First impressions: ROCKSMITH + looks set to fail

I have been so excited for Rocksmith +. Last week, Ubisoft released it to the world. It was immediately greeted with confusion and disappointment for various reasons. I wanted to try it for myself and Ubisoft was kind enough to provide me with a 3 month subscription so I could check it out. All the following thoughts are mine, but you are free to try it for yourself. Rocksmith + is now available through the Ubisoft Store (affiliate link) starting at $ 14.99 per month on PC. I want to note that this is tagged as a first impression instead of a review because it is a barely launched subscription service. I hope to write a follow-up after a couple of months to assess how the platform has evolved over time to provide a more precise indication of where it is headed.

I really don’t know where to start. I think I’ll start with the highlights. Rocksmith + it looks smoother overall than its predecessor Rocksmith 2014. Note tracks look and feel more beautiful. The number of songs is huge. At the time of writing, there are over 7,700 songs in the game. They’ve added loads of videos to help teach the techniques and ranked them by approximate skill level. They have health and wellness videos while playing such as posture, stretches to warm up and stretches to cool down. These are very important things that are rarely talked about in the guitar world. One of the great strengths of Rocksmith + is the promise of additional content. They announced that new songs and content will be available monthly (although they previously said it would be more often). This is always good and since it’s a subscription you don’t need to buy the game and then buy a lot of DLC. Get the full library with your subscription. Furthermore, there are several ways to connect to the game. You can use a Real Tone cable (¼ “to USB), an audio interface (compatibility varies) or the Rocksmith + Connect the mobile app that uses your phone’s microphone to listen to the guitar / amp while you play. Finally, there are a lot of international artists who are really cool.

Now we come to the areas that I consider downgrades. For starters, the UI looks very busy, very cluttered, and very overwhelming. Every time I load it, I have to take a second to orient myself. This is not helped by the fact that they have a ton of song recommendations on the Home tab along with your favorite songs and your recently played songs and the content they are promoting like their videos. Then, they have another section called Play where you can find multiple songs rated in a million different ways and then you have the Search section where you can search for songs based on a keyword or genre. He is very busy.

Also, when you go to the Learn section, they have video lessons where people talk to you about techniques, chords and stuff like that, but I found these aren’t paired with exercises like in Rocksmith 2014. You have to watch the video and then look for a song with whatever technique or thing you just watched a 3 minute video on. It would have been much nicer if they’d followed the video with a simple exercise or small list of songs using whatever the video covered. Furthermore, Rocksmith + it eliminated the Guitarcade which was something that many musicians liked as a way to practice scales and techniques. Also, I haven’t found anything like Session Mode where you can just play with a band. For a platform that talks about guitar teaching, they really seem to have eliminated a lot of teaching tools they had.

As I said earlier, there are 3 ways to connect your guitar or bass Rocksmith +. I’ve tried all three and in my experience, the mobile app is the worst as you might expect. The cable and interface options essentially connect your guitar directly to the game and I felt a bit of a lag, but it didn’t seem to affect my score at all. Meanwhile, with the app I have been marked for a lack of a lot of notes and chords that I know I’ve hit and which is to be expected when essentially you’re using a wireless microphone over a direct wired connection. If you can, I would avoid the app. I must also admit that there is a possibility that the problem was the way I had positioned my phone and maybe if you spend the time really finding the sweet spot it works better, but if you already have a Real Tone cable and / or a ‘ audio interface, I would recommend only those.

