Making Your Own Song Mappings

[Alan Chatham]

Have you figured out a good assignment of notes in Guitar Hero, Rock Band, or Frets on Fire? Interested in seeing if you

I've been using the EOF Editor along with ripped tracks from Guitar Hero and Rock Band to access the note patterns easily. Then I search for the appropriate guitar tab, then start to enter what fingerings correspond to what colors in the game. With luck, the colors will map to the notes uniquely. If not, then there is a chance that one color can be mapped to an open string and the other to the 5th fret on the lower string. This technique is also used to move notes that are higher than the 5th fret to the next string. If a song has notes higher than the 5th fret on the 1st string, or two widely used colors mapping to the same note, then the song can't really be mapped to the guitar. For chords, especially power chords, that are only mapped to one color in the game, we try to use which single note really captures the sound best. For chords that are mapped to chords in the game, we look to assign each note of the chord to a different color in a way that doesn't interfere with the other notes in the song.

Of course, there might be a better way of doing all of this - experiment, and let everyone know if you find a great way to do things! If you're really motivated, there may be some sort of way to support mapping 2 colors to the same note by quickly sending each color signal and a strum, but who knows.

Also, the guitars can support all the frets - you just need to connect the 1st fret to the 6th fret, the 2nd to the 7th, and so on, with tape or wire. We're going to move to this model of production, but so far our instructions and kits imply a 5-fret guitar. If you do wire up all the frets, it might bring up some more conflicts with notes overlapping - we haven't really tried this yet. If you do try it, let us know how things went!