Lane Breakers

Charting Guitar (and from here on out Bass by implication) for Rock Band consists of creating a rough representation of the actual guitar part in the audio across the 5 button layout. The idea is to make it *feel* like you're playing a real guitar despite jamming out on a piece of plastic.

To start with, you'll want to have some experience playing the game yourself, preferably on Expert as you always wanna start with authoring the Expert chart. You can also look at how songs have been charted officially and in customs before for inspiration, though be aware that the standards for what constitutes a good chart keeps evolving over the years and is very different between games.

Lastly, you'll want to look into the basics of how a guitar is played and some very basic music theory before beginning. Also, make sure your song is tempomapped properly before you start charting, or you'll waste lots of time trying to fix that later.

:!:Will add pictures:!:

• Notes - Where you put the playable notes, Green being the lowest and Orange being the highest on the neck.
• Force HOPO On - Makes it so a note marked by it will always be a Ho/Po in-game, meaning you can play it without strumming it as long as you're keeping combo. Only allowed on Expert and Hard.
• Force HOPO Off - Makes it so a note marked by it will always be strummed no matter what. Only allowed on Expert and Hard.
• Solo Marker - Marks the duration of the note as a solo, meaning it will count your note-hit progress for the section and give you a bonus in-game.
• Overdrive - See its own page for detailed explanation
• BRE - See its own page for detailed explanation
• Tremolo - Creates a “strum lane” for the duration of it, used for parts with fast off-time strumming to help make it more playable. Use sparingly!
• Trill - Creates a “trill lane” for the duration of it, used for parts with quick shifting between two different notes that would be hard to play consistently otherwise. Use sparingly!

Some of these will be explained in greater detail later.

• Grid (A) - The note density when placing notes. In most cases its fine at 1/16th, but you might sometimes need to change it to 1/32th for faster songs.
• Grid (B) - Changes which rhythm the grid uses. Straight is the default. Triplet is often used in Blues, Swing is often used in Jazz, and Dotted is very rarely used at all.

:!:Will add pictures:!:

The hardest difficulty, and the part that should try and be as close as possible to the real song in terms of note density and rhythm. You want it to feel as close to playing the real thing as possible within the limitations of the game itself and the engine. Here are some of the basics to keep in mind:

• Think about the pitches - For a low-pitched note put it as Green, for a high-pitched note put it as Orange, as a very basic example.
• Consistency - To help emulate the feeling of playing a song, try to keep the way you author a part consistent for each repetition. For example if its charted as Red → Yellow → Blue, keep it as Red → Yellow → Blue for each repetition.
• Chords - Unlike a real guitar, we use 5 buttons laid out differently than the 6 strings of that. As thus, you'll want to chart chords using 2, 3 or 4 strings as 2 notes at the same time, and bigger chords that uses 4, 5 or 6 strings as 3 notes at the same time. Consistency also applies here, but can be fudged a bit if there is a lot of really fast chord patterns that would be impossible to play (for example in a Technical Death Metal track).
• Sustains - By increasing the note length to more than a 16th, it will create a visual tail after the note in-game, and the note need to be held down for the duration of it to get maximum score. As thus, you want to have a 16th gap between the end of a sustain and the next note for the sake of readability and to avoid a situation where optimal score is RNG, and in worst case audio cutting out awkwardly if using multitrack audio.
• Sustain length - You'll want to make sure the sustain is long enough to be realistically able to whammy it at least once or twice with the whammy bar on the guitar controller. As thus, don't add sustains to absolutely everything even if it might look more realistic, as it will make it a worse gameplay experience.
• Pitch over technique - You want to chart the way the song sounds rather than the exact technique of how it is played for the same reasons we can't chart cords entirely accurate; a real guitar with 6 strings is different from a 5 button controller. For example, if a song has a sweep that picks across different strings with different pitches without the guitarist moving their fretting hand, it should be charted as different notes and probably be Hammer-Ons rather than just a line of the same notes in your chart. This is not a guitar tutorial, its a guitar simulator.
• Wrapping - Since you can only represent 5 notes at once, you sometimes need to reorganize notes in a way that isn't 1:1 pitch accurate, but represents the movement and feel of the part. For example, if a solo keeps going up in pitch, you might have to repeat an ascending such as Green → Red → Yellow - Blue and then Red → Yellow → Blue → Orange pattern multiple times in a row. This is one of the hardest parts to get used to, but by finding good ways to wrap you can massively improve the quality and feel of your chart.

This section contains further explanations on how to handle things like HOPO forcing, solo markers, and the like:

This section contains some additional advice on charting that might come in handy sometimes:

A common confusion is how to handle authoring harmonic notes; very high pitched notes created via holding your hand barely on the string over one of the bands on the guitar and then strumming. It is very easy: treat them as normal notes. In most cases you'll want to keep them strummed.

Sometimes the guitarist creates the harmonic with their strumming hand and then bends the string or uses a whammy bar to create a effect that sounds like a fast trill. In those cases, chart it either as a sustain or a trill depending on if it will make the song more fun or not. Remember; more difficult doesn't always equal more fun.