The Road to 20k hours of playtime on Rocksmith 2014 remastered.

Welcome everyone to my blog,

My name is Matthew, I live in Austin, Tx. and I am hooked hopelessly on Ubisoft San Francisco's Rocksmith 2014 game. The game term is used very lightly as this is a tutor for playing a real "not a plastic" guitar. It won't teach you enough to play in a band, that requires learning music theory and other items that are not included in the game but are easily enough learned through books. 

So, why the 20,000 hour standard? Well, the rule of 10,000 hours is tossed around on the Rocksmith forums often enough and even though it's contested in certain circles, it's at least a benchmark, a target to hit, a goal to strive for. At the age of 41, some might say that it's an unrealistic goal and if I weren't unable to have a job due to a horrendous back I wouldn't try for this. However, this is one of those times when I'm going to try to push this out as hard as I am able simply because of the amount of free time that I have due to this back problem.

How am I going to go about documenting this? For most, in this age, it would be documented via youtube but since I do not as of yet know how to utilize that tool and I'm better at working with words that are written rather than with speaking as I have a bad stutter. For the time being, I'll be taking two photos on days that I practice: One at the start, one when I'm done for the day. I'll be recording which songs/lessons/times I spend on guitarcade and providing photographic evidence of such to document. If I feel that there are any personal feelings or thoughts I'll be posting/sharing those as well. This is as much for me as it is for you.

As for the gear that I'm using? Well, it's as follows

Best choice (wal mart) Stratocaster knockoff

Irin (ebay) p-bass knockoff

Lagrima (ebay) acoustic/electric

Maestro by Gibson SG

Glarry(ebay) Ibanez rg knockoff

Glarry(ebay) b.c.rich style knockoff

I use thick picks (light green) from Ernie Ball

My strings are GHS boomer 9's

When it comes to my selection of gear, the reviewer that I use is a youtuber that is very succinct, to the point and probably one of my all time favorites simply because he's not afraid to do reviews for cheap gear so if he's reviewed it, it's probably on my watchlist and on the way to being purchased. My youtuber may be found here if you're looking for gear on a budget, this is your guy.

On days that I do not practice on the xbox one, I will try to read the books and post what I've learned, if I'm out of town, I do have rocksmith on my laptop and that will be specified on days that I play it which will not be often due to me being out of town/state/country. It's just easier to load up the laptop than to go through my entertainment center and untangle the spaghetti cords that connect the xbox to the television.

Ultimately, I'm going to attempt to document everything I can in as much detail as possible, so expect daily updates for the most part. So, why 20k hours when ten will do? Because of this:

I came across this useful chart at this webpage and when reading the Summary and the amount of time required to hit that mark, I only had one thought "Challenge accepted". 

So, that's my story. I'm pushing through to twenty thousand hours. I'm doing this at 41 and 1/2 years of age. I'm not being sponsored, I'm not being endorsed, and no one asked me to do this. At my age, with the health conditions I'm facing, this is going to be one HELL of a ride. So let's rev it up and see how far this ride goes. So for me, it's 20,000 hours or death. 

One quick note though, I'm at the time of this writing 11 hours away from 365 hours. That's 1 year of practicing 1 hour daily. So why did I wait so long? Largely to see if I could stick to it and because I had a VERY chaotic year and it seemed to me as a good point at which to start and make this push.

Ubisoft S.F. if you're reading this, thank you for this game. I wouldn't know what else to do with myself without it. When your back goes out, everything goes to hell and doing something as simple as even tying your shoes becomes torture. On some days, even picking up my guitar by the neck sucks ass.