Authoring Expert Guitar and Bass

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(Please note that this is an unfinished draft from my notes. I'm posting it as-is because I'm unlikely to finish it any time soon, and unfinished online is better than not online at all. The information is good, it just needs images, but I've put away my modding stuff for now, and I don't care to dig them out for this. Still, you'll get the gist.)

Expert guitar charting is effectively transcribing the guitar part as literally as you can within five buttons. Then you simplify that down for the lower difficulties—Hard being Expert with most of the flourishes removed, Medium being the skeleton of the part over four buttons, and Easy being the very basic rhythm over three buttons. (All of this applies similarly to bass, so for simplicity, I'll only be referring to guitar in this tutorial.)

Expert charting

There's four important aspects to a good Expert chart:

Appealingly accurate rhythm
Pitch consistency
Chord coherence
Good technique translation

These are the four most common complaints people have about charts they play, aside from a bad tempomap.

Appealing accurate rhythm

Guitar Hero is a video game. The goal is to make the guitar part feel good to play and decently match what's heard in the recording. This means that virtually no notes (referring to intentionally sounded tones, picked, tapped, strummed, or otherwise) are left out of the transcription.

In short, if you hear a note, it should be playable! But no more notes than what are audible should be playable.

A good example of a chart that fails this is the "Bark at the Moon" chart from the first Guitar Hero. To make the main riff easier, Harmonix leaves out the fourth note in every grouping of five strums, radically altering the rhythm of the guitar part. This is a no-no. Folks who aren't good enough to play the song will play easier ones or have fun failing trying. Don't accommodate the skill issue.

Similarly, you shouldn't author too many notes either, for difficulty or any other reason. "I'm the One"'s Solo 2A is an infamous example of overzealous strumming far faster than what's actually in the recording. It's hated by even top-level players for that reason.

That's the accurate part. Here's the "appealing" comes in. No guitarist has absolutely computer-perfect rhythm (nor should they)— but you should author the part as if they do.

Guitar Hero displays its charts with beatlines that sync up to quarter notes. These are a visual guide to the rhythm and tempo of the song. Notes should fall evenly on or between these beatlines as much as possible. Even audible timing errors should be ignored, unless they are so deliberate that anything else feels wrong to play.

If you author off these beatlines, not only will your chart look messier in-game, but it can be harder to read by the player. Most guitarists have a good enough sense of rhythm that laying down a stream of quarter notes, eighth notes, and sixteenths will match up perfectly or near-perfectly, so long as your tempomap is good. (If you find yourself having to author off the grid regularly to make stuff match, that's a good sign your tempomap needs to be redone.)

Use faster subdivisions if you need to squeeze more notes in, but quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenths, 24ths, 32nds, and so on are what you're working with. Stick to them unless you absolutely have to (and 95% of the time, you do not have to).

Pitch consistency

It's a damn simple fact; green is lowest, orange is highest. This means in any given lick, you should try to match the notes from lowest to highest and keep repeating pitches authored to the same colors throughout that riff.

Similarly, two audibly different pitches should not be authored to the same color. Granted, this is an easily broken ideal; occasionally, you will have to reuse a color within a riff, and certainly between different sections of a song. As long as it's fun and feels good to play, it can be forgiven.

Wrapping is a special technique you'll run into often if you chart solos or lead parts. Often, a melody line cannot fit over the five buttons. Say the guitarist does a chromatic climb down from G to the next lowest C—that's nine pitches you'll have to fit over five buttons. This is where wrapping comes into play.

If you author those notes so they're three runs of three notes each that overlap, you'll have a part that feels good and represents the point of the climb down—that is, the guitarist descending down the chromatic scale.

A really good tip while you're trying to chart that Addy told me once: in a melodic line, chart the lowest notes first as green and the highest notes second as orange. That way, when you reuse pitches, you'll be reusing the middle buttons, instead of assigning green to two pitches (and killing the effect of "bottoming out") or assigning orange to two pitches (and killing the effect of orange being this awesome, piercing end to a solo).

Chord coherence

The type of chords you match to specific sounds have a huge impact on the playability of the chart. A mistake I have seen in multiple published rhythm games is that three note chords are used for generically "big" chords without respect to what pitches and tones are in that chord. This is wrong.

Not only do the number of notes in a chord matter, but the distance between notes affects what the chord is good for. The distance between notes in a chord should roughly match the pitch difference between the notes in the recording. Here's what I like each chord for:

1-2 chords (green/red, red/yellow, etc): These are chords where the two pitches you hear are very close to one another; they feel "small". They can be power chords, barre chords, muted chords, but they're very small, there's not a ton of pitch difference going on. This is also good for dissonant sustains and chords where the guitarist plays two pitches that "fight" one another.
1-3 chords (green/yellow, red/blue): These feel very much like power chords on a real guitar and are good for them. They're hard to describe since they're kind of a middle ground; not as big as a 1-4 and not as small as a 1-2. Just good, meaty chords. One especially good thing 1-3 chords are good for are long ascending or descending chord passages; you can use 1-3 chords as in-betweens for 1-2 chords and keep the descending feeling intact.
1-4 chords (green/blue, red/orange): Now we're getting into weird, special chords. These are good for octaves or sevenths, very big pitch differences without much dissonance. Chords this big tend to feel "hollow", without a middle tone (think the intro to "The Impression That I Get" by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones).
1-5 chords (green/orange): I've yet to need to use this in a chart. Real big though!

