Questions
FAQ
No. You need the tablature files, not the software that writes them. GuitarSesh reads .gp3, .gp4, .gp5, .gp and .gpx files directly and turns the notes in them into a playable chart.
Any 1/4" to USB cable, or any audio interface you already have. Pitch detection runs in a compiled C++ module on the audio thread, so the note you play is graded against the note that is charted, not against a button press.
Windows and macOS, on Steam, in Early Access. There is no mobile version and no browser version.
No. One purchase, no subscription, no per-song charge, no catalogue to buy from. The songs you play are the tablature files that are already on your drive.
The data. Every note of every play is graded as it goes past, and the verdict is written down. One play produces one note log: a row for every note in the chart, carrying the string and fret, whether it was hit or missed, the exact moment you hit it against the moment it was charted, the timing word that gap earned, the technique on the note, and the bar it sat in with the tempo that bar was running at.
Those note logs are the source of truth. The database is rebuilt from them rather than the other way round, and the database is what every screen reads: song stats, the per-measure heat strip, the leaderboard, goals, career stars, the tempo the game picks for you the next time you load that song. The numbers on this site are that same store. Nothing here is a one-off score screen that vanishes when you press continue.
Second, the library. GuitarSesh plays the tablature files you already own, so nothing is locked behind a catalogue and no song has to be licensed before you can practise it.
Per note: string and fret, hit or miss, the hit time against the charted time, the timing verdict, the technique tagged on it in the tablature file (bend, slide, palm mute, harmonic), the bar index, and that bar's tempo.
The timing verdict is a fixed chart-time rule, so it does not move when you widen the hit window. Perfect is within 24 ms either side of the beat. Good is 24 to 72 ms late. Beyond 72 ms late is Late, and more than 24 ms early is Early — there is deliberately no "good but early" band.
Per play: accuracy carried to two decimals, longest streak, hit and miss counts, average tempo, letter grade, which arrangement you played (lead, rhythm or bass), and the assistance mode with the level it started and ended on. A play is written once it finishes above a 30% accuracy floor.
Four assistance modes, and the one you used is stored on the play so no number is ever quietly flattering.
No Assistance plays the song exactly as written. Static Altered Tempo holds one fixed slowdown for the whole song. Dynamic Tempo keeps every note and moves the speed. Dynamic Difficulty holds the speed and moves the note density: eleven levels, thinner at the bottom, the song as written at the top, shifting mid-song as your accuracy moves.
It stays on your machine. The note logs are plain JSON files in a folder you choose, and the database is a SQLite file that sits beside the program. Both are yours to open, copy or back up.
There is no player account and no play-data sync. The module that talks to a server is a development-only tool and is excluded from the build you download, so there is nothing in the shipped program that uploads a play. Career mode fetches its map assets once on first run. Submit Feedback and Community Polls are the two features that talk to a server, and only after you accept an in-app consent prompt: a submission carries your Steam ID, platform, app version, the free-text or poll vote you send, and the IP address and timestamp your request arrives with. See the privacy policy for the full breakdown.
GuitarSesh is made by one person, and Early Access is how that is done in the open rather than behind a wall. The game is playable now and changes often; the changelog lives inside the program so you can see what moved. Anything on this page marked "not yet" is exactly that — a real answer with no date attached to it.
Before the song starts it builds eleven tempo ladders for that chart. Level 1 plays well below the written speed; level 11 plays at the written speed. While you play it tracks accuracy phrase by phrase and moves you up or down a rung, and a change only lands on a phrase boundary, so the song speeds up between musical ideas instead of in the middle of one.
Every bar carries its own tempo, and every note is stamped with the tempo its bar was running at when you hit it. That is why a per-bar tempo profile of a song is something the program can show you rather than something it estimates.
Drilling. Pick a song, pick a range of bars, and play only those, with a count-in, as many passes as you want. Each drill is recorded on its own: the bars, the tempo used, the tempo you are working toward, accuracy, hit and miss counts, how long it ran, which attempt it was, and whether it cleared the 85% pass mark.
