Smashing Pumpkins – Disarm (Bass in Rocksmith)

I’ve warned everyone that this blog is unpredictable and can contain just about anything. In the spirit of self-improvement, I’m tracking my improvement in several hobbies. A couple of those hobbies involve guitar and bass. I am a decent bassist, a marginal lead guitarist, and an absolutely wretched rhythm guitarist. Is that going to change for the better? I sure as hell hope so. I’m going to experiment with Rocksmith (music learning software) for an extended period of time and see if it works successfully as a learning tool.

Overview

Having knocked out Blue Christmas (an incredibly slow-paced song) on bass, I started putting together a rank-order of Rocksmith songs from easiest to hardest. The question of “what’s an easy song to play?” was a popular query during this game’s heyday. The answer is pretty nebulous, as not everyone finds every musical concept as hard or easy. I, for example, I just crappy as hell at chord changes, whether open or barre. Others may find that they have more trouble with solos. It’s just what it is. Anyway,

Song Review

I love Smashing Pumpkins. Not my favorite song and not on my favorite album, admittedly. Those trophies go to Tonight, Tonight and Mellon Collie. Disarm is passable for the occasional listen, though, but it’s just too slow for me. Points to Mr. Corgan for bravery in using the violin.

Actually, scratch that… reading the lyrics again, this song is much better than passable. Just changed my mind on the fly. Solid tune.

Bass Track Review

As stated above, this might be considered one of the easiest songs in the game. The image illustrates that the bass portion of the song doesn’t even kick in until the halfway point. That leaves, what, maybe two minutes for the average player to alternate three or four root notes on two strings? That’s pretty manageable for the neophyte.

I probably could have gotten 100%, but I ended up playing finger-style instead of using a pick, and a few notes weren’t properly picked up. Oh well, 97.7% is as good as learned. Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the “EXCELLENT PERFORMANCE!”

How Did I Learn It?

It’s just root notes. There was little to no preparation. I intentionally picked this song as one of my first ones in this challenge too, as I knew the dynamic difficulty that Rocksmith scores this track is one of the lowest in the game.

I played this song on my Epiphone Thunderbird as opposed to my Fender Jazz simply because it felt like a T-Bird song. Interestingly enough, upon closer review, original bassist Darcy Wretzky seems to prefer Fenders. I wouldn’t have guessed.

The Details

Played on: Epiphone Thunderbird
Difficulty: Easy
Approx hours to learn: 0
My final accuracy score on Rocksmith: 97%