All songs with difficulty properly sorted

[Youri]

Every now and then someone comes along ask what the easy songs for a beginner are. Usually the responses don't get much further than some of the songs in the core game.

First a disclaimer. Song difficulty is personal. You might be good at one technique and bad at another, while the person next to you has this exactly the other way around. Also being motivated to play a song you really like might make it feel a lot easier. No automated calculation of difficulty really works for everyone.

That being said, the default difficulty sort in RS2014 does a pretty bad job. In fact, it even makes the mistake of not listing the alt/bonus arrangements individually, because there are actually a lot of easier versions of songs that remain hidden for a lot of people.

Using the RS Toolkit to extract songs as xml files, I've written a program that analyses all songs. It takes pretty much everything in account: techniques, speed, timings, finger spread, shifting, chords.

Here's the sheet with the result:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sk9HR6sb-YYQ4fE7RXtUG-t8Gqyl1PhXtJhsOpi3G0w

[ChrisCage78]

Nice, thanks for that!
You should share it on rocksmith's reddit too if you haven't.

I'm surprised some songs are easier than Jackson 5 - I Want You Back (Rhythm) when it's one chord repeated for the whole song

[Youri]

The algorithm takes repeatedly doing the same thing into account already. However, even though the song you mention has only one chord, you need to play it both normal and muted. Therefor, it's not exactly the same thing. It also considers chords with fingers 3 frets apart a bit harder and the song has some faster strumming patterns compared to other songs with comparable difficulty.

It is probably the easiest to get 100% in, but that's only because RS2014 doesn't check the frethand muting techniques or strumming too often.

In any case, if you want to learn an easy song I would not focus on just the top song, but instead focus on the top 10 or even top 20.


I don't have a reddit account, but feel free to link to this topic.

[KellyR]

I think this proves (To me at least) that difficulty is subjective. Like, on bass--I can't really comment on the guitar scores--I find Green Day's Boulevard of Broken Dreams [63 difficulty score] easy, and have for some time, and I've been able to play Tom Petty's Learning To Fly [53] and I Won't Back Down [57] after just a few weeks to a couple months of playing bass. And My Chemical Romance's I'm Not Okay (I Promise) [49] is easy enough for me that I don't even worry about my score when I play it, just how it sounds. Yet Green Day's Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) [20] is hard for me. As is Tom Petty's Good Enough [35]. Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars is so completely trivial that it was the first thing I could play, but it's rated at [46]. And so on.