Rock Band 3 - Lessons (Part 2)

Figure 1: Lesson Description and Progress

The guitar lessons in Rock Band 3 seem fair enough.  Lessons are separated into small easy to accomplish "exercises" (for lack of a better word).  For example the lesson in figure 1 has three exercises as you can tell by looking under "Overall Progress" in the lower left.  When you first start a lesson all the blocks under "Overall Progress" will be darkened.  As you progress through the lesson they will be shaded green.

Figure 2: Useful Lesson Description

In some lessons such as the one in figure 2 the exercise description will be used to try to educate you on music terminology.  I think the concept of teaching more than just muscle memory is a good idea, but they didn't really follow through with the idea which is annoying at times.

Sometimes they mention music/guitar terminology as if you already know what they're talking about.  It's as if they edited out the lesson/exercise that was supposed to tell you about that terminology.

For example in figure 1 above it references "fifth position" but I hadn't seen anything thus far that explains what "fifth position" is.  A Google search revealed the answer, but who wants to go search Google in the middle of your lessons?  Why should you need to?  I chose the option to "Learn an Instrument" and it never told me to make sure I had a book on music theory handy.

To make matters worse, not only are the lesson introductions/descriptions incomplete, but it seems like they may even be inaccurate at times.  Take the same lesson in figure 1 again.  It tells you to keep your hand in fifth position for the open E and play the E at the seventh fret with your ring finger.  What it doesn't tell you is how you're supposed to reach the ninth fret one beat later.

I assume you're supposed to stay in fifth position since it doesn't tell you otherwise.  But that means my little finger is on the eighth fret.  Not the ninth.  Am I supposed to be stretching my little finger out to get to the ninth fret?  Is learning to stretch my finger out part of this exercise?  If so, why didn't they justify their seemingly odd suggestion by saying so?

Fortunately I'm not the only one who had a problem with this lesson.  So, when I did my Google search for "fifth position" I also found a better way to play the lesson which involved moving to seventh position.  But seriously... when you make a game that has such poor instructions that people are forming their own support forums to figure out how to make sense of them ... well ... let's just say you've got some room for improvement. :)

Here's another example of incomplete instructions.  In figure 3 below you'll notice it says you should use three fingers to play the chords.  But in figure 4 which is from the same lesson you'll see that it's clearly telling you to barre the fret with one finger.

Figure 3: Lesson Description

Figure 4: Note/Chord Help - Barre the Strings

In their defense the next chord you play does show three fingers.  But it's not like they were out of room in the description.  Why not go into a little more detail for the sake of clarity?

I think that about sums it up for describing the hardware and software.  In the upcoming entries I'll start documenting my actual progress through the game/lessons and my perception on how much help it has been in learning how to play a real guitar.