Rocksmith+ Might Be the Most Fun Way to Learn to Play Guitar

ign.com:

Rocksmith has been around since 2011, beginning as an alternative to the five button rhythm guitar craze, set apart by the fact that it lets players use their own real six strings as the controller, turning the act of actually playing a guitar into a rhythm game. Over the years, it’s more been touted for its success as a guitar learning tool than an actual competitor to other rhythm games, and that’s really what Rocksmith+ leans into. Rocksmith+ is a subscription service that costs either $14.99 per month, $39.99 for three months, and $99.99 for a full year, and along with that cost comes a library of more than 5,000 songs, a comprehensive suite of lectures to teach you how to play guitar at just about every level, and a staggering amount of tools to help meet you at your level of guitar skill, and fine tune it from there.

And it all works! Having given it a test run for a few weeks, and coming in with just a handful of guitar lessons from back when I was a teenager and a few hours of messing around with previous Rocksmith iterations as my foundation, I certainly improved my knowledge of chords, increased my finger dexterity, and learned about proper guitar playing form.

I can’t speak for what Rocksmith+ will be worth to someone who already knows how to play guitar well, but for me, what really makes Rocksmith+ earn its subscription cost is its lesson plan. They’re broken up into four learning paths: Basics, intermediate lead guitar, intermediate rhythm guitar, and advanced, with each learning path packing a bunch of lessons that are punctuated with a practice track that puts your understanding of the lesson to the test. You’re challenged to get a score of 80% of notes hit at 100% speed in order to clear a lesson, which