* The General Philosophy: Starting with Expert Guitar, authoring should be, rhythmically, a literal transcription of the actual guitar performance. From there, we adjust the notes to best fit the Rock Band guitar then simplify the parts for each difficulty.
* Consistency: When possible, keep the same gems representing the same notes (e.g. if you use a Red gem to represent an E note, continue to use red gems to represent the same E throughout the song), and with phrases that repeat throughout a song (e.g. the main riff in Here Comes Your Man). Also, try to maintain consistency in chords throughout a song (e.g. if you use a Green/Yellow chord to represent an E chord, it should represent that chord throughout the song) This is often impossible as many songs have more than 5 notes and 7 basic chords, but try to stick to it as much as you can.
* Preserve motion: Above all, guitar authoring is about making the part feel right. Try to preserve melodic motion even if it means breaking consistency. For example, if our E note (previously mapped to a red gem) is part of a line that moves upward, it's ok to map it to a different color in order to preserve the feeling of playing a higher note. Also, make sure that the motion of your chords is correct (e.g. a Red/Blue chord is going to be higher in pitch than a Green/Yellow chord, but lower than a Yellow/Orange chord).
* Wrapping: Often times, a melodic line will contain too many notes to fit within our five button constraints. This can also become more of a problem at simpler difficulties when you have less than five buttons to work with. When this occurs, we wrap the notes, using patterns such as Green/Red/Yellow, Red/Yellow/Blue Yellow/Blue/Orange.
* Author intention over sloppiness: Much of rock and roll is sloppy by nature, however, our game is not. Therefore we need to "clean up" sloppy guitar parts. All authoring should be quantized, usually to 16th notes (in some cases 32nd notes or triplets). The easiest way to do this is to use the Snap to Grid feature in Reaper when entering notes. If you can tell what the guitarist intended to play, but they just didn't quite make it, author the part as intended. There is a gray area here when it comes to solos, as they can be intentionally sloppy.
* Chords: There are 4 basic types on chords in Rock Band; 1 3 chords (Green/Yellow), 1 2 chords (Green/Red), 1 4 chords (Green/Blue), and three note chords. Each has its own feel.
o 1 3 usually feels like a power chord or a bar chord. 1 3 chords make up the majority of "normal" chords used in Rock Band.
o 1 2 chords can feel good for bar and power chords as well, but also work as thirds, fourths, stops (like playing a chord on a slide guitar), or generally "small" chords.
o 1 2 chords are also useful for conveying motion in extended sequences of chords. To use an extreme example, if we have a descending pattern that is 7 chords long, we would use Blue/Orange, Yellow/Orange, Yellow/Blue, Red/Blue, Red/Yellow, Green/Yellow, Green/Red.
o 1 4 chords feel great for octaves, but can also work well for sus chords.
o 1 5 chords are also great for octaves, but are only allowed on expert, should be used as sparingly as possible.
o 3 note chords are usually only used for nonstandard or "big" chords; like augmented, seventh, and diminished chords, or perhaps a normal chord with a second guitar playing a higher or dissonant note over it.
* Sustained notes: There are some basic rules pertaining to the use of sustained notes in game.
o Notes with no sustain, should be no longer than 1/16 note. Any note that is longer than 1/16 will have a sustain tail. On the other hand, no note should be shorter than 1/64.
o Notes should not overlap. Any note that begins before the end of the previous note (or notes, in the case of chords) will not appear on the track.
Authoring Rules by Difficulty
Expert
* Expert Gems are MIDI notes 96 (C6) to 100 (E6)
* Expert should represent the actual guitar part as accurately as possible. Barring general sloppiness (as mentioned before) try to represent even subtle variations in the guitar part.
* The Expert guitar part should never be authored to be intentionally harder than the actual guitar part, it can be ridiculously difficult, if that's what the actual guitar calls for (e.g. a song like Caprici Di Diablo, Bodhisattva, or The Thrasher may have 32nd or even 64th notes all over the place � too difficult for casual players, but hardcore fans that love this sort of challenge).
* Expert may use all 5 buttons.
* All chord types can be used on expert. Three note chords may not include both Green and Orange gems (e.g. no Green/Red/Orange, Green/Yellow/Orange, or Green/Blue/Orange chords).
* Durations should only be authored for notes longer than a dotted 8th note for songs over 100bpm, and a regular 8th note for songs under 100bpm. Always leave at least a 32nd note gap between the end of a duration and the next note, though a 16th note gap is standard.
Hard
* Hard Gems are MIDI notes 84 (C5) to 88 (E5)
* Hard should be the "reasonable" version of expert. It should be possible for an expert player to 100% hard with only a minimal amount of practice. Try taking out subtle variations so the parts are more consistent. Removing motion or strumming that is a 16th note or faster, is a good place to start, but again, this is based on the tempo of the song.
* Hard introduces the Orange button, but try to avoid quick Green to Orange jumps.
* Three note chords and Green/Orange chords are not permitted in Hard. Both Green/Blue and Red/Orange chords are acceptable, and can be a good replacement for both.
* Durations in Hard should be the same as Expert.
Medium
* Medium Gems are MIDI notes 72 (C4) to 76 (E4)
* Medium is probably the hardest difficulty level to author, and yet one of the most important (most casual players start on medium). The key to medium is retaining as much of the rhythmic and melodic feel of expert and hard but in a way that is much easier to play.
* Removing the remaining 8th notes from Medium is a good way to thin out from Hard. Try to only have playable notes on strong quarter note beats.
* Medium introduces the Blue button, but try to avoid quick Green to Blue jumps.
* Do not use the Orange button in Medium.
* Chords are still allowed in Medium, but try to avoid fast chord changes.
* Do not use the Green/Blue chord in Medium.
* Durations in Medium should be pulled back to allow more time to move from note to note. A good general rule is to try and leave a quarter note between the end of a note and the beginning of the next. The easiest way to do this is to pull every note with a duration back an 8th note, that way all your dotted 8ths become 16ths. However, be aware that a duration that is too short will leave a stumpy, broken looking tail on the track. Be sure to check for this in game, and if a note tail looks too short, pull that note back to a 16th.
Easy
* Easy Gems are MIDI notes 60 (C3) to 64 (E3)
* Easy should be really easy. No player will complain that easy is too easy, they'll just move up to medium, so make it EASY! The easy player should be able to look at the track, see the note, look at their guitar neck, move their finger to the right button, strum, then look back up for the next note. That's a lot to do between every note, so make sure you leave a significant amount of space.
* On easy, all remaining quarter notes should be removed, leaving half note spaces between notes.
* There are no chords in easy.
* Do not use the Blue button in easy, only Green, Red, and Yellow.
Important Note:
Even though there are only 3 buttons to work with in Easy, motion must be preserved. This is often the most difficult when moving from section to section. An example of this is if the verse has a repeating pattern of Yellow-Red-Green, and the Chorus has a repeating pattern of Green-Yellow-Red, but the last note of the verse, and first note of the chorus are different. When this occurs, we can't leave two Green gems next to each other representing different notes. We would change the last note of the verse from Green to Yellow, so that motion is preserved.
Solo Sections
* MIDI note 103 (G6) marks solo sections (guitar only).
* Guitar solos should be dictated by the music, which can be a gray area. Try to avoid putting solo markers on little guitar fills and repeated lead lines, and use it only when there is an obvious solo.
* If a song ends with a solo make sure to end the solo marker as early as possible. This leaves time for the solo score marker to pop up before the track pulls out at the end of the song.
How to chart, the HMX way lol
if you pay attention you can see HMX broke a rule or two (3 note chord on hard!) XD
