What Happened: 'Gold on the Ceiling' by The Black Keys

By Brian Adam McCune

Part of a Notetracker’s job is determining whether the tuning and musical content of a song will be supported by the game. As proud as we were of we were of the original Rocksmith, it did have limitations. Back in those days, we only supported E Standard or Drop D tunings. There was no bass guitar support, and perhaps most relevant to this BackTrack, the game did not support tone switching. As a result, we had to be very careful to pick music that would actually work under those constraints, and the only people on staff who could make an authoritative assessment were the Notetrackers.

In 2011, we were approached with the opportunity to release music from The Black Keys' still-unreleased album El Camino. Normally, we would get previews of new content via watermarked audio files or secret link streams, but in this case, the label was keeping a tight lid on distribution, so we were invited to go to them. Matt Montgomery and I jumped at the opportunity and spent Halloween 2011 in southern California listening to El Camino in its entirety—twice!—alone in a conference room with nothing but a guitar and some light snacks, taking notes the entire time.

We immediately loved “Lonely Boy” and wished we could use it as DLC, but not being able to emulate that octave dip in the song’s main hook would make for a less-than-ideal experience, so we had to pass.

“Gold on the Ceiling” was the next standout track, which we were relieved to find was in Drop D tuning. With its heavy blues shuffle and grooving single-note pentatonic riff, I was convinced that this would be great for Rocksmith and that it was going to be a hit—and boy, was it ever! At the risk of falling into hipster cliché, I say with some pride that Rocksmith launched this song before it was cool. The single debuted in February 2012 and went on to be certified Gold in the US, Australia, and Canada. By the way, if you're wondering why we left out the brief clean guitar outro in "Gold on the Ceiling," it was because without a tone switch, the distorted tone from the track completely buried the master audio, making it feel like a mistake. We had to make a lot of tough calls like that in those days.

We also picked the last track on the album, “Mind Eraser," not because we thought it would be a hit, but because it was so approachable for beginning guitarists. There are always new musicians out there looking for confidence boosters, and nothing provides that like being able to play a complete riff just like you hear it on the record. We were also starting to consider bass support, and Matt and I both loved the bass in "Mind Eraser."

Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys playing live at SXSW in 2010

Looking back on this experience feels nostalgic, but also shows me how much Rocksmith has evolved between our original Black Keys Song Pack (which was just the sixth DLC release!) and the second. We hope you feel you’ve come a long way, too.

Brian Adam McCune joined the Rocksmith team in 2010 and became the Lead Notetracker in 2012. He holds a Master’s degree in composition, and is active as a composer, arranger, orchestrator, percussionist, and educator.

"Blackkeys022011.jpg" by Music54 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

"Black Keys at MOG" by Kara E. Murphy is licensed under CC BY 2.0