Getting your guitar into Fret Beam

Fret Beam listens to your guitar and writes the tab. The detection engine is built into the app — there's nothing extra to install, no Helix required. It works with any USB audio interface carrying a clean, dry guitar signal. This walks through picking your interface as the input and confirming Fret Beam hears it before you go live.

Get your guitar into your computer the way you normally record — through your audio interface, amp, or modeler. If you can already record guitar on this computer, the signal is there; Fret Beam just needs to be pointed at it.

The steps

1. Plug in the way you always do. USB interface into your computer, guitar into the interface. On first run, your operating system asks for microphone / audio-input permission — click Allow, or the app can't hear anything.

2. Pick your interface as the input. Open Settings → Guitar input and choose your interface by name. There's an Automatic (finds it for you) option, but it only auto-matches devices named HELIX — every other interface has to be picked by hand, or the app just sits at "No guitar."

3. If you see a second "Signal" dropdown, pick the clean channel. On multi-channel interfaces and modelers a Signal dropdown appears (Input 1, Input 2…). Play, and choose the one the meter lights up on — that's your clean DI.

   On a Helix, the dry DI is USB channel 7.

4. Watch the Live Level meter. Play a few notes and check the meter (0–100%):

   • 8% or higher — "Good, it's hearing your guitar." You're set.
   • Connected but quiet — "Very quiet, play a few notes." Turn up the interface's own gain.
   • Nothing — "No guitar on this input yet." Wrong channel or wrong device; go back to step 2.

5. Check the top-bar status light. The USB guitar ready light tells you the same thing at a glance: green = hearing you, amber = warming up, red = can't hear the guitar yet.

Your choice sticks — the app remembers your interface across relaunches, so this is a one-time setup.

If nothing shows up when you Record

A wrong or silent input is the number-one reason nothing appears when you hit Record.

Open Settings → Guitar input, play, and get the Level meter into the green. If the meter's dead, confirm the device is the right one and turn up the gain on the interface itself. Remember that a non-Helix interface is never picked for you — you have to choose it by hand.

This is a separate thing from OBS's own Audio Input Capture source. That step is about getting audio into your recording; this step is only about getting your guitar into Fret Beam. For the recording side, see Adding the live tab to OBS. More setup questions are in Troubleshooting.