This repo contains the song charts I've made for Clone Hero, YARG, and any other rhythm game whose songs are cross-compatible. My charts are for drums only and not available in RhythmVerse.
NOTE: There is no copyrighted content in this repo. You're free to download my charts, but it's up to you to drop in the appropriate song files for them to work. For each chart, I will note the version of it that was used (album, single, music video, etc.).
The following charts can be found in here:
| Artist | Title |
|---|---|
| N/A | N/A |
The following tools can help with song charting:
- Moonscraper - a fantastic app specifically for creating Clone Hero charts and the most accessible to beginners
- REAPER - a general purpose DAW that is much more complicated to learn but more flexible; note that REAPER requires additional downloads to make it suitable for charting songs:
- The REAPER RBN Template
- These files
- The RBN charting preview plugin, 32-bit or 64-bit beta version
- Or is this included in the files link above?
- Onyx - a tool for converting songs
- Demucs - a music analysis tool that can (acceptably, if not fantastically) generate stems from song files
- Parallels - a user-friendly virtual machine manager for macOS that can run a Windows 11 ARM VM on an Apple Silicon Mac (Moonscraper is Windows-only); it's billed as a subscription service and is not cheap, but "just works"
If you're looking to get started creating your own song charts, the following resources have been immensely helpful for me:
- This realtime screen recording of author Justin CH's charting process
- Grishhung's REAPER Charting 101 tutorial
- The RBN/C3 Vocal Authoring documentation
I'm still figuring out a process that'll work for me. Everyone's different! This is a living document but here are my notes on song charting.
Edit the song in Audacity
If applicable. Is there a long silence at the beginning or end that needs to be trimmed? Does some silence need to be added to get the audio to sync up better with its paired video?
Get the song into stems and in the correct format
First, I need to start with a song. Usually that's in the form of a FLAC file. I always split the song into stems first. Even if they end up not sounding good enough to use in the final chart audio, I can at least hear the separate instruments better for easier beat mapping.
Who could I use as an example case other than Cyndi Lauper (Blue Angel was her original band before she became a solo artist)?
> brew install python pipx ffmpeg
> pipx ensure path
> pipx install demucs
> pipx inject demucs soundfile
> mkdir "Blue Angel - Maybe He'll Know"
> cd "Blue Angel - Maybe He'll Know"
> cp "~/Music/Blue Angel - Maybe He'll Know.flac" song.flac
> ffmpeg -i "song.flac" -b:a 80k song.opus
> demucs --filename "{stem}.{ext}" "song.flac"
> ls separated/htdemucs/*.wav | while read WAVFILE; do OPFILE="$(basename $WAVFILE | sed 's/\.wav$/.opus/')"; ffmpeg -i "$WAVFILE" -b:a 80k "$OPFILE" -nostdin; done
> rm -r separated
We should now have, in addition to our original FLAC, a set of Opus files (the statest of the art recommended song format, requires Clone Hero 1.0) for each track and the song as a whole.
> ls
bass.opus drums.opus other.opus song.flac song.opus vocals.opus
At this point, I have decisions to make. How good do the extracted stems sound? Good enough to use as the audio for the final artifact? Or just useful as a guide for the charting process? My current thinking is to layer the stems over each other in Audacity and give them a listen; if the componenets put back together aren't too muddy-sounding, I'll use them. It helps that I'm a drummer and that track seems to be the one Demucs has the easiest time separating out.
Now that the easy part's done, it's time to get down to business. I'm currently using Moonscraper for my charts because I've never used any DAW before and REAPER looks more intimidating than I have time for at the moment. Some day, though...
Because of this, it's time to fire up Windows 11 in Parallels--I do charting work in my home office and my office PC is a Mac.
Get Moonscraper ready
- Start a new project
- Fill in song properties (artist, title, album..., sound files, etc.)
- Switch instrument to drums (4 lane, pro) (should already be on expert difficulty as the default)
- Set waveform to the song audio
Find the time signature and tempo
This can usually be found on the web but, in the odd instance or to confirm veracity, use Moonscraper's built-in BPM calculator.
In our example case, Blue Angel's "Maybe He'll Know" is in 4/4 time and Moonscraper pegs it at 172pm (or 86bpm if we're playing it half time, which... I need to learn what that means). The web disagrees slightly and pegs it at 167/83.5bpm.
Enjoy the silence
Use Audacity to add enough silence to the song to get it synced up with the lane measures + 1 measure for a lead-in.
In the case of our Blue Angel example, the drum part leads off with 4 kicks we can use to tell time. The first kick hits at ~6.43s and the next measure starts at 6.89s
This can get tricky, mostly because of timing. Many (most?) music videos use a different edit of a song than is on the album. Is the video the same length? Do characters' mouths in the video match up with the vocals all the way through?
Of course, a way around this would be to use the audio from the music video instead of from the album, but then you have to either find a version of the video with 320 kb/s audio or suffer inferior audio quality. Also, this isn't an option if there's lots of audio going on in the music video that isn't a part of the song.
Ideally, both audio and video source use the same version of the song and all we need to do is add a delay to sync them up.