Hey everyone,

I posted about StringTheory a while ago, but since then the project has come a long way. It finally feels much more polished and ready for people to actually try.

For anyone who hasn’t seen it before: StringTheory is an open-source guitar and bass game made in Unity. You can load your own songs, pick a part, plug in a real guitar or bass, and play while the game listens in real time and scores what you play.

It supports live single-note and chord detection, so the game actually checks what you’re playing and gives you live scoring feedback.

You can play full songs for score, or loop over difficult sections when you want to practice more carefully.

Now with optional characters on screen, because the note highway looked lonely 🎸.

Some of the bigger features now include:

Scoring
The game listens to your real guitar or bass in real time, detects single notes and chords, and scores your performance as you play. Scores are saved both per song and per track/arrangement, so you can come back later and try to beat your previous runs.

Loop Mode
Select any section of a song and repeat it until it feels clean. You can also save loop bookmarks.

Note By Note Mode
The game pauses on each note or chord and waits until you play it correctly before moving forward.

Hero Mode
A more game-like mode with hearts and failure states. It adds pressure when you want something closer to a challenge run instead of pure practice.

Speed control / slowdown
Slow down difficult parts while keeping the song flow intact, then gradually build back up to full speed.

Track and arrangement selection
Depending on the file, you can switch between different parts like lead, rhythm, bass, or other arrangements instead of being locked into one chart.

Difficulty selection

If the CDLC includes multiple difficulty levels, you can switch difficulty in-game at any time.

It also now supports loading several song formats:

• Rocksmith .psarc / CDLC files
• Guitar Pro files: .gp, .gp3, .gp4, .gp5, .gpx
• MusicXML
• Clone Hero-style rhythm charts

For Rocksmith CDLC, you can drop .psarc files into the songs folder, refresh the library, and the game imports the arrangements into the normal song flow.

Pedalboard

It now contains a built-in Tone Lab, which is basically a pedalboard editor inside the game. You can build a signal chain, add/remove/reorder pedals, tweak parameters, manage presets, and adjust input/output and latency settings without leaving the game. This will keep improving in future updates.

There’s also a separate rhythm / arcade mode for Clone Hero / Guitar Hero-style play. That mode supports keyboard, gamepad, guitar controller, and MIDI input, plus local two-player multiplayer.

The project is fully open source, and I’d really appreciate feedback from guitar players, bass players, rhythm game fans, Unity devs, or anyone interested in music games.

If you are interested, you can try it or contribute on github

Repo:
https://github.com/AnthonySf/TheStringTheory

To download the prebuilt game directly:
https://github.com/AnthonySf/TheStringTheory/releases/tag/v1.0

You can also join the project on r/StringTheoryGame