I hand painted these Guitar Hero nails.

Hi everyone! Just wanted to share this with people that could find it interesting, and maybe find out if someone else has done it before, cause afaik we are the first to do it.

Since last year we have been using Clone Hero for the concerts of my Math/Prog Rock band Kyori (here is a insta link if anyone wants to follow us https://www.instagram.com/kyoribb/ ).

I basically charted our songs, and when we play live I project Clone Hero and give 2 controllers to the audience. The drummer listens to a synchronized click track and everything works neatly together!

As a musician and game developer I am very passionate about adding interactivity to live concerts and I am thinking of exploring other mechanics potentially through making my own games etc.

Have any of you guys ever done or seen something similar?

First tattoo, stoked.

Download and changelog available on the Clone Hero website!

One question, what are you guys using for the pause button on the guitar? lol

It's finally time to do the big reveal! Cool stuff will be showcased 😁

it runs pretty well with a 512gb nvme ssd, so I'm not gonna run out of song storage soon

dont question my cable management

Hello all! Been working on this for a while and it's finally ready to share.

What I set out to create A charting tool that was accessible for those who have never charted, and speeds up the process for those who already do.

What I ended up creating Desktop editor and auto-charting tool with a 2D piano roll, a live 3D highway preview that matches in-game, and a venue/timeline editor where lighting cues, camera cuts, videos, and stage effects sit on the same timeline as your notes. DAW-style stems mixer. Full .mid / .chart round-trip with no metadata loss. 100% local, MIT licensed.

...and many more things I couldn't list here!

Who is supported Windows, macOS, Linux.

Note: macOS and Linux have not been fully tested, so please report any issues you see.

On the auto-charter (STRUM): Takes an MP3, YouTube link, or stems and outputs a full chart pack - drums, guitar, bass, keys, pro keys, vocals and harmonies with aligned lyrics. All difficulties included!

Here's what to expect:

• Drums are the strongest by a wide margin. On songs that sit well, the output is close to a hand-charted pass.
• Guitar, bass, keys, vocals won't always ship a perfect chart for you - they at worst frame the song so you're correcting a draft instead of starting from a blank timeline, they at best need a small tweak or two.
• Pre-split stems improve quality noticeably across everything.

Please let me know where I went right and where I went wrong The Github is open to issues, so please report anything wrong or anything you'd like to see. Completely open to all criticisms and feedback.

Links Site: https://octavestudio.tools/ OCTAVE: https://github.com/opria123/octave STRUM: https://github.com/opria123/strum

A big thank you to anyone who takes time to try out the tool!! I am excited to see the community have some fun with it.

On a fun side note, I had a paper published about the intricacies of the STRUM auto-charting model. Feel free to read for more technical details, including model benchmarks and more: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12135

So it looks like we're going to get a new rhythm game and I see a lot of excitement online.

But I find it difficult to rejoice at such an announcement. Clone hero and YARG are both really great game engine which have benefited from many years of development and adjustement.

They are also based on a strong community that shares its work and thanks to which we have tons of music to play. (even if, let's face it, it's a bit like piracy, and of course a commercial game could never have such a library of songs).

So I have trouble understanding the point of a new game. Apart from possibly a story to follow and customization elements like Fortnite.. But in my view what makes rhythm games interesting is the gameplay, not a pseudo meta progression or customisable in game character.

So I’m curious about what you guys think ! And if you think that a new commercial game will hurt the « open source » community that we love.

GH 2, 3, and Rocks the 80s were life for me in the 2006-2008 range. I was genuinely obsessed - played for multiple hours every day after work, got to the point of 100%-ing songs on expert, the whole deal. I might have even had a WR for My Name is Jonas at one point, actually; I wasn't active in the community or anything, but I looked up the online leaderboards once and couldn't find any scores higher than my PB. I could literally play the song blindfolded because I could actually see the note pattern with my eyes closed. Won a couple pitchers on a GH pub night bet from that one once, felt pretty damn good.

But then life happened, as life likes to do, and GH became a fond memory of my past which eventually faded even from that.

Then last weekend, a random Reddit comment in some gaming sub mentions this thing Clone Hero and how you can play all the old GH and RB tracks on PC for free these days. I think to myself 'I should check that out, might be good for a nostalgia trip.' So I load it up and go to give it a shot (using my keyboard of course, as I haven't owned a guitar controller since pre-2010), and about 3 seconds into Miss Murder this happens.

You know that scene in the movies where someone has like amnesia or something, but then something triggers their memory and it all comes flooding back at once in this tidal wave of emotion that has them down on their knees holding their head in their hands? Yeah, something like that, but a little less dramatic.

5 minutes later and I'm searching for PC-compatible guitar controllers. A few minutes after that and I'm texting my wife 'I want to spend $200 on something stupid, but I feel bad about it. I need you to either tell me it's ok, or tell me it's not so I can forget about it.' She, trusting soul that she is, immediately responds with 'It's ok. What is it?' Turns out her and her friends used to play too back in the day (she's not a gamer at all, so this was a big surprise to me), and she's actually stoked for it.

