which tutorial are you referring to?

Reaper is numbering the channels beginning with 1 instead of with 0 as defined by the MIDI standard. It’s not proper, but they must think it’s more user friendly or something. For now, just add the 1 to it but keep that discrepancy in mind when reading MIDI details in different places because they may not all be using the false numbering scheme.

For pro guitar, hammer on/pull off is marked with a note one lane above lane 6’s gem.

Not that I’m aware of.

Ziggy originally found information about the strum areas in the Harmonix patent document. I described the mechanism as such in EOF’s pro guitar authoring tutorial:

Rock Band 3’s patent documentation describes this as the “strum area”, where the strings that are above the dark part of the indicator have no importance for scoring (ie. don’t need to be picked) the chord as a whole as being correctly hit. Three possible strum areas are defined: High (requires the G, B and high E strings to be hit), Medium (requires the A, D, G and B strings to be hit) and Low (requires the low E, A and D strings to be hit). Effectively, this is the same as defining the direction of the strum as being upward (the first 3 strings hit in an upward strum matter most), middle (direction neutral, but allow for the top and bottom-most string to be missed) or downward (the first 3 strings hit in a downward strum matter most). In addition to reinforcing the intended strum direction pattern of a part of a song, this game mechanic allows some leniency to make up for strum detection errors on the Mustang and Squier controllers as well as player error.

Sorry for bumping such and old topic, but where did you manage to find that tutorial?

I’ve been trying to author Pro Guitar/Bass but I can’t seem to find any tutorial and I’m having quite a lot of trouble authoring.

EOF has a pro guitar tutorial that discusses overall concepts of RB3’s pro guitar feature, along with the techniques and other mechanisms (ie. trainer sections) that are supported by the game, but it doesn’t describe authoring them in MIDI editors. Here are some details I’ve thrown together:

MIDI notes 24-29 are used to define notes in the easy difficulty. MIDI notes 48-53 define notes in the medium difficulty. MIDI notes 72-77 define notes in the hard difficulty. MIDI notes 96-101 define notes in the expert difficulty. The fret number each note uses is encoded in the velocity of the MIDI note, where fret # is defined by using velocity (100 + #). For instance, a note on 97 with a velocity of 105 would be the in-game equivalent of the A-string, fret 5 (2nd string, 5th fret). As Drihscol mentioned, the channel number used (in a number system where channels begin with number 1) for the MIDI note indicates whether the note is “normal” (channel 1), a ghost note (channel 2) or a string muted note (channel 4). Other techniques are defined using MIDI note markers. Be aware that in the event of chords that have some strings encoded as normal and some encoded as string mutes, the game will display the entire chord as string muted. If you want to author a chord like 3X5, just leave the string muted note out of that chord.

Slide notes: These are defined by using a marker 7 notes higher than lane 1 (ie. 103 for expert difficulty). The velocity of this marker defines the direction of the slide. A velocity of 108 (indicating fret or higher indicates the slide is downward. A velocity of 107 (indicating fret 7) or lower indicates the slide is upward. For unknown reasons, RB3 may show a slide going the opposite direction than is expected. Encoding the slide marker to use channel 12 (in a channel numbering system that begins with 1) signals to the game to reverse the displayed direction for the slide. The use of this reverse mechanism is preferred to authoring the MIDI to have the slide go in the wrong direction just to have it display correctly in-game, because then the intended direction of the slide is reflected in the MIDI.

Arpeggios: These are defined by using a marker 8 notes higher than lane 1 (ie. 104 for expert difficulty). The entire chord reflected by the arpeggio is defined at the start position of the marker, but the notes that are not played are authored as “ghost” notes by encoding them in channel 2 (in a number system where channels begin with number 1). Until the end of the arpeggio marker, the fretboard in-game is displayed turquoise to indicate an arpeggio is in effect. Chords can exist inside arpeggios, but I don’t know how a named chord inside an arpeggio would be displayed in-game.

