What is Rocksmith?

Billed as “the fastest way to learn guitar”, Rocksmith and it's 2014 sequel were a pair of games designed to capitalize on the early 2000s Guitar Hero craze. The twist was that, unlike those plastic controllers that took the world by storm, Rocksmith let you play along to famous songs with your actual guitar or bass. When the game was released, the developers promised that its Montessori-inspired approach would blend the vicarious excitement of Guitar Hero with the growth and fulfillment of learning an instrument.

Rocksmith launched to a lot of hype, and a fair deal of skepticism. Critics pointed to certain flaws in the technology and interface; but for every Popular Mechanics piece claiming that it only teaches you “how to play a video game with a real guitar as the controller”, there were a thousand new fans who insisted that the game gave them a clear path through the arduous early phases of learning the guitar. Then, one day, it just faded into obscurity.

Now, speaking as someone who got onboard Rocksmith fairly early, this was a huge disappointment. While there were certainly a few issues with the game, the idea that you could hook your guitar up to a computer seemed revolutionary. If I had to guess, I'm not the only one who thought that Rocksmith would be the AOL of 21st century guitar: a clunky, glitchy version of a technology that would completely change the way we learned instruments. I remember how transformative it felt to play along to my favorite recordings, and that joy that coursed through me when I finally got a perfect score.

Then, the world moved on. There was no “Guitar Internet Explorer” to fix all of the bugs. There were no major improvements to the technology that allowed for even better digital guitar instruction. Everything just sort of went back to the way it was.

But I was never able to let go of that promise, and in the decade since I first played Rocksmith, I've actually gotten kinda decent at the bass, so I figured it might be worth going back and seeing how well the game lived up to it's promise.

My Story

I think that I was in a similar position to a lot of other people when they first picked up the game. I'd had my B.C. Warlock for nearly a decade, but I'd never been able to hit the escape velocity to break free from chords and scales into the vast expanse of songs that weren't “Breaking the Law” or “Whole Lotta Love”. In the span of about two years, I racked up over 400 hours of playtime in the game. I could see measurable progress in both my song performance and the technique mini-games, and I really felt as though I'd graduated to the intermediate stage of the guitar.

Then things went wrong. Buoyed up by the confidence that I could play Maiden songs from start to finish (minus the solos), I went to work making recordings of some of the riffs and ideas that I'd been jotting down over the years. But the moment I sat down and listened to my recordings, I realized just how many issues I had. You see, Rocksmith is good at figuring out the note that you're playing based on the information from your pickups, but it is absolutely terrible at detecting rhythm. After months of struggle trying to get a simple double track to sound right, I decided that I needed to quit Rocksmith and spend some quality time with a metronome.

Coming Back

A wave of nostalgia swept through me as I fired up the game. The title screen's familiar burst of feedback (no doubt painstakingly tailored to be much nicer than the real thing) shot through my speakers, rising up on the back of the announcer's pleasantly monotonous voice and reaching a glorious crescendo with the barrage of half second samples as I scrolled through the menagerie of songs.

I wanted to start with something easy, since I wasn't sure how well I'd remember the “fret falling” note system after so many years. Since I've been working on my stage presence, I also wanted it to be a high energy song so I could really move around. I figured something at the intersection of pop and hardcore punk would do the trick, so I decided on Rise Against's “Savior” and fired it up.

It took me about a minute before my brain locked in with the falling notes, but once I did it was like I'd stepped into a time machine. Only now I didn't fumble over which fret to play or break my rhythm every time I tried rock the neck of my guitar along with my headbanging. By the end of the song I was singing along to the chorus and having an absolute blast.

Conclusion

Of course, I've learned a lot more in these past ten years than just the guitar. Like how technology doesn't grow along some linear progression where things steadily improve at a fixed rate. It's a market-driven engine where commercial potential is the difference between the lightening fast advances we saw in cell phones and the slow motion stagnation of so many promising devices. Simply put, if there's no financial interest, then there's' no technological growth, either.

But I can't help think that there's something tragic about all that. To see something that had the potential to change the world languishing in obscurity. To know that, even as we speak, there might be a life changing medical device sitting unused in some developer's garage because the shamans of our age decided that the cost benefit analysis didn't pan out. I suppose that's just how it is sometimes, but I take some comfort in the knowledge that if those truths are ever a bit too much to bear, there's this amazing little video game just waiting for me to hook up my axe and jam.