Beta Update: Rebuilt Pick Detection, New Song Complete Screen & Goals

The beta branch jumps from v3.0DD to v3.0T - sixteen versions of work from July 13th to today. Below are the big ones, then everything else grouped by area.

Repeated notes now need a real pick

This is the biggest change in the update, and it changes what your accuracy means.

Until now, any in-tune note counted while its window was open. A string left ringing from an earlier pick would keep registering the notes that came after it - so a single stroke could score a whole run of repeats. Chugs, tremolo picking and pedal tones were all scoring themselves.

A note now needs a fresh pick when its pitch repeats from what you just played. Pick it and it counts exactly as it always did. Let one stroke ring through the run and only the note you actually picked counts.

What has not changed:

• Hammer-ons, pull-offs and slides still count without a pick - those are sounded with the fretting hand.

• Anything where the pitch changes is judged exactly as before. A ringing string cannot change its pitch, so a new note is proof on its own that you played it. Melodies, riffs and chord changes are untouched.

• Held notes and their sustains work the same as always.

• Your history is unchanged. Past scores, star ratings and completed goals all stay as they are.

Expect accuracy on chug-heavy songs to read lower than it used to. That number is now what you actually played, and it is the number Dynamic Difficulty and any goals work from. Personal bests set on those songs were earned under the old rule, so treat them as a target to beat rather than a baseline.

The detector was rebuilt from scratch this week. The first version could be fooled by a ringing string into counting picks that were never played, it did not switch on at all for the first song of a session, and it measured your signal in whatever audio buffer size you had selected - so identical playing could score differently because of a setting that has nothing to do with your guitar. All three are fixed. Palm-muted chugging that used to lose roughly one pick in five now loses about one in thirty, sustained chords went from nearly always missed to almost always caught, and bends, vibrato, mains hum and a silent room no longer set it off. Bass registers every pick whether you play fingerstyle, with a plectrum, or slap.

One screen after every song

The old post-song chain - XP screen, then celebration, then a tuning check, then stats, then a goal prompt - is gone. Every song now ends on a single Song Complete screen.

Your grade, accuracy, stats and XP sit on the left. Everything else is a checklist on the right: whether the play saved and why, your goal progress, and what is next in your session or setlist. One clear action in the corner keeps you moving - Play Next Song, Finish Set, Play Again, or back where you started.

• Weak Spot names the stretch of measures you played worst, with a bar for each section of the song and a PRACTICE THIS button that reopens the song on exactly that stretch.

• If a play does not save, you get the full screen with the exact reason, live hit and miss counts, and a one-tap fix - instead of a small pop-up. Runs below the save threshold also show Best Stretch, the passage you actually played well.

• A trend strip shows your last few attempts and how this one compares.

• Career milestones still play their full celebration, then leave a receipt on this screen with a Replay button.

• Full keyboard control, and Reduce Motion is properly respected here.

New: Song Goals

Set a target accuracy for any song and arrangement, then work toward it.

Only clean runs count - full speed, no Dynamic Tempo or Dynamic Difficulty. Assisted plays still show on the trail as hollow marks so you see the whole journey. A grade ladder on each goal shows every tier from B- up to S with your best and your target both marked, so you can see exactly how far you have to climb.

Creating a goal suggests a ladder of starter targets from your best runs so far. When a qualifying run hits your target, the goal is marked complete with a celebration. Goals are purely for the satisfaction - they do not touch XP or Career progress.

New: Anchor Highlight Box

An optional amber window on the note highway showing where your fretting hand should be for the notes coming at you, with finger-number hints next to the fret numbers.

Diagrams showing how the box picks a hand position in each case. The note highway itself looks different in game.

It works out hand position straight from the notes, so it works on any song including your own imported tablature - no extra setup. When the shape moves, a dashed ghost fades in at the new position while you finish the current run, and the box lands before the first note of the new shape strikes, so your hand is settled rather than scrambling.

Off by default. Turn it on in Settings > Appearance.

Career unlocks by progress, not level

Career mode no longer gates content behind your player level. Clear a venue and the next one opens right away. Locked venues, cities and countries now tell you exactly what to complete to unlock them instead of showing a level requirement. Anything already unlocked stays unlocked.