Regardless of how much distortion is used over these chords, that does not change how many notes should be in them. A band like Slipknot is notorious for using very heavy tunings with a lot of distortion, and yet their riffs tend to be played as single notes. A two note chord does not magically become a three note just because it's very loud, heavy, or triumphant. Knowing how the chord is played on a real guitar certainly helps.

So what do you use a three note chord for, then? Three note chords should be reserved for chords with many pitches together. Open chords are a great example of often-good three note chords, since they're potentially six different strings on the guitar sounding at once, giving them a very "full" feel, and they tend to be played with the strings lagging each other in being struck, meaning many tones ringing out at once. Suspended, augmented, and diminished chords are also often very good as three note chords.

Rule of thumb: if you can listen to the chord and hear an extra upper or lower tone hanging over what would otherwise be a basic power or barre chord, you've found a good candidate for a three note chord.

One last thing to keep in mind: all that stuff about pitch consistency with single notes still applies with chords, just doubly so. It's important to train your ear to reverse-engineer chords as best as you can. The verse riff in the GH2 chart of "Monkey Wrench" is basically a master class in chord pitches and the differences between various types of chords. The little five chord sliding bit at the end of each repetition is a great example of what a 1-2 chord sounds like versus a 1-3 chord.

Shared pitches is key; if you hear the lower or even upper pitch in two different chords as the same pitch, or at least having the same "quality", you can make them share the same lower or upper button, creating a feeling of cohesion or musicality that dumb shifting up and down the buttons can't provide.

Good technique translation

You might be left with a question or two about other strange noises that can be made on a guitar and how to chart them. These can be a matter of opinion and style, but as far as Harmonix style is concerned, here's how I see these charted:

Slides

Slides are often charted as a sustain starting from the highest pitch. I've seen them (usually in Neversoft charts) charted as rows of HO/POs going from highest pitch to lowest pitch, but I think this looks kinda tacky, so I use the sustain method.

Pitch bends/feedback

Pitch bends at the start of a sustain are usually charted as a sixteenth hammer-on to the sustain charted a note lower than the sustain, but this is up to what feels good at the song tempo.

Pitch bends in the middle of a sustain, or changes in pitch of sustained feedback, depend on the severity of the bend, as you'll need to chart a new sustain (and thus another strum on the controller thanks to the lack of forcing). Up to you, but usually, it's worth it to make the bend more interesting.

Muted strums

Muted strums depend on their context. On their own (as an additional percussive effect, for example) it's best to chart them as green single notes.

Guitarists will often mix muted strums and notes and chords ringing out in the same riff, or as "pickup" notes going into a chord. In these cases, it helps to know how the song is played on a real guitar. If the guitarist is simply muting the chord without moving his hand, author it as the lowest pitch of the chord. If he plays the mute elsewhere on the neck, or the mute is audibly lower in pitch, author the mutes on green to better match the motion of the real riff. Occasionally, it makes sense to author muted chords leading into 1-3 chords as 1-2 chords, if the single note is already used in that riff for a single pitch (see my "Dope Nose" custom for an example).

Other miscellaneous tips

Here's a few situations I've found myself in and suggestions if you get stuck:

Add sustain gaps. Sustain gaps are dead space, at least a sixteenth note or so of space, after the end of a sustain and before the start of another note. These are seriously important, because not having gaps will make your chart less appealing to look at and less fun to play, since players will have to drop the sustain to get to the next note comfortably. I'd recommend adding sustain gaps even when the next note is the same note; remember, DualShock players have to lift up to hit the button again, so keep them in mind as well.
Try to learn how the part is played, preferably without distortion. You don't have to be a real guitarist to author for Guitar Hero, but knowing a bit about how a song is really played will help you immensely if you're unsure if two chords that are close are the same, or if you're missing notes in your transcription.
- A great example of this came from when I was finishing up my "Substitution" rechart. Silversun Pickups is a band that loves their fuzz and distortion, and the bridge drops down to these twinkly single notes that are still caked in them. As a result, hearing the actual attack and pitches of the notes was downright impossible. Thankfully, Silversun Pickups are a band that likes to play acoustic, and I was able to catch a live acoustic version on YouTube which had the part played clean so I could author exactly what was being played.
Author even minor variations in the guitar part. This might drive you a little nuts, but if a guitarist is strumming on an acoustic and their strumming patterns subtly change throughout the song, be sure to match that in your chart. Any disconnect from the guitar part makes a player's brain trip up, and especially seasoned players will notice.
Watch out for chords that sound different because they're strummed different. With open chords or heavy distortion, how the guitarist strums a chord (how hard they hit the strings, whether they miss or add extra strings to the chord) can radically changed how the chord is voiced, despite the fact that their fretting hand has stayed the same. What you do is situational. If the added tones are extra notes or are really noticeable, change the chord for the player in-game. If they're just distortion squeals, you might be able to ignore those and get a much simpler and more easily readable chart.
- I experienced this hardcore when I charted Nirvana's "Very Ape". Kurt's sloppy strumming causes some of the power chords he's playing to have extra squealing notes over top them. Where audible, I charted these as an extra orange added to the chords I was using for the rest of the part—so switching between two and three-note chords where that extra tone was audible.
Chart what's fun! Guitar Hero is a game, and GH2 in particular is highly simplified and has fewer note options than later entries in the series, in Rock Band, and in Clone Hero. Even fun little tricks like "hammer-ons" to opens to simulate natural harmonics can't be used here, so just follow the pitches and do what feels satisfying.
You will probably want to rechart your earliest customs when you're better at it. Focus on just what's fun to play for now. A lot of charting is based off feel and experience.