Yellow Moon Band – Chimney (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
Continuing my bass guitar jaunt, I moved onto another easy one – Yellow Moon Band’s Chimney. This one gets a 5 out of 29 on the official Dynamic Difficulty score, which is about as low as you can go.
Song Review
Since the mid 2000s, I’ve picked up a lot of good bands and songs from rhythm games. For instance, JAWS, Gold Motel, and La Sera have entered my permanent distance running playlist. I never would have found those bands without Rocksmith.
This one isn’t really my thing, though. I get what the song is trying to do (a sort-of 70s rock throwback), but there’s nothing about it that really grabs me. I can see the technical merits to the guitar and the driving-sort of impulse to the song, but I wouldn’t even particularly like this song if it DID come out of that era. My interests from the music in that era veer more towards glam and metal…
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?
For 95% of the song, you’re just going to hang onto the first and third frets of the E and A strings (with the very occasional open note). You might have a little bit of trouble with the rhythm of hitting the strings throughout, but a brand new player shouldn’t have an issue getting >90% on the first try.
The Details
Played on: Epiphone Thunderbird
Difficulty: Easy
Approx hours to learn: 0
My final accuracy score on Rocksmith: 99%
