Rock Band 3 - Lessons (Part 1)

Figure 1: Main Menu

Lessons in Rock Band 3 are accessed either through the training menu option or through the career/my goals menu option (figure 1).  Either way you'll end up doing the same lessons (figure 2), but the career mode will align the lessons with achievements whereas the training mode seems to be more or less intended to just learn how to play an instrument or a song without any specific goal in mind.  (Though you still get the same achievements/trophies regardless of which path you choose)

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Training mode:

Figure 2: Pro Guitar Lessons Menu

Since I'm a bit of a perfectionist and hate to start on "easy" difficulty in any game I chose the training mode path. My rationale was that if I learned how to play the guitar first then playing the game with the guitar would be easy enough that I could start playing songs on a higher difficulty level.  If you read between the lines I think you'll find the words "That didn't work" in there somewhere.

I found two problems with this approach.  First of all, there's not much in the way of instant gratification via achievements or trophies going this route.  So, unless you can find a sense of self accomplishment by learning to play individual notes and chords you'll quickly get bored and/or frustrated with the training.

Secondly there's the issue of the training itself.  The lessons start off with individual notes rather than chords and I've sense been told that this is the opposite order that most people learn to play the guitar, but this is really only part of the issue.  The big problem with the lessons is an unsteady progression in difficulty.  For example in a lesson with five exercises it my steadily get more difficult for the first three exercises.  Then become REALLY HARD on the fourth exercise. (Like seemingly impossible "I quit for the day" hard)  And then the fifth exercise of the lesson is easier than the first part.

I imagine the right way to approach that scenario would be to step back to the easier exercises in the lesson and redo them until it becomes almost second nature.  Then try the hard exercise again.  But since you don't get any achievements, trophies or anything for redoing these exercises/lessons you'll have to use your own self discipline to keep yourself on that schedule.  It would have been nice if they'd added achievements for completing an exercise/lesson X number of times.

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Career/my goals mode:

Figure 3: Career/My Goals Menu

So, yeah.  Self discipline... what are the other options?  :)  Career mode.  I actually found the "my goals" portion of career mode for the pro guitar to be pretty good.  It mixes up the basic note/chord lessons with song lessons so that you get to put your newly learned skills to use.

In figure 3 the icons to the right of the goal listing represent the requirements for the first goal (introducing pro guitar).  The requirements are: Watch a video, do part of the first easy guitar lesson, do a song lesson, do some more guitar lessons, song lessons, guitar lessons.

And even better yet, since you're playing in career mode completing all these requirements help you earn achievements and trophies.  So, you get a little instant gratification to keep you going when you're really sick of trying to make it through a lesson.

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Pro keyboard:

The pro keyboard career goals are nowhere near as nice.  The first 4 goals for the guitar with the song lessons and instrument lessons mixed together are nowhere to be found.  There is a goal for accomplishing these lessons, but they're all crammed into the "general keyboard goals".  The rest of the goals you see there all involve playing song after song until you've completed each one in the set - which is something like 70 songs.

This essentially makes the career/my goal route about the same as the training route where you have to decide if you want to learn how to play the instrument or how to play songs, and it seems to be "all or nothing" as far as goals/achievements go.  In contrast, the career goals for the pro guitar actually give you an achievement for watching videos.  I'm not sure why the experience is so different for the pro keyboard.  It really almost seems like the keyboard was an afterthought.

Fortunately my wife already knows how to play the keyboard/piano.  So, she's been breezing through most of the lessons and songs anyway.  But I have a feeling less experienced players may be a little overwhelmed by this all or nothing approach to goals.

In my next entry I'll go into more details on the lessons themselves.