Now let’s get to the heart of why Rocksmith + he feels condemned. The song library leaves a lot of shortcomings. I understand that licensing can be very challenging and / or expensive and so I want to start this section with the acknowledgment that I’m sure licensing is a big reason for many of my complaints on this topic. One of the reasons I initially wanted Rocksmith 2014 was being able to play some of my favorite songs from some of my favorite bands like Foo Fighters, Alter Bridge, Rise Against, Halestorm, blink-182, Green Day, etc. All of these artists are available in the base game or were made available via DLC. I made the stupid mistake of thinking that all these bands would license the songs Rocksmith +. None of the ones I just mentioned have a song available on the new platform. It does not end here. When I hear the name Rocksmith, of course I am thinking of rock music and famous rock bands. When you search by genre, Rock and Metal take up perhaps 1/10 of the library. Sometimes you can find a great name like Alice Cooper or Opeth in there, but I don’t know them outside of their names. They don’t pull me in to play their songs. Now, I’m a fan of Bowling For Soup and noticed they had a number of songs in the game. They had a song that I recognized and listened to quite a bit of Bowling For Soup. This indicates a pattern that I have noticed though. If a larger name is included Rocksmith +, you might get one or two of their songs that people recognize if you’re lucky and the rest are all songs that no one has heard of. There’s also just a weird disconnect for those included.

I want to start this next section with an important note. There are a lot of international artists that I have found in the game and I think it’s great. There are Japanese, Latin, etc. musical groups. I’ve never heard of and now they’re getting a new audience and I think it’s great to have them here. I go back to my vent.

Many songs make little sense. Who knows who is really known for the guitar in their songs? Kristen Chenoweth. I love Chenoweth. She is fantastic and can sing like crazy. I never heard one of her songs and thought, “I need to learn the guitar part.” I don’t even know if her songs contain guitar. I can understand having some songs from pop artists like Britney Spears and * NSYNC. They were popular acts and I could definitely see the ways you could create great guitar parts for them. Hell, I’ll accept The Wiggles too. However, Pentatonix is ​​here. You know, the a cappella group. A capella, the musical genre that consists of making music only with your voice. I have nothing against Pentatonix. They have some funny songs. Why am I in a game that revolves around the guitar? Looking at the song list, it appears Ubisoft went to record labels, asked for song licenses, and the labels gave them a box of forgotten snippets. I can’t speak for everyone and if these are the songs that turn you on, great! However, it was a struggle for me to find songs that interested me. Eventually I found a song that motivated me to play (“Seven Deadly Sins” by Man with a Mission), but a single song won’t hold me back for long.

This isn’t the only problem with the song list, though. At the time of writing, Rocksmith + says it has 7,762 songs. Of these, 960 songs have a Lead track (931 of these have been released since Rocksmith + team) and 153 have a Rhythm song (143 of these were made by Rocksmith + squad). I know that at least some of those numbers overlap, which means there’s only about 1/7 of the library available for learning real guitar parts. 7,759 songs in the library have chord charts. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a new feature for Rocksmith + where the song plays and instead of the falling notes, it only has chord diagrams that descend at chord changes. This isn’t a terrible tool in and of itself, but when it’s 90% of your game that should be dedicated to helping people learn to play the guitar, it feels like a slap in the face. Chord charts are extremely abundant online for free or via music books. Getting them down a track is a negligible improvement over seeing them on a piece of paper.

One final note about the song list is that it will change based on your region. For example, if you live in Germany, you can access Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”. If you live in the US, you don’t have access to that quintessential metal song. However, you can use a VPN to access it.

Rocksmith + has the Rocksmith Workshop where you can make arrangements for the songs and then others can play them. I haven’t played with this feature yet, which is why it isn’t mentioned before.

I remember there were rumors based on job advertisements about it Rocksmith + possibly with instruments for drummers, keyboardists / pianists and singers. This would surely explain a large part of the song library. Unfortunately, for a game focused on guitar and bass, what we’ve been given seems extremely lacking and ridiculous. Not to mention it almost seems offensive. In my opinion, the improvements don’t outweigh the downgrades. Rocksmith + it appears to be still in beta and incomplete, but only shipped to silence people. I really hope there are some major improvements in almost every aspect of the game in these first couple of months. What was your experience? You’ve tried Rocksmith + still? Think about it? Tell me if you think I’m grossly wrong on my first impressions in the comments.