Creating a Rocksmith CDLC

Rocksmith is a great and fun way to learn how to play guitar and/or bass. That said, the repertoire of official songs (whether built-in or for purchase) has always necessarily been limited.

Enter CustomsForge—a user community dedicated to helping each other out with Rocksmith issues, and, for our purposes more importantly, increasing the pool of songs available through the custom DLC^[1]‘DLC’ stands for ‘downloadable content’ and is either ODLC (‘original’ downloadable content, i.e., for purchase) or CDLC (‘custom’ downloadable content, made available by their … Continue reading (CDLC) process.

There are a number of tutorials and help topics on the CustomsForge site itself, but I thought it might be helpful to provide a step-by-step walkthrough of the process. Originally, I had planned to use my work on Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds for the purpose, but as that’s the CDLC I cut my teeth on and providing live snippets is difficult, I thought I’d use my second CDLC project instead: The Animals’ ‘Sky Pilot’!

Here are the basic steps in my workflow (click on the links):

1. Acquire a good quality recording of the song in question
2. Obtain or craft proper scores for the desired tracks
3. Laying out the tempo map
4. Assembling the project
5. Building the CDLC
6. Testing and debugging
7. Publishing on CustomsForge.

I’ll be sure to let you know of alternative procedures as they arise!