Woohoo, my Squier is in! Time to pick it up tonight and take a break from my Borderlands addiction to rock out (or, more likely, flail wildly at the strings not knowing what I'm doing!).
I will report back with impressions after I'm able to spend some time with it.
Woohoo, my Squier is in! Time to pick it up tonight and take a break from my Borderlands addiction to rock out (or, more likely, flail wildly at the strings not knowing what I'm doing!).
I will report back with impressions after I'm able to spend some time with it.
Awesome... I can't wait to hear more impressions of how it works. Let us know if the guitar is remotely "decent" as a real guitar. I'm concerned that it will be a piece of junk as a real guitar... Not that I expect it'd be anything "awesome" but i'm hoping it's at least reasonable
I was able to spend some time with the Squier Monday night. General impressions:
1. Wow, this thing is heavier than what I'm used to, but I expected that.
2. This is 1000-times more involved than a 5-button guitar (also expected).
3. Picking real strings on a real guitar while playing Rock Band is really cool.
4. Wrapping my head around the idea that the horizontal axis on the screen is now vertical movement of my hands between guitar strings is taking some time, but that will come.
5. The first technique problem that I ran into was that because my fingers are different lengths, I was tending to accidentally hold the wrong string when switching fingers. I'm sure that will be cured with practice as well.
6. In virtually no time, I was able to 3-star some of the easiest songs on easy pro guitar. However, things are really stripped down on easy; it's nowhere near playing all the notes (and there are no chords). Still, this is great as you can get somewhere starting from rock bottom in very little time, but I recognize I have a long way to go, both up the song difficulty ladder and up the difficulty settings ladder.
7. Being able to plug this into an amp and play outside of game (well, in my case, mess around with plucking some random strings) is also really cool. For the record, I got a Fender Mustang I amp to go with it.
Now for the bad part - the Squier that I got either seems to be maladjusted or flat-out defective. I'm having major issues with fret detection - it basically gets worse as I move down the neck and as I move down to the thinner strings. For example, the big E string works down to about fret 19, but the other strings don't really work past fret 12 (or worse). From what I've read on the RB forums, this is definitely not normal and my guitar is either defective or needs to be adjusted in some way. I'm going to contact support and see about getting this fixed. I think if I can get past this issue pro guitar will be a great experience, but having to deal with this right out of the gate (after waiting so long in the first place) is frustrating.
jdport - Given that I've never played a real guitar before, I doubt that I can provide any intelligent feedback on whether this is a "good" guitar or not, since I have nothing to compare it to.
Termie - if you want to play some Borderlands co-op sometime, I am game.
Your thinner strings may be hitting the frets, causing them to not ring true like on the lower frets. But you would also hear this on the amp so I'm not sure. Assuming the alan wrenches were included, you can try to raise the strings a bit. You do this by adjusting the saddles, which are the individual little pieces that hold the strings up on the bridge (the part that attaches the strings to the body of the guitar). If you look closely you should see 2 little screws on each saddle. If you turn those counter clockwise they should raise the saddle, thus keeping the strings a bit higher off of the neck so hopefully they don't hit other frets when you pluck them.
I'm not sure how the guitar detection works in the game though, so this might not even matter. It could all be in the neck and yours is broken which is too bad.
I was able to spend some time with the Squier Monday night. General impressions:
1. Wow, this thing is heavier than what I'm used to, but I expected that.
2. This is 1000-times more involved than a 5-button guitar (also expected).
3. Picking real strings on a real guitar while playing Rock Band is really cool.
4. Wrapping my head around the idea that the horizontal axis on the screen is now vertical movement of my hands between guitar strings is taking some time, but that will come.
5. The first technique problem that I ran into was that because my fingers are different lengths, I was tending to accidentally hold the wrong string when switching fingers. I'm sure that will be cured with practice as well.
6. In virtually no time, I was able to 3-star some of the easiest songs on easy pro guitar. However, things are really stripped down on easy; it's nowhere near playing all the notes (and there are no chords). Still, this is great as you can get somewhere starting from rock bottom in very little time, but I recognize I have a long way to go, both up the song difficulty ladder and up the difficulty settings ladder.
7. Being able to plug this into an amp and play outside of game (well, in my case, mess around with plucking some random strings) is also really cool. For the record, I got a Fender Mustang I amp to go with it.
Now for the bad part - the Squier that I got either seems to be maladjusted or flat-out defective. I'm having major issues with fret detection - it basically gets worse as I move down the neck and as I move down to the thinner strings. For example, the big E string works down to about fret 19, but the other strings don't really work past fret 12 (or worse). From what I've read on the RB forums, this is definitely not normal and my guitar is either defective or needs to be adjusted in some way. I'm going to contact support and see about getting this fixed. I think if I can get past this issue pro guitar will be a great experience, but having to deal with this right out of the gate (after waiting so long in the first place) is frustrating.
jdport - Given that I've never played a real guitar before, I doubt that I can provide any intelligent feedback on whether this is a "good" guitar or not, since I have nothing to compare it to.
Termie - if you want to play some Borderlands co-op sometime, I am game.
I'm assuming there is a rockband 3 song book out with full tab for all the songs so you can work on the songs without being in the game...
Finally a strategy guide that would be worth buying
Today we learn just how desperate things really are for the music game business, and also about the latest RBN artist.
Harmonix Continues Streamlining Business, Trades in Alex Rigopulos to GameStop
RBN Artist of the Month: April 2011 Lolita
:biggrin:
I tried some fruitless adjustments (it doesn't help that I know nothing about adjusting a real guitar beyond tuning), and then decided to bail and return it to BB since this doesn't seem to be a common problem. I had to reorder another one so I get to wait again.
But don't worry, I'm sure I'll be playing TTFaF on expert pro in another week or two.
OK, I have Squier #2! The good news is that the major fret detection problem I had with the first one is completely gone on this one. On the downside, I am having strum detection issues on some of the strings. But, based on my experiments so far, it appears this issue can be fixed by messing with the string height and/or pickup height. Still, it's kind of annoying to deal with since the strumming worked great on the first one right out of the box (of course over half the frets were hosed beyond repair on that one).
I guess the takeaway here is that even a non-defective Squier may require a bit of fiddling before it works optimally. I will report back after I'm able to spend more time with it.
I'm very tempted to pick up the pro guitar, only becuase i wanna learn guitar and i feel this maybe the best (atleast most fun) way to practise and get over the initial hump.
What do you guys think. I could also go with a pro-keyboard. I just wanna learn an instument. I could start with the keyboard.
The thing with the keyboard is you only use one hand. They need to break it out to different charts for the left and right hands. I know this is the first go around at keyboard but I feel the guitar is the better choice to learn. The guitar is not perfect either but it will give you the basics. I'd go with the guitar but at $320 that hard sell for me. I can get a nice used ovation for that price.
OK, I have Squier #2! The good news is that the major fret detection problem I had with the first one is completely gone on this one. On the downside, I am having strum detection issues on some of the strings. But, based on my experiments so far, it appears this issue can be fixed by messing with the string height and/or pickup height. Still, it's kind of annoying to deal with since the strumming worked great on the first one right out of the box (of course over half the frets were hosed beyond repair on that one).