Fretladder

About this site

Back to the charts

What this site is

Fretladder publishes calculated difficulty ratings for rhythm-game charts – guitar, bass, keys, drums and vocals from Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Clone Hero, and the custom charts made for them. Every rating is computed from the chart file itself. None of it is hand-assigned, voted on, or edited afterwards. How the calculation works is explained under “How it works” on the charts page, and in full on the methodology page.

An independent project

Fretladder is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or run by Staycation44, and it is not the fretwork project itself. It is a separate fork that uses fretwork’s engine under its MIT licence, hosted and maintained independently. Anything about this site – a wrong rating, a missing pack, a bug – belongs here rather than with the engine’s author or their YouTube channel.

What is stored here, and what is not

The site hosts no audio and no chart files, and nothing can be downloaded from it. What it holds is numbers calculated from charts, the song, artist, charter and pack names those charts already carry, and one graph per chart, drawn from its note density. Where a chart is published on Chorus Encore, or has a Clone Hero leaderboard, its graph links there; nothing is hosted here. It is not a place to get songs.

Ownership

Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Clone Hero, and the names and marks that go with them, belong to their respective owners. The songs belong to their rights holders, and the charts to the people who made them. Fretladder claims none of it, and is endorsed by none of them.

Licence

The code behind this site is a fork of fretwork, published under the MIT licence, which requires the original copyright notice to travel with it, unaltered: “Copyright (c) 2026 Staycation”. The fork’s own source is on GitHub.