Helpful Tips for Guitarcade

[AihaLoveleaf]

First of all if you're reading this: Congratulations, you have not been clickbaited by the lack of a question mark in the thread title. I'm here to drop some advice, rather than the other way around of asking for it. Hopefully most of you reading this thread will be able to make use of the knowledge here to finally get those frustrating Guitarcade trophies out of your life, if you're still stuck with playing and completing Rocksmith in 2022 and onward.

 

The biggest tip and the reason I created this thread is related to pause abuse. Pausing is nothing new and is recommended in every trophy guide for the game. The problem arises when it comes time to actually pause, as you have to completely separate yourself from the guitar to hopefully hit the pause button in time. This can be incredibly difficult or nearly impossible to do in a timely manner in some of the more hectic minigames on the list. Not everybody has a second person to help pause the game for them, so for those like me in the same boat, I have your solution: A fight stick.

 

Setting your fight stick on the floor allows you to make use of what I like to call the cheese pedal. This allows you to keep your hands fully occupied with your guitar, while allowing your foot to handle pausing duties. Basically, every time you need to pause, you simply step on the pause button by poking it with your toe. To illustrate, here's a picture of the fight stick I'm using: 

 

 

As long as your fight stick has an easy to press, and easy to reach pause button, it will work. Even other types of arcade controllers should work, as long as you can reliably step on the pause button. Get creative, and see what you have handy for pause duties.

 

While I'm here, I'll also talk about how I handled each Guitarcade game. If you're like me, you might be desperate for helpful advice to get through these minigames, so hopefully something here can help out. All Guitarcade games listed below were played with Emulated Bass, except for Dawn of the Chordead, which must be played with standard Electric Guitar.

 

Ducks

One of the easiest games on the list. Simple pause abuse will get you through this. Pause while you find and fret your note, then unpause to pluck the string. Where most people run into problems with Ducks and Super Ducks is when the game decides to give you ducks on Fret 20. Most of the time the game janks out and decides not to register your input, leading to lost health and a dropped combo. I was able to remedy this for the most part by changing my strings and lowering the bridge on my guitar. Since I have a wraparound bridge, I can't do too much for my intonation beyond that. If you're able to adjust intonation for each string, you're in luck. If you can't fix Fret 20 no matter what you do, it's fine, because the game gives you your health back as you successfully blast ducks on other frets.

 

Super Ducks

The same advice from Ducks applies here, but now you have more strings to deal with. Make sure you're using bass guitar so there's less strings to manage.

 

Scale Runner

This was the most difficult minigame for me. The pause trick using the fight stick really shines here, as the game moves so quickly once you've reached max speed that it can be incredibly difficult to reach the pause button in time on a standard controller. In Scale Runner, you need to reach a combined total of 50,000,000 points among 11 scales, so you want to be in the ballpark of 4.5-5m points per scale to safely reach the mark.

 

If you're a beginner like me and have not actually practiced your scales yet, don't worry about playing the scales with correct fingering. This is how I approached each round:

• I pause the game and set my finger in the string containing the upcoming notes. I read ahead the playing field to get an idea of what notes I'm going to be playing after I unpause 
• After I unpause, I input the next 2-3 notes in the scale before pausing again. Sometimes the game will extend part of the scale for several notes, an example being the repeating fret 5 and 7 on the red string. If I see that coming, I'll stay unpaused and play it out until the next string is coming
• Pause the game again. Set my finger on the next string to be played and repeat the process again

 

Besides that, favor playing slow and accurate, rather than fast and frantic. Even at max speed, the game gives you enough time to ready your finger and pluck the note properly. You'll see what I mean once you're there. 

 

Harmonically Challenged

Another fairly easy one. The cheese trick here is to just play the notes on fret 19, rather than taking your chances on the game's glitchy recognition of harmonics. The game will always build upon the notes given previously. Meaning your game might start with Yellow, and then Yellow/Blue, and then Yellow/Blue/Orange and so on. It took me up to around twelve notes in a row to finally hit the score requirement. Pausing and writing down the pattern helps. Don't rush when playing the notes. Even though the bomb looks like it's going to blow up, you have plenty of time to fret 19 on the correct note and play.

