SET UPYOUR REAL GUITAR

An electric guitar, or an acoustic with a pickup, plugged into your computer. The game gets a clean signal straight from the strings, so it hears every note, even fast ones, and the band and music can play out loud.

Only plugged in: the game's built-in amp, and Prog Metal, the hardest song difficulty. Wrong notes also count against you (so the game can coach you) plugged in or with a cable into your phone. A microphone would hear the game's own sounds, so these stay off for it.

Your phone becomes the guitar's ears. It listens, works out each note, and sends just the note name to the game on your computer. No sound is sent and nothing is saved. Its mic is for an acoustic guitar; an electric plugs into the phone with a guitar cable.

Same Wi-Fi is fastest. With the phone and computer on the same network, notes arrive in a few milliseconds. If they can't reach each other directly, notes go through the internet instead ("a little slower"): it still works, and Check my timing evens it out for songs.

Songs and the phone's mic: the band plays from the computer, and the phone's mic would hear it as your notes. Wear headphones on the computer (headphones on the phone don't help) and turn on I'm wearing headphones. With a cable ticked, you don't need them.

What you'll hear with a cable: the phone listens, it doesn't play your guitar back. An unplugged electric is quiet, which is fine for practice. Some guitar-to-phone adapters have their own headphone jack, so you can hear yourself through that.

For an acoustic guitar without a pickup. Your computer's built-in mic works, or any mic it can see. Got an electric, or an acoustic with a pickup? Plug it in dry instead, even if you also play through an amp (a mic on an amp hears the amp's sound and the room, not your strings): see Playing through your own amp.

No guitar needed. Tap or click the notes on the fretboard, or press the keys A to G when the game asks for a note's name. It works on phones and laptops, and it's a great way to learn where the notes are before you pick up the guitar. Switch to Play my guitar whenever you're ready: tapping still works alongside it.

When you're plugged in, the sound of your guitar has to come from somewhere. You have four choices. The game always judges your clean, dry guitar, so whichever you pick, your score is the same.

Hearing notes on their own? If notes play when you're not touching the guitar, turn off "loopback" in your interface's settings: it's sending the game's sound back in as an input.

The game listens for your picks and reads each note's pitch, and it needs your dry guitar for that. An amp's direct out (or an XLR or line out) sends the amp's sound instead: distortion holds every note at the same loudness, hides the pick, and adds overtones, so the game misses most of what you play. In our test, a high-gain channel let the game hear about 1 in 4 notes, and even a clean channel missed some and added notes that weren't played. If the game hears an amp or a distortion pedal, it tells you under the level meter.

Effects pedals: tuners and clean boosts in front of the interface are fine. Distortion, fuzz, compressors, delay and reverb change what the game hears, so put them on the amp's side of the split.

Latency is the time your guitar's sound takes to travel into the computer, through the amp, and back out to your ears. A real amp has none. Software always has some, and a web browser adds the most, because it isn't built for live audio. That's the browser and your computer's audio drivers, not your guitar or the game.

Lower it

• Set a smaller buffer size in your audio interface's settings (128 or 256 samples).
• Use wired headphones. Bluetooth adds a lot of latency, often a quarter of a second.
• Close other programs that use audio, and use Chrome or Edge on Windows.
• For zero, hear your guitar through one of the zero-latency options above.

If the game stutters, falling notes jump, your notes seem to land late, and even typing in the browser's address bar gets slow while a game is open, your browser is probably drawing without your graphics card. Everything then runs on the processor, and it can't keep up. The game shows a tip when it notices this. It's quick to fix.

Already have amp software you like, a free amp-modeling app, or a plugin in your recording software? Play through it, and let the game listen alongside. You hear your tone with almost no latency, and the game hears your dry guitar.

1. Run your amp software on your audio interface, using the interface's own low-latency driver (ASIO on Windows; on a Mac, the standard one is already low latency). Play and check you hear your tone.
2. In the game, open Your setup, choose Play my guitar, Plugged in, and pick the same interface in the Input list.
3. Set Hear my guitar to Off, so you don't hear your guitar twice.
4. Turn the game's music to taste, run Check my timing, and play.

If the game can't open your interface while your amp software is running: on Windows, some interface drivers let only one program use the interface at a time. Check your interface's settings for an option to share it with other programs, or let the browser use the interface's standard Windows driver while your amp software uses ASIO. If neither works, a real amp or direct monitoring (above) gives you zero latency with no software at all.