TabBook use and Rocksmith

TheQwertiest

New Metal Member
Mar 20, 2015
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Prototype... Just when I thought that good music was over and done, I found the band that quickly became my favorite! Just listen to those overlapping guitar riffs, or those beautiful speed solos, or the always perfectly controlled vocals! The art at it's finest! And it's one hell of a ride playing the songs too (aside from the fact that I don't have a 7-string T_T)!

Anyways, what I wanted to say is - thanks, guys, and continue being epic!


Now onto the question mentioned in the topic name:
(It's a bit touchy topic and may come a little offensive to the band, but that is not my intention in the slightest)

You may or may not know, but there is a game called Rocksmith. One of it key features is that it allows to play guitar tabs (packed as game songs files), but in more comfortable (for novice guitarists) way and it has, well, game elements as well, which also helps. Here is an example of the game process:

So, all the songs in the game are sold separately, but sadly there are no Prototype songs (yet?). Thankfully, through some hacking it became possible to add custom, user-made songs to the game, which created a massive community for supporting those customs (http://customsforge.com/).

I wanted to share Prototype's awesomeness with the community and, seeing that no one made any Prototype customs yet, decided to change that. Since internet tabs usually suck and picking notes by ear is akin to guessing game, I went to the official tabs book.

So, the main question, or actually the request of mine is: could you permit me the use of the tabs from the Official Tabs Book to make those customs?

PS: I dunno if it needs to be mentioned, but I will receive no monetary or commercial gain from these customs, and if your songs get published in Rocksmith, all the customs of these songs will be immediately pulled out.
 
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First off, thanks for your compliments on our music. It's always great to hear when someone discovers it and enjoys it so much. Thanks also for buying the Prototype Guitar Collection TAB book. I spent many, many hours/days/months on it and I appreciate your support!

Regarding your question about Rocksmith, we have not been approached to submit any of our music for licensing in the game. We were fortunate to be a part of the Guitar Hero III game and to have some of our songs available for Rock Band as well. It's really great that there's a community of Rocksmith players interested in adding their favorite songs to the game and we appreciate you asking us about including Prototype songs as some of your custom additions to the game. As long as you're not profiting from these custom tracks (and the creators of Rocksmith are not profiting from it) we have no problem with you using the official Prototype tabs to make custom Rocksmith tracks. I would request a couple of small favors in return...

First, please do not publish any PDF or ascii versions of the tabs anywhere. As you can imagine, I went to great lengths to transcribe and notate these songs and am hoping to direct people to the Amazon Kindle versions which are available for what I think is a very low and reasonable cost of $1 per song tab.

Second, if there is a way for you to link to my Amazon Author page (in order to advertise the tab book) in whatever description you make for the custom Prototype tracks I would really appreciate it. The link is www.amazon.com/author/kragen. That way, anyone who wants to buy the tabs and play them on a guitar outside of Rocksmith knows where to get them.

Thirdly, if there is a way for you to link to the Prototype album on iTunes (for the album that each song you use appears on) in your Rocksmith custom description, we would also really appreciate it. The link for Catalyst is https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/catalyst/id551716507, the link for Continuum is https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/continuum/id164175207 and the link for Trinity is https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/trinity/id345467255.

Lastly, since you seem to enjoy the tab book it would be great if you could write a review on Amazon for it. I don't have any reviews at this point and would love to get some positive feedback up there for the book (or whichever of the smaller, album focused "mini-books" you may have bought).

I think these are pretty fair requests in order to use the songs tabs for your Rocksmith custom files. Let me know what you think. :)

Cheers,
 
Thanks for the permission and a quick reply =)

I consulted customsforge.com admins about the links to amazon\itunes and they are okay with that as long as I do not profit from it. Band itself is not allowed to post it's songs as customs with links to the shop though :heh
And I'll put the review on TabBook sometime later this week as well :)
Also it goes without saying that I won't post tabs from the SongBook on the web...