 

Big Swing Baseball

Big Swing Baseball sucks. This one had me wanting to use the guitar as a baseball bat and swing right into the TV. The idea here is that you bend the correct note on the correct string in order to swing your bat and hit the incoming baseball. You really want to do your best here to hit as many balls as you can in a row, as big multipliers result in massive points when you finally hit a Home Run or Grand Slam while the bases are loaded. 

 

The trick to getting Big Swing Baseball right is to understand the timing. When the pitcher throws the ball, a set of four beeps will play. You will be playing your note on the fourth beep, in order to swing the bat in time. This means you should be in a rhythm of Beep, Beep, Beep, PLAY! This means that your played note should audibly fill in as the fourth beep. You'll get a feel for the right timing as you fiddle around and retry the game a bit.

 

The other trick to Big Swing Baseball is finding what works for you to create the bent note that the game is looking for. Just like with Harmonics, Rocksmith's recognition of bends is pretty crappy, so you'll likely have to cheese it if you want enough consistency to rack up a multiplier. This can be handled in several ways. Hammer-ons and slides both work great here. You can go 1 or 2 frets higher depending on the size of the bend and what the game recognizes best from your guitar. Pre-bending also works, but I've found it to jank out on me enough times that I stopped relying on it. The easiest solution is probably to play the bent note directly, but as a beginner I'm not smart enough to know how bent notes translate on the fretboard, but it works for the advanced players out there.

 

Another thing to note is that not every note is going to be bent. This took me forever to notice and held me back from getting the trophy earlier than I could have. If the game isn't visually bending the string, then just play it normally without bending.

 

Super Slider

Super Slider also sucks. Mostly because of Rocksmith's janky slide detection, and partially because of the bit of RNG involved in getting a good or bad run. What Rocksmith loves to do is to start spazzing out once you've slid the block due to feedback from the guitar, which means you'll sometimes end up with your block randomly shifting to the wrong spot. To combat this, I slide the block where I want it to go and then quickly pause the game so that I can mute my strings. I specifically go in that order of pausing and then muting, because I found that muting first sometimes sends bad input to the game, such as a strum to drop the block early. 

 

Other than that, I'd recommend you to play around with the game a bit, and watch some runs on YouTube to get an idea of what works. Generally, playing for combos in the middle is your best bet. Try to play a few steps ahead of the game and look for combos that are most likely to trigger field-clearing chains.

 

Quick Pick Dash

Pause abuse makes this trivial. As soon as the strings change, pause and resituate yourself before continuing. The multiplier builds up quickly here and you'll be at 5,000,000 in no time. I got to 30,000,000 points before I got bored and quit, which only took a couple of minutes to reach after hitting 5m.

 

Dawn of the Chordead

Doing this minigame properly is a nightmare for beginner players. Not only are you likely to see a ton of chords you may not have learned yet, but the game quickly devolves into nothing but barre chords, which are both tricky to play and janky in recognition by the game itself. As of writing this post, I only have about 7 or 8 chords practiced to memory, so I had to employ some cheese to get through this one. Simply fret and play the thinnest strings on your guitar. This means that you ignore whatever is happening with the rest of the chord and play whatever numbers correspond to Orange, Green and Purple. The game will register those three strings as having played the entire chord, and turns the frenzy of barre chords in your favor, by giving you very simple chord shapes to play on the fretboard.

 

That's all I've got to share. Hopefully this helps anybody out there that's ready to put this game behind them. Good luck.

Edited January 4, 2022 by AihaLoveleaf
Fixed typo

[kindajustin]

I remember talking to you about this almost a year ago at this point. I'm not surprised at all to see that you not only nailed every single trophy in the game, but developed your own cheese routes to accomplish it. It ain't a cheese if you did the work to discover it Aiha, you're an apex trophy hunter ?

Edited January 5, 2022 by kindajustin

[AihaLoveleaf]

10 minutes ago, kindajustin said:

I remember talking to you about this almost a year ago at this point. I'm not surprised at all to see that you not only nailed every single trophy in the game, but developed your own cheese routes to accomplish it. *It ain't a cheese if you did the work to discover it* Aiha, you're an apex trophy hunter

Thank you Justin! I appreciate the kind words. ? Guitarcade was definitely something I needed to employ every trick in the book for, especially considering that I was really burning to finally play some new games. Guitar is awesome, so hopefully people using this thread and myself will eventually learn to handle complex scales and fretboard navigation properly, but it is comforting to know I can do all of that on my own time without the crushing weight of those trophies on top of me. ?

