One of my favorite things to do is play my guitar. When I play, I usually play a video game from UbiSoft called Rocksmith.

This is not an ordinary video game, for starters it uses a real guitar. Essentially you plug your guitar in to the computer using a special “realtone” cable. This takes my analog guitar sound and turns it into a signal that the computer can read.

The game is very full featured, it has several ways to learn and play guitar and bass. The learn a song part is similar to the Guitar Hero presentation. There is a note highway that send down notes for you to play, if you play them all on time you are playing the song (lead or rhythm). The ingenious part of this, it uses a thing called dynamic difficulty. It will present a subset of the notes from that song to you the first time through. Depending how well you do with that it will start to give you more notes and based on your score it will continue to make it more difficult until you are playing the whole song. – A brilliant way to coach you through learning a song without having a real live teacher.

One of my favorite things about Rocksmith (RS) is the Downloadable Content (DLC) these are songs that have been arranged for RS by the UbiSoft engineers. They have created so many songs that it is hard to imagine that you wouldn’t find a song or two that you like.

I have been tinkering with the guitar for a long time, I have never had a teacher and worked on learning from books and videos. This software has allowed me to get back to enjoying the guitar way more than any of the other learning methods have. I play most evenings and enjoy the time to unwind and not think about anything but playing a few songs and having fun with my guitar(s).