Clone Hero
What is Clone Hero?
Clone Hero is, as the name may suggest, a clone of Guitar Hero for PC. If you don’t know, Guitar Hero was a rhythm-based game where you’d play a guitar along-side the music. The great thing is this version can be played on PC, without any extra controllers!
Why use Clone Hero instead of Guitar Hero, Rock Band, or Fortnite Festival?
Guitar Hero Live was discontinued in 2018, meaning you can no longerplay new songs on it, and are limited to the original 42 games. This also applies to older entries.
Rock Band 4 was a great option, but as of January 2024, they’ve stopped released weekly songs.
Fortnite Festival is rather new, and while it’s still updated, you’re still limited to the songs that Epic has added to the game.
Clone Hero allows you to load on your own songs (including custom charts), use legacy hardware (I’m using the Guitar Hero 5 Wii controller), and just offers more control.
What about YARG?
YARG (short for Yet Another Rhythem Game) has more features on paper, and is open source, but has a few issues that prevent me from playing it:
- No matter how much I try, I get incredible controller latency on YARG. It makes it unplayable.
- YARG feels less polished.
- I like the graphics of Clone Hero more.
That said, it’s still being updated frequently, while Clone Hero has all but ceased development (1.1 will come out soon, and they have a sequel planned, but it’s a long ways off). If YARG gets more polished (and the latency is fixed), I may very well make the switch.
How to get Clone Hero
Downloading Clone Hero is easy. Just go to https://clonehero.net/, click Download, and click the correct download button for your system!
Installing is also easy, just follow the instructions on the installer.
How to use Clone Hero
Buttons
The first thing to know about clone hero is that you control it with the 5 buttons: Green, Red, Yellow, Blue, and Orange. In the menus, Green is select, Red is back. The other buttons are for secondary things, like sorting the song list. On the official controllers, this is pretty self explanetory. On the PC, those buttons are automatically mapped to A, S, J, K, and L.
To move up and down on official controllers, you can use the strum bar or (if it’s included on your model) the joystick. On the keyboard, it’s just the up and down arrow keys.
Setting up
Before you can do anything, you’ll need to setup your local account. Press the start button on your controller (enter/return on keyboard), and choose create profile. Type in the name of you choice (on your PC keyboard), and press enter. back to your controller Select the type of controller you’re using. Most guitars will be 5 fret, but if you have a Guitar Hero Live controller, that has 6 frets. If you’re on PC, the best option is 5 fret guitar. For the drums, it depends on what kind of drums you have (you can use a real electric drumset). For more info, see this page.
You can do a bit more customization, which i highly recommend you do. Press start to open your profile settings. Go to Highway Length, and crank that thing up! I play on 500%, which I find is a good balance between helpful and non-distracting. You can choose whatever you want.
If you’re using a keyboard, you’ll also want to enable gamepad mode, which disables strumming. Trust me, you don’t want to have to strum on the keyboard. Press Red to get out of the profile menu.
Now you can play!
Navigating the menus
Navigating the menus is pretty self explanetory. Just move the arrow keys to the menu element you want to go into, and press Green. You can press Red to go back. All the controls are on the bottom of the screen, so just look there if you want to know what you can do.
To choose a song, first go to Quickplay. There you’ll see a list of songs, sorted alphabetically. You can press the Yellow button to change the sorting. Press it once to sort by artist.
When you find the song you want to play, just press green.
The first option set you’ll see is the instrument. In most cases, the only option here will be Lead Guitar, but sometimes other options are available. Select the instrument of choice.
The next set of options is difficulty. Most songs that you source will only have Expert difficulty, which doesn’t neccasarily mean it’s very difficult. Expert is just the exact 1-1 translation of what the actual artists did in the song, so while that can be difficult, it’s not always. Select the difficulty of choice.
You can choose some modifiers (if you enabled gamepad mode, you’ll already have one), or just choose Ready. Finally, you can press ready to start the song.
How to play
To play a song, you want to press the correct button as the note appears on the screen. It’s pretty easy to pick up, but difficult to master. If you’re on a guitar (or didn’t turn on gamepad mode), you’ll also need to strum the guitar at the right moment too.
Sustains require you to hold down the note for as long as it appears, but you don’t have to hold down the strum bar.
Taps (which have a lot more black on them) require no strumming, so you can just tap the notes.
Some groups notes will be light blue, which indicates that, provided you hit all of them correctly, you’ll get some star power for them. Each group will fill up your star power by 1/4. After your star power is 1/2 full, you can press the star power button (H on the keyboard) to activate your star power. This will double your multiplier for as long as you have star power.
Finally, you can whammy on sustains to get extra star power for them (only works on light blue sustains).
I find the easiest way to figure out the mechanics is to just play! A great beginner song is After Dark by MrKitty.
How to get songs for Clone Hero
Now I hear you, “how do I get custom songs on Clone Hero”? Worry not my friend, Enchor is here to save the day.
Chorus Enchore (enchor.us) is a site that hosts loads of custom charts that people have made. Just search for the song of your choice, and click download! Some songs will have duplicate charts, so compare them to see which one seems more complete. The little number next to the instrument icon represents Intensity, which means exactly what it seems like it would.
Once you download a song, put it in your Clone Hero songs folder (usually in the documents folder). Go to settings > general, and reload the songs. After that, it should show your new songs in the song library.
Legal disclaimer: To be in the best position legally, only download charts for songs you already own. Or don’t, I really don’t care
Types of input for Clone Hero
Keyboard: This is the option requiring the least setup, and is ready out of the box. It isn’t as fun as the real deal though.
Guitar: This is the classic input method, and (imo) the best option.
Drums: This can be used with the official drums, or an electric drumset with MIDI support.
Other instruments: While Rock Band support Vocals and Piano, Clone Hero doesn’t. YARG does however, so that’s an option if you choose to pursue it.
Multiplayer
Finally, I’d like to just touch on Multiplayer, which is a really fun way to play the game. It requires 2 things:
- A secondary controller, or another PC (with the same songs)
- Someone to play it with
To connect a second player, just press the start button on their controller (after you’ve already logged in), and choose a profile. If the controller activates your profile menu, you’ll need to press the Spacebar and assign the controller to player 2.
You can do quickplay, which combines points into an overall score, or versus, which puts you up head-to-head.
If you’re interested in doing online multiplayer, check out this page which covers more on it.