[DimSmoke]

Great tips!

 

I have a question about scales runner. I'm trying to do this a bit at a time on the days I play, but I noticed recently that scores I get on the scales get reset when I exit the game! On the scale selection menu it shows your highest score for each scale you've played this session, but when you quit these go back to zero. On the leaderboard it has the combined total score from the scales you've played, but then recently this also went back to 1 scale and most recent score for me, I.e. also losing the other scores I had achieved.

 

Does anyone know if the game saves your scores somewhere locally, or if the scores are lost does this trophy need to be achieved in 1 play session? If so, this will be much harder for me than taking a few days to get a good score on each scale.

[AihaLoveleaf]

7 hours ago, DimSmoke said:

Great tips!

 

I have a question about scales runner. I'm trying to do this a bit at a time on the days I play, but I noticed recently that scores I get on the scales get reset when I exit the game! On the scale selection menu it shows your highest score for each scale you've played this session, but when you quit these go back to zero. On the leaderboard it has the combined total score from the scales you've played, but then recently this also went back to 1 scale and most recent score for me, I.e. also losing the other scores I had achieved.

 

Does anyone know if the game saves your scores somewhere locally, or if the scores are lost does this trophy need to be achieved in 1 play session? If so, this will be much harder for me than taking a few days to get a good score on each scale.

The story I've heard is that a patch released for Rocksmith at some point that messed up Scale Runner, and made it impossible to hold your progress between sessions. You could possibly try to downgrade the game, but I didn't want to worry about my save file's compatibility or having to unlock the game again - so I suffered it out through a roughly 4.5 hour session, which was just as stressful as it sounds. 

 

I'm not sure what your overall level with the guitar is, so consider this advice pointed to readers in general: if anybody is feeling like they're not quite at the point of being able to get 4-4.5m points per scale yet—try coming back to it after grinding Master songs and conquering some of the other Guitarcade games. I had basically never touched a guitar before really laying in to the Rocksmith trophy list, so the skill level needed to cheese Scale Runner isn't that high, but I did need the experience I gained beforehand, before making a serious attempt for Scales Owned.

[DimSmoke]

On 29/07/2023 at 11:46 PM, AihaLoveleaf said:

I suffered it out through a roughly 4.5 hour session, which was just as stressful as it sounds

 

Thanks very much for your advice, I followed this and was able to beat it in a long session like you. The last 2 scales gave me a lot of trouble, I couldn't really get much over 3 mil on each, but I was able to hit around 5-6 mil in a couple of the simpler ones and made up the points that way. Thanks again!

[Shlomo_Sheckles]

What a difficult task. I hope the 2014 version isn't this difficult or I'll definitely skip it.
Some take away points for guitarcade is if you're struggling and swearing up and down you hit correct notes but they're not registering for you then re-tune your guitar. Do not trust the built in tuner for this game I had to re-tune twice doing scale runner and re-tune again after about 30 minutes doing baseball.
Scale runner is the longest grind since you have to do all 11 modes in a single sitting or get over 50m from 10 or less scales (good luck). I didn't have a fight stick so I had to rely on a controller to pause and it was too difficult to hit with my toe. Scale runner moves too fast to attempt pausing with a regular controller.
Ducks and super ducks was easy enough doing pause trick with a regular controller.
Big Swing baseball was impossible until I stopped bending and started doing hammer-ons instead. Usually a whole step hammer-on or a whole step and a half hammer on (2 to 3 notes) further down from the root note. You can do pause trick with baseball, but half the time you don't see exactly what string it is. The best time to pause is when you can see what fret will be next, it'll play a tone and you can figure out which of the 4 strings it'll be from the tone. That way you have a little bit of time to hear the beeps for the rhythm.

One last thing the chord minigame was pretty tough as well even doing pause trick since a lot of the screen is obscured when you pause the game. Particularly the fingering posistions on the left hand side gets obscured. I ended up coping some of the later on chords by screen shotting capture footage then trimming them out into MS-paint. Something kinda like this. It's not a complete list however, but you can see just enough of the fret-board in the mini-game to tell which configuration of the chord you're playing is. *I don't know how to upload the image. I tried 2 different websites to upload the image to, but it doesn't seem to post here correctly. https://imgur.com/a/L1D618Z

Edited January 23 by Shlomo_Sheckles