Rock Band 3 - Results

Overall Self Assessment:

I'm getting better at the pro guitar controller and I'm enjoying playing through the career mode.  I haven't picked up a real guitar yet, but I'm optimistic that the skills I'm learning will translate fairly well.

Accomplishments:

• I've made it through the easy and medium instrument lessons and the first two career goals

• I'm learning to play through songs without having to look down at the guitar

• I'm able to move up and down the fret board (to some extent) without dragging my fingers along the strings (using onscreen cues) to see where my fingers are.

Details:

As I mentioned in previous entries, I recommend everyone start out in the career mode if you're trying to learn to play.  The training mode and career mode take you to the same instrument lessons, but the career mode mixes them up with song lessons and song goals that make everything a little more fun.

So, after I tried the training mode and decided it wasn't working for me, I started spending most of my time in career mode.  As a matter of fact, the career goals have driven me to play full songs with no song lessons whatsoever.  I had originally intended to learn to play the guitar as well as possible through the training mode before playing full songs.  And to my surprise playing songs has been a key step in my development.  But before I explain how playing songs has been such a big deal for my development let me elaborate on the experience of playing easy difficulty level songs.

When you play a song under easy difficulty in Rock Band 3 it doesn't slow the song down or change the music in anyway.  To make the song easier it simply doesn't require you to play all the notes/chords in the song.  However, those notes/chords will still be played through your TV speakers.  So, it may be irritating at times when you feel like you should be strumming a string because there's music playing, but you're not supposed to play it under the easy difficulty level.

Due to this method of adjusting the song difficulty you can't really take your eyes off the screen and look at the guitar because you need to be able to see which notes/chords you're supposed to play.  That was very annoying to me at first (and still is sometimes).  It was driving me nuts to be missing notes/chords because I was moving my hands or fingers the wrong place, when I knew I could do it if I could just look down.  But I didn't have enough time to look down at my fretting fingers, glance down at the strings, and then move my eyes back to the screen before the next note is coming down the screen.

Then something amazing happened.  Once I kind of gave up and just started trying to play the song even though I knew I was going to miss a good portion of the notes, I discovered that I started to be able to "feel" whether or not I was in the right place.  Furthermore, most of the time when I found myself second guessing whether or not my fingers were in the right place they were in the right place but I'd miss the note because I paused or got off beat when I second guessed myself.

Now I'm to the point that I can play most songs with at least three stars on easy difficulty as long as there's not too much activity on the G, B, or high E strings.  For some reason I can't seem to transition between those strings and the others very accurately.

Another area I'm working on is moving up and down the fret board.  I can generally find the right numbered fret in time to strum the string as long as it's one of the first nine eight frets and one of the first 3 strings.  Beyond that I'm depending heavily on the onscreen cues that let you know which fret button you're holding down.  So for example I might miss the 10th fret and hit the 12th fret instead and have to slide my fingers back up the frets to get to the 10th fret before it's time to strum/pick the string.

Enough blogging.  I'm going to play some more now.  Hopefully I'll have more accomplishments to report soon.