Hovering a locked country names its prerequisite. Italy needs Germany cleared first, so the progress line tracks Germany - 3 of its 4 cities conquers a country. Total Cities is Italy's own.

Career plays that fall short of a venue's accuracy target now earn XP for the attempt, the same as Quick Play, instead of nothing. You still need to hit the target to progress at that venue, but the practice run itself counts - and past plays missing this XP are credited automatically after you update.

Setup Doctor rebuilt

A full pass on the guitar setup diagnostic.

• The 12th-fret harmonic no longer reads as a perfect setup. It is exactly double the open string, so it measured 0.00 cents and declared "Intonation fixed" - the exact false pass the on-screen warning tells you to watch for.

• Problems are listed in the order you would actually fix them - tune, truss rod, intonation, nut. The old order told you to set intonation and then adjust the truss rod, which undoes the intonation you just set.

• Relief readings talk about buzz and action, which they never mentioned before. Saddle advice names the intonation screw rather than the height screws, and tells you to take tension off the string first.

• The nut check now says what it can and cannot see - a low nut buzzes but does not bend pitch, so this scan can only ever spot a high one.

• Scan quality is now based on how precise the scan actually was, rather than reporting "high" while skipping the fret that matters most.

• Scale length is adjustable in the app, and bass tolerances account for the longer scale.

• Results hold instead of vanishing the moment you take your hand off the strings.

Everything else

Scoring and XP

• Star ratings and letter grades now reflect what a song actually demands - the techniques it uses, how fast it moves, and how cleanly you played it. Results split into Clean and Mastery with a line showing how your score became XP.

• You earn XP from every play, not just Career - Quick Play, setlists and practice sessions included, and a run you stop partway through still counts.

• Existing play history is untouched; older plays carry a "Classic" tag.

• Accuracy shows its exact figure everywhere instead of rounding to a whole number.

Song difficulty

• Every song gets an automatic difficulty rating from its chart - up to five stars with the exact figure underneath, sortable in the browser. (Library view only this version - Folder view difficulty sort lands in the next update.) Your whole library is rated once after this update.

• The rating reflects a song's hardest sustained stretch rather than its overall average, so a tough section is not hidden by easier parts.

• Imported songs get rated too - they use their own track names, which the rating now recognizes and maps to the right part.

Hit effects

Settings > Appearance has a new HIT EFFECTS card. Every default reproduces today's look exactly, so nothing changes unless you go looking.

Hit Flash - the burst at the strike line when your note is heard. This one is detection-driven: it fires when the app hears you, so it carries your input latency.

• Standard - today's look, unchanged.

• Bigger Flash - the same white burst half again as wide, and it holds its brightness before dropping off rather than fading evenly, so it stays readable longer. Wider only; the vertical footprint is untouched, so it cannot bleed up the lane into the notes behind it.

• Color Burst - the one that actually looks different. Standard and Bigger Flash both blow out to white at the moment of contact; Color Burst keeps white to a small core and lets the string's own colour survive as a wide coloured spread around it, growing to roughly two and a half times the note's width. It also opens on a brief white pop.

Arrival Cue - off by default, and the opposite idea. This one is clock-driven: it fires the instant a note reaches the line whether you play it or not, so it never lags behind your playing the way the flash can.

• Approach Glow - a 300ms two-stage telegraph. An outline forms about 300ms out to say "incoming", then the note body ignites late on an accelerating ramp and peaks exactly at contact, clearing fast afterward so the flash owns the moment. The original was 90ms, which sits inside human reaction time - it finished before you could act on it and read as invisible.

• Beat Tick - a thin white tick at the line as each note arrives, gone in about a sixth of a second. The minimal option if you want timing information without anything growing.

Pair Color Burst with either Arrival Cue and that opening white pop is dropped automatically, so white reads as "now" and colour reads as "hit" instead of the two claiming the same moment.

Miss Flicker - off by default. A faint grey mark at the line when a note passes unplayed, gone in a quarter second.

Dim Strike Line - premium note style only. Lowers the strike line's resting glow so everything above stands out against it.

