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.

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• 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.

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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 a riff is 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 chords 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.

All 2-note chords are allowed on Expert.

3-note chords are also allowed, with the exception of any 3-note chord that has both a Green and a Orange note in it (G-R-O, G-Y-O and G-B-O)

All 2-note chords except for Green-Orange chords are allowed on Hard.

No 3-note chords on reductions.

Only 2-note chords without a lot of hand stretching required on Medium, meaning no Green-Blue chords for example.

No 3-note chords on reductions.

Absolutely no chords should be on Easy.

Here is how to make sure your character animates correctly on-stage. If not authored they will automatically be set to the default play animations for the entire song and never move their left hand, which often looks very odd.

Determines what animation pool to use for the character:

• [play] - The default playstate, makes the character energetically move along to the beat while playing.
• [mellow] - Makes the character stand mostly still while playing, good for laid back or sad songs.
• [intense] - Makes the characters move around a lot on stage, good for high energy songs.
• [play_solo] - Makes the character focus on playing their instrument with soul, looks good during guitar solos and other leads.

• [idle] - Makes the character stand in place and nod their head to the beat without playing.
• [idle_realtime] - The default idle state at the start of a song. Makes the character stand still without moving with the beat, so its a good idea to also put this one at the end of the song, for example.
• [idle_intense] - Makes the character dance with the beat without playing.

This changes how the fretting hand is animated:

• [map HandMap_Default] - Single notes are played as single notes, chords are played as chords, no extra bells or whistles. Default!

• [map HandMap_AllBend] - All notes are animated as string bends.
• [map HandMap_DropD] - Green notes are played without holding down a string, everything else is animated as a chord.
• [map HandMap_DropD2] - Green notes are played without holding down a string, otherwise Default.
• [map HandMap_Solo] - Big chord animations and chord string bends.

• [map HandMap_AllChords] - Everything is animated as a chord.
• [map HandMap_NoChords] - Nothing is animated as a chord.
• [map HandMap_Chord_C] - Everything is animated as a C chord.
• [map HandMap_Chord_D] - Everything is animated as a D chord.
• [map HandMap_Chord_A] - Everything is animated as a A chord.

If you're unsure which one to pick, keeping it to Default is usually fine, and then change it to Solo during a solo or DropD2 during a chugging riff, for example.

Bass only; this determines which type of strums the bassist will use:

• [map StrumMap_Default] - Playing with two fingers
• [map StrumMap_Pick] - Playing with a pick
• [map StrumMap_SlapBass] - Playing with fingers and thumb slaps

Its often a good idea to look up live footage to see which technique the bassist of the band uses IRL if you're unsure which one to pick. For songs with programmed synth bass, we recommend SlapBass.

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The MIDI notes below the actual charted notes at lanes E1 to B2 determines where your character's hand is on the guitar neck, with E1 being the lowest near the head of the guitar and B2 being the highest near the body of the guitar.

Be sure to leave gaps between the end and beginning of left hand position notes, or else the character's hand will awkwardly jerk between notes. Note length doesn't matter as long as notes aren't touching in Rock Band 3, though the hand will slide immediately when there is a gap in Rock Band 2.

A lot of movement is also automatically animated based on the Expert chart, so if a riff or solo pattern is playing different notes across different strings you don't need to change the left hand position any during it.

It is impossible to make a 1:1 representation of how this would look when playing the song IRL, so don't worry about that. Just try your best to make it look convincing enough. A simple left hand position animation is better than none at all.

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:

Grace notes is when you strum a note, then quickly slide or hammer-on to another fret to make it sound like one note with a bent pitch. While often realistically charted as 32th notes on a straight grid, we recommend charting them as 16th on a triplet grid to account for how strict the Rock Band engine is.

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 and as single notes, unless they actually are chords (for example the verse riff in Roundabout by Yes).

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 grace note, 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.