Now that Rock Band is once again available on store shelves, a ton of new people are joining the fun and living out fantasies (or nightmares) of being a rock god. For quite a few people, Rock Band is their first exposure to rhythm-based games and as such, they now get to spend the next several months trying to get better. I first started playing these kind of games with the original Guitar Hero and have played every iteration since, slowly building up my repertoire of finger-moves to the point where I can get through any song on Expert.

It wasn't an easy learning process, especially having no formal background in music, so all of my evolution was based on trial-and-error. Fortunately for you, I can now offer some guidance that will cut some considerable time from your own learning process and hopefully inject some good habits in place of bad.

One Finger

If I had known this earlier I would have advanced a lot faster than I did in terms of skill settings, but I can at least share this knowledge with you:

Set the game on Easy and pick a simple song. Force yourself to play the song with nothing more than your index finger. This means you're going to have to move your index finger up and down the neck of the guitar in order to hit the proper notes and yes, it's probably going to feel very strange. Obviously, you'll want to hit chord notes in the normal way, but for individual notes, only use the index finger.

The reason this is good practice is that it will get you comfortable in navigating the neck of the guitar, as well as serving the purpose of calibrating your finger placement. What you'll find by doing this is that a lot of songs can actually be played with a single finger instead of trying to coordinate four digits, especially the notoriously weak pinky. Once you get comfortable with this you'll also discover that you really don't need your pinky any more and it should only be used for special circumstances where you basically have no choice.

One Finger Slide

Here's the situation: the song in question is throwing normal notes at you but suddenly, here comes a row of diagonals that will require a special trick. Now most people probably handle these diagonals like I did, which is to hopefully coordinate your four fingers in a perfect rhythm, something that seldom, if ever, actually works. 9 times out of 10 you'll blow it, usually hitting the first note in the chain but messing up everything else.

This brings us to the One Finger Slide, the most important maneuver you can learn. You'll know when you can do one of these moves because the first note in the chain will be wider than all the notes following it. This is your cue to position your index finger over the first big note, strum it, and then slide your finger across the rest of the buttons (without strumming). If your timing is good then you'll hit every note using nothing more than a single finger.