(Or Hugh, depending on what year we’re talking about.)
You can play bass in the single-player mode of Rock Band 2, but I usually stick with guitar instead. I think it’s force of habit from playing the older editions of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, where there was no option to play bass in the single-player mode. (Well, that and the character that I’m using in Rock Band 2 right now is one that I created specifically to look like Richie, right down to the cowboy hat and the double-neck guitar.)
Well, yesterday I decided to play some songs on the bass for something different. I haven’t really played much Rock Band or Guitar Hero lately–I had been spending a lot of time playing Fable or finishing up the Shivering Isles expansion pack for Oblivion. The problem is that if I don’t play for awhile, I lose the ability to play on Hard and have to work my way back up to it. I figured that switching to bass for awhile would change things up a bit without changing the difficulty level.
I figured that “Livin’ On a Prayer” would be a good track to start with. The guitar part isn’t particularly tough on that song. That turned out to be a very bad assumption to make. I based my assumption on the guitar part–which is actually mostly fingering along with the talkbox–and not on the bass in the song. To be perfectly honest, I never really paid much attention at all to the bass line in Prayer at all. That was a mistake.
The bass line to Prayer is the key to the whole song–something that I didn’t realize until I’d started. I usually gauge difficulty in Rock Band by how bad a particular song makes my arm hurt by the time it’s done. The bass part of Prayer definitely ranks up there on the list of tracks that can accomplish that.
In short, I would up with a whole new appreciation for what both Alec did and Hugh does when Bon Jovi plays this song by the time that I was done.
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