"This is an eight string guitar...."

Since hearing Sting say those words before launching into Bring On The Night live in at the Newcastle City Hall in 1979 (live on Radio 1 for those old enough to remember), I've been curious about eight string basses. Having played a 12 string acoustic guitar before, I appreciate what they might do, but have never played one. In 6 to 8 weeks (or however long Dean take to deliver an Edge 8), this will change :-)

150 Customs and counting!

I posted custom 150 this morning - "No Time This Time" by The Police, which completes Reggatta de Blanc on CustomsForge. Just a few left to do on Outlandos d'Amour and Zenyatta Mondatta now.

Tabbers with five string basses

Just because you have a nice, shiny 5 string bass, it doesn't mean that everyone else has one (although I do....). Don't create tabs for songs which are played on 4 string basses specifically for your 5 string. It's not big, and it's not clever.

60 Customs and counting....

I think I'm running out of steam now. There must be at least 30+ customs which I have in progress and need the Guitar Pro files correcting. Why post something on Ultimate Guitar.com if it's useless? (The answer is, if you post a tab, you get free lifetime membership....) Some of these will get looked at, others will be consigned to the Recycle Bin.

Christmas Wrapping is still causing me problems. I've got a really good looking tab but converting it into Guitar Pro is a headache. Maybe closer to December one of the other custom makers will put me out of my misery and upload it.

I really should concentrate more on playing as for the past two weeks, I've only been testing the customs I've made. I have a massive backlog of DLC and CDLC to get through. 

28 customs and counting!

I'm getting pretty good at this custom-producing lark now and just released my 28th track. My main disappointment though is the quality of tabs out there. I have at least 25 more customs half built, but they will never see the light of day unless I go in and manually change the tabs. What's the point of uploading a tab to the Internet if it's crap?

Why I only produce bass for Rocksmith Customs

The reason I am only producing bass parts for Rocksmith customs is that I can't play, and don't currently have, a guitar.

The tabs for songs available on the web are very hit and miss. Some are perfect reproductions, others build your hopes up until you're halfway through the custom creation process, and you realise that it would be easier to start from scratch.

Being a bass player, I can correct the flaws in any bass tabs, but if I were to include guitar parts, I'm 100% reliant on the guys at the Classic Rock Coalition on CustomsForge to test out my tabs. I'm really not keen on asking them to test a guitar part which could be utter rubbish - I don't want to waste their time. I'd rather concentrate on producing the best bass CDLC which I can.

This may sound selfish but on CustomsForge, there are many guitar-only customs which I'd love to play bass to. I've contacted a couple of the creators only to be told that they either may do it at some point or after uploading the custom, they were sick to death of the track.

There is a bass emulation mode on Rocksmith, so the guitarists don't really have an excuse to not supply the bass track for every custom. Bassists aren't so lucky unfortunately as there's no guitar emulation mode for bass.

Until I can get hold of a guitar, all my CDLC will be bass-only. I've been disappointed by some customs where the bass has been very poorly written - I don't want any guitarists to feel the same about my work.

18 Customs and counting...

I'm now up to 18 released custom tracks, which have been downloaded over 2,000 times in total. Adding guitar parts is still a problem (not having a guitar being the main problem!) and I've still got to get my head around adding lyrics and dynamic difficulty. 

The team at CustomsForge could not be more helpful though and are more than happy to help me fix my issues. Getting hold of decent tabs is the main issue. I see a tab for a song which I'd really like to turn into a custom, only to find that the tab might as well be for a completely different song.

As I've got the sheet music for all The Police songs, there'll be a few more of those published in the coming weeks, starting with the earlier, more frenetic stuff.