Elva the Bass: Four months in

Well it has been great weather for Kitesurfing all January and February, So that has been my afternoon priority. I’ve almost stuck to my plan of an hour of Bass per day. I’ve lost interest in the lessons that came with rocksmith, mainly because they all use the “E” string and it does not always get picked up by the program. Same thing with the mini-games. They work fine until I need the E string and then I fail and it takes ages to restart the game. Scale Warriors is about the only one that still works well. I just ignore the red hints.

This has left me for the most part running 20min sessions with a small break between them. As such I have a bunch of songs at 99% completion. I’ve not been able to get many to 100% as that requires zero error or using master mode. I’ve only won with master mode is there is a simple riff and I’ve been able to memorise it. So songs with a bridge or instrumental have been too hard and with no hints I forget that they are there.

Being able to read Tab music has not been as helpful as I was expecting, and I know that our church songs should have really simple riffs. I’ve found a couple of instructions but kept loosing my place until…

Karl explained chords to me in a way that I could understand. So now I can follow the chord music that has been written for guitar, with the added bonus that it usually has the words underneath the chords so now I know where in the song I should be. The tricky part is that whatever the chord for guitar is called I play that note (just the one) that it is named after. So now I can see that most songs have only four notes that I’d need to remember. And once I know the pattern of the Riff that should be achievable.

But, Karl also explained about the pentatonic scales, so whatever note the song starts with sets what pentatonic scale I should be using. Then all the other notes in the song will be a part of that pentatonic scale. With this I can see how people don’t need to learn an entire song by rote. If I can follow the pentatonic scale things should be mostly fine. Within this riff all the four notes of the song can be found, that will help me with learning the scale I think. Now I just need to keep an eye out for these as I practice the complicated rocksmith songs.

 

CDLC: http://customsforge.com/

Yay, there are some of the church songs in there already and the pokemon theme works well plus a bunch of others. I wonder how hard these are to make, maybe I’ll be able to add in some Dean Martin songs myself. I wonder if I can transcribe sheet music into chords?

 

Another avenue is this box set from a UK church mob, I may get the intermediate pack at the end of April if my back account has recovered by then. Seems like I can use it to supplement the supplemental rocksmith CDLC.

http://www.musicademy.com/store/uk/christian-bass/beginner/worship-bass-beginners-boxset.html

 

If I can get a new laptop I could run my guitar through rocksmith and use that as an amp emulator. Currently though my plan is to use my Uni laptop to display the music, whether it be tabs or chords.

Alternatively I can download and use free versions of Guitar Rig and Amplitube, then install the ASIO4all drivers to it to recognise your guitar., Instructions on hitechguitar.com

 

I still have not located any tango music that I understand but with what I learnt this week it should be possible. Before that though I’ve now prioritised practicing church music. I should be able to spend a month arriving early to church and joining in with the singing practice. Once I can play a few songs without losing the beat or where I am at then hopefully the singers will request I join them onstage.

 

Onday I should change rocksmith back from French to English. There are a few other people I could play with now and it would be easier for them:  Allan choceran, Jez, Kyle, Karl Helbig, Geoff Sampson. I’ve got my second cable too so the co-op thing works OK.