Reduce Motion & Effects now calms all of this, not just menu animations: the growth-animated burst renders at a fixed width instead of expanding, and the Approach Glow's peak is capped.

Career and stats

• Career Stats shows career activity only - no more quick-play or practice XP mixed in. Your overall profile gets its own column.

• World, Country, City and Venue progress now includes a "Next up" hint, plus a Your Venues panel showing your best run at each.

• Fixed Longest Streak showing your hit count instead, on the results screen, XP screen, career play details and venue screen.

Guitar input, amp and tuner

• Switching your answer during input setup from "GuitarSesh is my amp" back to your own amp no longer leaves the built-in amp running - it used to power back on moments after you declined it, so every pick was heard twice.

• Choosing "GuitarSesh is my amp" for the first time now starts the amp right there, instead of staying silent until you relaunched.

• Fixed the amp crackling and drifting out of tune when your interface and your speakers are on different devices, and it starts up in your saved tone.

• The Guitar Input status panel was rebuilt - a lit indicator instead of a badge that overlapped the rows beneath it, and buffer size is now one left-to-right scale from lowest latency to most stable, spelling out what your selected size means.

• Hit timing calibration is more accurate - the measurement used to be dragged early by the tail of a ringing string.

• A clear "No input" option on the first setup screen, for visualize-only play with nothing connected.

Chord Library

• Redefining a chord that uses an open string no longer hides the rest of the shape. The neck now widens to reach the highest fret you have fingered.

• Corrected several E Standard chord entries stored against the wrong fret.

Languages

• Fixed whole sections that were in the wrong language - Danish and Norwegian screens no longer show Swedish, Italian no longer shows Spanish.

• Traditional Chinese now reads as proper Taiwan wording. European Portuguese uses European wording throughout.

• Removed stray characters from Ukrainian, German, Hungarian, Czech and Romanian, and restored missing accents across Swedish, Norwegian and Hungarian.

• The Daily Hub is fully translated, along with the career world map, the Encore celebration, the shared trend graph, and the song database records and mastery views.

Setup and startup

• Long waits at startup now show a real progress panel - a heading, a bar with a count and percentage, and a line explaining what is being worked on. It covers the database update, song library scan, career restore and tuning data restore.

• On a fresh install, rating your library and scanning your files no longer runs silently - on a full library the window could previously appear to freeze.

• Updating to a build that changes the database format converts your play history once, on first launch. That conversion used to run silently and could look like the game had frozen - it now shows a progress panel naming what is being worked on, with a bar, a count and a percentage.

• If tuning data ever goes missing, it is restored automatically with a brief progress message instead of an error popup asking for a manual database sync.

Menus and quality of life

• The Measure Sync Intro count-in (Settings > Behavior, off by default) is 2 bars instead of 6, and holds a steady tempo while Dynamic Tempo is on. The setting name now shows the real bar count.

• Discord and Steam Forums links now sit on the main menu.

• The changelog is a page-by-page browser, and its NEW markers now last the whole time you are on a version instead of vanishing after one visit - counted from the version you updated from.

• The Setlist screen's background drifts through all of its colour themes over time instead of sitting on one.

• The Goals screen got an animated background, cascading rows and a progress chart that draws itself.

• Settings > Appearance groups its right-side options into their own boxed panels.

Fixes

• Fixed a crash that could close the game instantly with no message and nothing in the log.

• Fixed your default Quick Play song silently disappearing, most often after switching profiles or on certain fresh installs.

• Fixed a new profile silently taking over a previous player's folders on relaunch.

• Fixed a crash when opening Quick Play or Settings on a brand-new profile with no songs loaded.

• Fixed "Update All Local" scrambling or duplicating Setlist history when run more than once - affected lists were repaired automatically.

• Fixed a long-standing gap where D Standard pitch data was never installed, which could silently break note detection for the next song you played.

• Stopped writing a diagnostic file after every single song - the setting that controlled it was off by default and never worked, so every player was quietly collecting one file per song forever.

• Logs are now one folder per day, kept for a week, in a single location.

As always, bug reports and feedback go through the in-game Feedback screen, the Discord, or the Steam forums. Thanks for testing.