Simple Minds – Don’t You Forget About Me (Bass in Rocksmith)
Now that we’re entering the depths of winter, I’ve been picking up my musical instruments more often. Not much else to do in the industrial Midwest when the temperatures dip below freezing nearly every day.
Overview
This wasn’t a particularly challenging song to master on bass, though it did have a 17/29 DD level on Rocksmith. DD level can be a deceptive measure of difficulty, though, particularly for bass. DD just sets the number and complexity of notes you get in a song; a full bass track may be fairly simple, yet have a lot of the same root notes over and over again.
Song Review
Good placement for this song in The Breakfast Club. This isn’t the best Simple Minds song, though… that award goes to Alive and Kicking. Seriously, go give Alive and Kicking a listen and you’re welcome. But Don’t You is still a great song, and Simple Minds is one of the unheralded masters of 80s pop.
Bono of U2 credited Simple Minds’ New Gold Dream with shifting U2’s sound and finding untold success on their future albums. Robert Christgau reviewed that album with an “[a]uteur Jim Kerr is Bowie sans stance, Ferry sans pop, Morrison sans rock and roll.” I think that review is overly cruel. Certainly, Kerr’s band didn’t have half the commercial lifespan of those other bands, but what mid-level bands deserve an unflattering comparison to Bowie, Roxy or the Doors?
Bono’s outright theft of Simple Minds’ sound is evidence enough of musical flattery, given U2’s meteoric rise on their stolen atmosphere.
Anyway, American Songwriter reveals that Don’t You’s basic groove is based on Fun Boy Three’s ska version of “Our Lips are Sealed.”
Taking a quick trip over to YouTube to listen to the song… woof, that rendition sucks. I am not even going to embed the song… it’s that bad. Sorry, The GoGo’s version is 1000x better. Do I hear the influence on Simple Minds, though? Not really.
Another factoid: Simple Minds didn’t write the song. Credit for the writing goes to writer and producer extraordinaire Keith Forsey, who also produced for Billy Idol and co-wrote the music for Flashdance. Interesting how a single person can make such an intense musical mark on a whole generation.
How Did I Learn It?
Like most of the bass tracks for this game, I just blew through it once. The song just has you playing root notes in a box, specifically the E and A strings over and over again. The relatively high difficulty of the song solely relates to the sheer number of notes coming your way throughout the song, but it’s far from impenetrable.
You just need to gain enough fretboard confidence to where you can avoid looking at your bass when you shift. You should be looking at the screen, and specifically looking a couple steps ahead on the note highway so you can anticipate string changes.
For a new player, this sort of thing is a big challenge. I’m rusty myself, and I’m not quite as confident on my Thunderbird as I am on my Fender Jazz, so I whiffed on a few shifts myself*. But it’s ultimately all a matter of playing regularly and with consistency.
* Different stringed instruments will have different scale lengths, fretboard widths, etc. The Thunderbird has a wider nut width near the headstock, which makes it more challenging sometimes to switch from one instrument to another. Think of it like typing on a new keyboard — the basic keys are still there, but you’re going to accidentally press the wrong key for a while, which your hands get accustomed to the next keyboard.
The Details
Played on: Epiphone Thunderbird
Difficulty: Easy/Medium
Approx hours to learn: 0
My final accuracy score on Rocksmith: 98%