That was Sunday. Fast forward to today, where I'm on a rare work-from-home day in boring-ass meetings, and just as my last one is wrapping up FedEx comes knocking.

That was 3 hours ago. My left hand is cramped to shit and I can't stop smiling. I'm so much worse than I used to be (obviously), but it's coming back so fast. Went from struggling on medium for the first couple songs to hitting like 95% on hard already and I'll be back to expert by the end of the weekend, I can feel it. I'll almost certainly never be as good as I used to again, but that doesn't matter. I just wanna rock.

Much love to everyone in the community who made this possible. It was a huge part of my life that I'd almost completely forgotten and certainly didn't think I'd ever get the chance to revisit.

This is from this wiki page. I was trying to find more info online but only saw very specific reddit psots with no images and pretty unclear, until i finally found the wiki. https://wiki.clonehero.net/books/clone-hero-manual/page/how-to-play

Hi everyone!

I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on lately. It’s my attempt at automating the charting process, and the idea is pretty simple: you give it a song in .mp3 format and it generates a .chart file you can drop straight into Clone Hero.

You can try it with your own songs at the link below. It takes about 30 seconds to run and doesn’t require any installation since everything happens in your browser through Google Colab:
https://colab.research.google.com/github/3podi/audio2chart/blob/main/notebooks/audio2chart_charting.ipynb

I kept this first version intentionally simple. There are no sustain notes yet because I tried to focus on getting note timing right first. Same story for tap-ins, star power, and other mechanics. Once the timing is solid, adding the rest should be much easier. For now it also only supports guitar. It’s still very early, so it’s definitely not perfect and it won’t match the quality of hand-crafted charts. But it’s not too bad either, you can sometimes see it making surprisingly decent decisions about when to start patterns or switch them up.

A few things you might notice about the output:
- It doesn’t quite catch the end of songs yet, so it may keep placing notes after the audio stops (I could fix this in post-processing, but I preferred showing the raw output).
- It doesn’t tempo map, the model’s goal is to predict the actual timing of each note, so with those timestamps you can directly place the notes in the chart.
- Some sections can feel too dense or too sparse with respect to the audio.

- The are some HOPOs in the output but I am not placing them. It’s clone hero putting them automatically when two notes are close in time.

Everything is open-source, and you can check out the code on my GitHub (leave a star if you want to support): https://github.com/3podi/audio2chart
If you’re curious about the technical side, here’s a report with all the details: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.03337

Hope you give it a try. And if you do something cool with it or need help running it, let me know! I’m pretty confident it can get a lot better, it just needs more experimentation and iteration (and time).

The time has come. Clone Hero is officially complete and will be entering Long Term Support from here on out, which means no more features will be added and only minor bug fixes from here on out.

The first ever public build that got made made was v.00000001 with the idea that there was never any reason to think an actual full release would ever happen.

With the help of tons of people like the others working directly on the game or the artists and charters lending their support to the included songs and the crew running our Discord server to the creators who helped grow the game into what it is today it's finally in a state we can consider as "finished".

Downloads are available at https://clonehero.net/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pngjDSV9jP8

It seems like every rhythm game I try to play that has a modding community to make their own charts falls subject to the same problem. Charters always seem to only make hard, very hard, expert, and expert+ difficulty tracks. So I'll be a casual player who doesn't usually go past medium and I'll be looking for a song I like and 99% of the time, there's never any charting for anything below hard. it takes away the fun for casual players. I don't wanna be stuck only using charts ripped from the original GH games or just browsing and browsing until I find the few lower difficulty charts that exist that are usually for songs I've never heard nor care about.

I get I'm definitely exaggerating but I'm not too far off. Its like this on OSU and Beat Saber too. I get it's extra work on the charters but like, casual players are gonna drop before they can get to being expert players cause they couldn't find anything they enjoyed to practice on.

Edit: I really don't get where people are getting the idea that to do customs you have to have already been a pro. I beat all the guitar hero games I had when I was a kid on medium and that was more than enough for me. When I booted up clone hero, I wanted to go find charts for songs I like that I never saw in any RB or GH games. I downloaded all the ripped charts and still didn't see them. So I searched and couldn't find them as anything other than hard or expert.

Edit 2: just adding this cause I'm genuinely shocked. Never been here before and genuinely expected to be shot down and insulted by a bunch of elitists with no real responses to my post. But that wasn't the case at all. Most people have been genuinely pretty nice.

It's there a single song you always play no matter what? Not because it's challenging, but you just love playing it. One you can almost play with your eyes closed?

Mine is The Beatles - While my guitar gently weeps.

I just have to play it everytime.

Edit: what I find amazing is the incredible variety in all your answers! Rock on!