It also reads your note logs to point at the bars you miss most, and it keeps a practice queue so a hard passage can wait for you rather than be forgotten. A drill does not write a play row, so drilling a hard bar can never inflate your song stats.
A target accuracy you set for one song and one arrangement. A run only counts toward it if it was played with no assistance, or at the top static level, which is full written speed — a slowed or thinned run can never clear a goal. When a qualifying run meets the target the goal flips to met, with the date and the accuracy kept as a receipt, and a celebration says so.
Goals award no XP and touch nothing in career mode. They are recognition, on purpose.
By default the tuner names whichever open string your pitch is nearest to. That is right when you are tuning and wrong when you are restringing: a fresh low E being wound up from slack passes nearer to other strings on the way, and a tuner that follows it will happily tell you a badly slack string is in tune.
Locking a string pins the target. Cents are then measured against that string and nothing else, and a string sitting an octave flat reads as roughly twelve frets flat instead of green. Auto mode stays the default; the lock is there for the job that needs it.
It walks you through capturing a settled pitch at a set of frets on one string, then separates what it heard into four physical causes: tuning offset, saddle intonation in millimetres for that string, neck relief with the direction the truss rod needs to go, and a nut-height flag. Each one comes back as a ranked instruction rather than a graph to interpret.
If too few frets were captured it says the confidence is low and withholds the millimetre numbers, because a measurement you are about to act on with a truss rod should not be a guess.
There is one, and it is optional. Guitar Input carries an amp with input gain, drive, a three-band tone stack, a noise gate and a cabinet, four models from clean to high gain, and an effects chain you can save as a preset and pin to a song. On Windows and macOS the audio runs from compiled C++ so it stays clean at small buffer sizes.
You choose where you hear it, and headphones or monitors are the sensible answer. If you already monitor through your interface or a real amp, leave it switched off and nothing changes.
No. The leaderboard is local: per-song boards built from the plays on that install, which you can filter to one profile or show across all of them. Several people can each have a profile on one copy and each keeps their own plays, streaks and career.
From the files you already own, or from ones you write yourself in any tablature editor. GuitarSesh does not sell, host or supply tablature, and it never asks where a file came from — it just reads what you point it at.
Experimentally, yes. Bass arrangements load and play, the tuner, tuning check, chord tools and amp all have a bass mode, and seven bass tunings ship. I do not own a bass, so none of it has had real playtesting and the tolerances are a first pass. If you play bass, your feedback during Early Access is what will fix that.
Not yet. The program says so in as many words when it meets one. The frequency tables that drive note detection are plain editable files, so adding an instrument is a question of defining it rather than rewriting anything — I need somebody who owns one to define it with me during Early Access.
Not yet — the highway runs top to bottom only. A horizontal layout is a rendering change rather than a setting, so it is a real piece of work and I am watching how much demand there is during Early Access.
Not a standalone one yet. There is a two-bar count-in before every song, and a count-in on Measure Master drills, both of which you can switch off. The tempo and timing machinery a metronome would need is already there, so this one is small; it is just not done.
No, and not in the near term. Everything runs on your machine with nothing to connect to. Single player is the thing being built well first.
29, picked on first launch and changeable at any time: English, Spanish (Latin America and Spain), Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), German, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Greek, Turkish, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese and Arabic. Arabic is laid out right to left, and the Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Thai faces are handled so text wraps properly rather than running off a panel.
Yes. Your guitar arrives as an audio input, and macOS treats every audio input as the microphone, so the first time GuitarSesh listens it asks. Decline and note detection has nothing to hear. You can grant it afterwards in System Settings, under Privacy and Security, then Microphone.
Mine. My own library and play data — one player, not a typical result. They are on the site because the honest way to show what the program keeps is to show it keeping something real, and the only real database I am entitled to publish is my own.