Rocksmith+ Fast Music Learning 12+

Get the cable for the best experience

I have been a long time Rocksmith user since its original release. I have honestly only learned how to play because of this game. When I learned about Rocksmith+ I decided to give it a go. I have the original usb cable that came with the game back in the day and connect it to my IPad via a adapter and it works great. The list songs is extensive but not a “ton” of popular songs. I have spent quite a bit of money over the years on my PS4 and PS5 for different songs on the games. This one is starting to get some very good songs and I am honestly very excited to see what all comes in the future. The mic feature works alright but if you can get one of the Rocksmith cables and it will make your experience SOOOOO much better.

Guitarist for 35 years

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.

Developer Response ,

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.

Close but no cigar

I want to start off by saying I’ve been playing guitar for 10 years self taught and loved the rocksmith 2014 game, but this doesn’t come close to how amazing the songs were on it, I’m just disappointed that the OG rocksmith songs isn’t on here, like trivium, godsmack, a day to remember, etc, for a new player this is amazing, great way to learn guitar but the choice of metal and rock songs is bland, I really hope to see more new era music added like wage war and bad omens, or even Black Sabbath it’s a great great platform, but I’m just once again disappointed with the music we have to chose from, I love rocksmith and always will as it is so much more fun to play rather than read tabs and and play by yourself as to where rocksmith keeps the groove going, rocksmith always made me strive to complete a song I’ve always dreamed of playing and allowed me to work on it note by note but I’ve found things I’ve liked and found things I haven’t but that’s nature of the human beast,I would love to see guitarcade make a comeback and session mode, I hope to see this improve but keep up the good work! For a on the go guitar/ instrument experience this is great!