Fretatro

Guitar Hero inside Balatro. Every blind is a song from your own Clone Hero library, and the cards you play are the lanes. Hit notes to score, build streaks and Star Power, and let your jokers play along.

Play with a keyboard, a controller or a real Guitar Hero guitar. Requires Lovely and Steamodded.

Fretatro is made by one person. The programming was done with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding assistant.

Install

Mod manager (easiest): install Fretatro from Thunderstore with r2modman or the Thunderstore Mod Manager. Lovely and Steamodded come with it.

By hand:

1. Install Lovely and Steamodded (guide).
2. Unzip Fretatro into its own folder in Balatro's Mods folder, so you get Mods/Fretatro/Fretatro.json. Windows: %AppData%\Balatro\Mods · macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Balatro/Mods
3. Start Balatro: Fretatro should be listed under Mods.

Add your songs

Fretatro plays Clone Hero songs (a folder per song with notes.chart or notes.mid and its audio).

Mods → Fretatro → Config shows the songs folder in use. With no songs, hands play like normal Balatro and a message tells you to add songs.

How to play

A blind is one song.

• You get 1 hand and 6 discards. Build your hand, play it, and pick 1 of 3 songs from the setlist.
• The setlist shows each song's length and how long until the first note (green short, yellow 5–20% of the song, red longer). Orange switches guitar / bass / keys.
• Short songs (under 600 notes) make every note worth more, up to x2; very short ones (under 300) also shrink the blind.

Your scoring cards are the lanes, left to right: green, red, yellow, blue, orange.

• Only cards that score get a lane; extra played cards sit out.
• With fewer lanes, the higher frets fold onto the lanes you have.
• A debuffed card keeps its lane, but nothing plays there.

Notes become score as you play.

• Your multiplier climbs x1 → x4 with your streak (10 / 20 / 30 notes). Each note pays 0 / 1 / 2 / 3 Chips, doubled in Star Power.
• Sustains, solos, jokers, Picks and enhanced cards add their part live; the left panel shows Chips × Mult building against the blind.
• Card enhancements trigger on Perfect hits in their lane.
• Star Power: complete star phrases (blue notes), activate at 50% with Select / tilt (Tab on a keyboard), whammy star sustains to charge it.
• Pair, Two Pair and Three of a Kind get +1 Mult. Extra hands (Grabber, Burglar...) become retriggers; extra discards add to the 6.
• There's no fail: misses just cost score. The crowd meter pays up to $4 a round.

Difficulty (Config) picks the chart. Easier charts have fewer notes, so each is worth a little more (Easy x1.3, Medium x1.25, Hard x1.1). Like in Guitar Hero, Easy barely uses blue and orange and Medium barely uses orange, so the shop leaves out jokers and Picks for those lanes there.

Note shapes: white centre = hammer-on (fret, no strum) · hollow = tap · blue = Star Power · purple bar = open note (strum, no fret) · $ + x * G = special notes from jokers and Picks.

Controls

In a song

Pausing saves the song; when you come back it rewinds 2 seconds and counts you in.

In the setlist: Green / Red / Yellow pick song 1 / 2 / 3, Blue rerolls (needs the Setlist voucher or a Reroll Tag), Orange switches guitar / bass / keys. On a keyboard: A S D F G.

In Balatro's menus with a guitar (set it up first with F8):

A controller and the keyboard work in menus exactly as in vanilla Balatro.

Keys anywhere: F8 guitar setup · F9 calibrate timing (play 24 notes like a song; Green saves, Blue / Orange nudge it by 5 ms) · F7 run summary (songs played, accuracy, full combos).

Config (Mods → Fretatro): difficulty, note speed, input (tap frets or strum; Auto picks by device), timing meter, lefty flip, colorblind shapes, backgrounds (a song's own image or video, or a concert stage).

What's in it

Every card's in-game text explains exactly what it does.

Troubleshooting

• No songs: Mods → Fretatro → Config → Rescan songs, or drag your Songs folder onto the window. Songs without your difficulty's chart are skipped.
• Timing feels off: press F9. Turn on the timing meter to see each hit early or late. last_song_log.txt in %AppData%\Balatro\Fretatro lists your last song's hits and timing.
• Something broke: look for [Fretatro] lines in the Lovely console. After repeated errors Fretatro switches itself off for the session and Balatro plays normally.