How the Rocksmith 2014 video game helped me (and my kids) get better at playing guitar

A couple of years back, I decided to pick up the guitar again (after 20+ years) and see about getting good enough with it to play at our family reunions.

While looking at guitars and deciding on which books to pick up to help me learn it, I stumbled across a program called Rocksmith 2014, which is a video game that lets you plug your guitar into your computer (via a custom usb cable) and then play along with a fairly large selection of songs at your current level of ability, making them harder by introducing more and more of a song as you get better at it.

Here is a quick introduction to the program for those wanting to know more about it than I talk about below.

What Rocksmith 2014 Does Not Do

While the game includes a set of tutorial exercises, there are two main things that it lacks:

1. Music Reading: If you want to be able to read sheet music, you will need to pick up a book or scour the internet. Myself, I used a second hand copy of Ernie Ball, how to play guitar for this.
2. Music Theory: Rocksmith doesn't get into music theory at all, so once you can start playing songs and decide you want to learn more about how music works, you'll need to learn that as well. Personally, I found the book Fretboard Theory to be great.

What Rocksmith 2014 Does Do

Flexibility and Fretboard Navigation

The main thing that rocksmith did for my playing was give me a fun way to practice playing guitar for long periods of time to build up my hand dexterity and get me used to moving all over the fretboard.

Not having the finger dexterity (or flexibility) to play different things can be a huge hurdle for the new guitar player and playing the same bit of sheet music over and over again can be both boring and frustrating (if you lack the ability to navigate the fretboard quickly and stretch your fingers out as much as needed).

With the large amount of good music available in the program (for lead guitar, rhythm guitar, and bass guitar), I found myself playing for hours at a time (and improving both the flexibility of my fingers and my ability to move around the fretboard quickly) without any of the monotony that I had been running into before I started using Rocksmith.

Song Learning

While you can simply use the learn a song mode to start learning a song, you can also go into a special mode that lets you play sections of the song over and over and set the difficulty and speed to whatever you want (along with whether it should get harder or faster as you master sections).

This let me master songs such as Iron Maiden's Fear of the Dark fairly quickly. This isn't me, but here is how it looks for Fear of the Dark:

My oldest daughter improved quickly

My oldest daughter came out to visit (she was 12 and had just started learning to play guitar) and we spent some time playing together on Rocksmith, her playing lead and me playing rhythm.

While we didn't play a lot (a couple of hours every few days), by the time she got back to her guitar teacher, he noted that she had gotten amazingly better and started giving her all kinds of more interesting music to work on.

My 3rd daughter is learning quickly

These days, I mostly use it with my 3rd daughter (age 10 now) as she has become interested in the guitar and I picked her up a 3/4 size pink fender so she could play along with me. In just the past couple of weeks she has improved a lot and has been getting up in the mornings and using my old beat up Ernie Ball book to teach herself how to read music.

I highly recommend it

Whether you are just learning guitar or have a kid that is learning it (or Bass Guitar), I cannot recommend this program enough. It seriously takes the pain out of getting your finger dexterity built up and navigating the fretboard, two of the major issues most new guitar players run into.

Use it along with a guitar teacher, good music theory book, and simple book on reading notes and you will find yourself improving by leaps and bounds.

If you have any questions about using Rocksmith, please feel free to ask and I'll answer when I have time!