Strum area: These are used in chord-heavy parts of songs to emphasize the strum pattern the player is recommended to use. This is defined (on a per-chord basis) by using a marker 9 higher than lane 1 (ie. 105 for expert difficulty) and using one of 3 particular MIDI channels for the marker. The following channel numbers reflect a numbering system that begins with 1: High area strums use channel 14 and emphasize the G, B and high E strings. Medium area strums use channel 15 and emphasize the A, D, G and B strings. Low area strums use channel 16 and emphasize the low E, A and D strings. My understanding of strum area markers is also that the game ignores scoring for the strings that are not emphasized by the marker (ie. when a high area strum marker is in use, the low E, A and D strings are ignored whether or not the user plays them regardless of whether there are notes defined in the chart that use those strings). I’ve only seem official RB3 charts to have strum area markers defined in the hard and expert difficulties of songs.

Trainer sections: These are text events placed at beat positions. For the guitar track, the beginning of the trainer uses the format of “[begin_pg song_trainer_pg_#]” and the end uses the format of “[end_pg song_trainer_pg_#]”. Replace # with the appropriate trainer number, ie. “1”, “2” and so on. You can place a “[pg_norm song_trainer_pg_#]” text event somewhere between the begin and end events to cause RB3 to seemlessly loop the trainer (A/B repeat style) instead of doing the stop, rewind, restart method that RB3 does by default. To use trainers in the bass track, replace the “pg” parts of each of those 3 text events with “pb”. It’s important to note that trainer sections are only defined in the 17 fret guitar/bass track and are automatically read by the game if the player is using a Squier guitar (playing the 22 fret track). Placing trainer events in the 22 fret tracks causes the game to crash.

Root notes: Like EOF, Rock Band 3 automatically looks up the name for chords based on what intervals are played. The catch here is that the game doesn’t automatically know what scale a chord is in, so the MIDI has to define which one and Magma refers to this as the root note. The root note numbering goes from 4 (scale of E) to 15 (scale of Eb), and each adjacent scale is 1 different (ie. 9 is scale of A). If a chord is to be displayed as a slash chord, a note 16 marker is written IN ADDITION to the root note. For example, Fm7/E uses root notes 5 and 16. Am/G uses root notes 9 and 16. If no name is to be displayed for a chord, write note marker 17.

Manual chord names: If you want to manually define a chord name you can use text events to override the game’s chord lookup. “[chrd1 …]”, “[chrd2 …]” and “[chrd3 …]” define the name of the chord at that position in the Medium, Hard and Expert difficulties, respectively. Just replace “…” with the name you want to show up. You can use a whitespace character to cause the chord to display with no name. I’ve always assumed “[chrd0 …]” may work to define a chord name in the Easy difficulty, but I never tried this because to my knowledge Harmonix did not define anything more than single notes in that difficulty for any song. You can display superscript in a note name by using a tag around the superscripted portion of the name. For example, the third arpeggio in the on-disc song “Foolin” is named “FM7#11“.

Tuning: Presumably this is only used for the chord name lookup and possibly the chord helper (I think I remember people saying it would show the string’s tuning if the helper was close enough to the nut end of the guitar neck). In RB3, the tuning is defined in the upgrades.dta file used in the upgrade CON file and specifies the number of half steps above or below standard each string is tuned. For example, to declare that the 17 fret guitar track (and 22 fret guitar track, if present) is in Drop D tuning:

(real_guitar_tuning (-2 0 0 0 0 0))

To declare that the 17 fret bass track (and 22 fret bass track, if present) is in standard tuning:

(real_bass_tuning (0 0 0 0))

Left hand positions: Besides possibly being used for animations, I could never come up with any reason why these would be used by the game except that maybe it defines where on the neck the chord helper is displayed. Conceptually it can be considered roughly the same as the mechanism in Rocksmith defining where the fret hand is placed (ie. which fret the index finger is at). This is defined by using using MIDI note 108 with a velocity of (100 + #) to define the fret number. If I remember correctly, only positions defiend at frets 1 thruogh 19 are valid and Magma will complain if a left hand position isn’t defined at or before the first note in a track is reached, and probably will also complain if a fret value lower than the left hand position in effect is reached. It had been found that if a left hand position got to be too much lower than a note’s/chord’s fret value, the game would start displaying fret values as 0. We don’t know why it does this. Just try to keep the positions relatively accurate, ie. probably no more than 3 or 4 frets below any fret value. This does mean it won’t work well to try to define different guitar arrangements in different difficulties of the same pro guitar/bass track, but you can try it.

Wouldn’t adjusting the HOPO Threshold make all the single notes HOPO?