How to add any song to Guitar Hero 3

Posted at: Wednesday 1st October 2008 by Phil Hartup

Phil Hartup shows how you can expand the PC version of Guitar Hero 3 by adding your own MP3s to the game

Note the version of the song you are getting, ideally you want to make sure both your song and its note chart are from the same album, as you certainly don’t want to be trying to sync up an unplugged or live note chart with a studio recording MP3. A handy tip to spot this is looking at the track's length.  If your song and the chart are identical length to the nearest second, then you can be 99 per cent certain you’re using the same version.

First off, you'll need to select the version of the game to tinker with in GHCP under ‘File’ and ‘Open game settings’. This part is important, because using the stock Guitar Hero 3 settings means you'll still be able to play online and access your old saved games. A modded version will break this compatibility, so its wise to save the English version and use another version for your modded exploits.

You can rename these, so for instance you could rename the French version to ‘Modified’ and thus leave the English version as the default. Using stock settings will still be compatible with online play and your saved games, while a modded version will break this compatibility. You can left-click on GHCP's system tray icon to bring up a list of the saved profiles to switch between your modified version and the original game, then right-click twice to launch.

SEEN A THOUSAND FACES, AND WE ROCKED THEM ALL

To add a song, click on the 'add' tab at the top of the screen, and select ‘new song’. This can also be done with the shortcut Alt-N. For the purposes of this example (see images) we’ll be adding the track Song 2 by Blur. We’ve made sure we're using correct version of the song that matches the note-track file. On Scorehero they list the available difficulty settings for a song. In this case Song 2 is available for all difficulty levels, but Voodoo Child, for instance is only available on expert difficulty.

Select the MP3 in the box labelled 'Guitar Track’  then select the chart file in the corresponding box to set the music to the notes. Click OK, then on the next screen you can enter meta information such as the name ofthe song, the lead singer, bassist and the year it was produced - although all of this is optional.

The song is now added to the song list. Next you have to set the list in the game where you’d like to play it. In this instance we’ve set it to the first tier and set six songs to be unlocked by default in the handily named ‘Default unlocked songs’ tab. This gives us access to the new song right at the start of the game.

At this point, you still haven't made any changes to the game files. To implement your changes, you need to open the 'File' menu then select 'Execute Actions' to make the magic happen. One important thing to remember is that the control panel will make a backup when you first start to use it. This is very important as we found out during the course of this experience. To access the backup use the ‘Game Management’ tab and ‘Restore Original Settings’. If you somehow break your installation of Guitar Hero 3, which can easily happen when modding a game, this should restore the game to its original state.