that only falls short on its execution.

Hi, thank you for the feedback. We always strive to improve our note detection and that includes the on-board microphone. We're sorry that you still perceived some latency and that it didn't seem as responsive as it should be.

Just to check, though, have you tried adjusting the Audio Lag Correction settings? It can be found under "Settings" (the gear icon in the upper-right of the Menu Pages) -> "Game Options" -> "Gameplay" -> "Noteway Display" -> "Audio Lag Correction". Since the on-board microphone doesn't apply tone modeling, it's possible that the visual latency you perceive could be adjusted with this setting.

On your comment on the Real Tone Cable, we'd like to note that we do not require the use of the Real Tone Cable for players to connect directly. We allow users to try any existing mobile interface/adapter/cable that they may have (although we cannot guarantee support & troubleshooting for third party devices). In our testing we've seen that many of the popular interface options on the market work with Rocksmith+ and anyone who would like to connect their electric guitar directly should not view the Real Tone Cable (and any required adapters) to be a requirement.