Software to Tab Out our Songs

The Volt

Sorry if this is in the wrong place but we've just recruited a new guitarist and we want to tab out the songs for him. Unfortunately we're not at all good at writing music so I'm looking for software (preferably free) to do this for me. Does such software exist?

It wasn't me!

Powertabs is dead handy for this and is indeed free software.

The Volt

dead sound of ya

The Volt

hang on does this allow you to import mp3 tracks into it?

feylya

No program will automatically tab your songs with any sort of decent accuracy. With PowerTab, you will have to enter what note you play and the timing for each note

The Volt

Ah right =/

There's a gap in the market

Malice

Personally I can't recommend Guitar Pro highly enough. I have used Power Tab in the past but I found the interface clunky and very hard to get to grips with. As far as I can tell, development of Power Tab stopped sometime in 2000. Guitar Pro on the other hand is being regularly updated. There's a full list of it's features on their website but what I find most useful are:

• The Realistic Sound Engine. Okay, it's not perfect but it still sounds far, far better than standard MIDI. The 5.2 edition ships has 265Mb of available sounds covering drums, guitar and bass.
• Being able to slow down/speed up different sections. You can either set it to get slightly faster each time it replays the section or stay at a constant slow speed. This is very useful for getting to grips with difficult sections.
• PDF/Text Export. You don't have to be worried about other people having the software as you can just create a PDF or text file for them.
• Percussion. You can add drums tracks to your songs. To me this is far more engaging than listening to the repetitive and annoying tap-tap-tap of a metronome .
• Proper arrangement of tab into musical notation. You are forced to take the riff that's in your head and think about the time signature/tempo of the piece so that it fits properly into bars. Before using this program 4/4, 3/4/, 6/8 etc were just reminders of when I was sent to piano lessons as a kid. Now I can see on the tab that there has to be a pause of x beats before the next part begins or that this riff has to begin on that beat so that it can end in time.

They have a demo of the software available for download. Try it out and feel free to PM me if you have questions about using it. Guitar Pro isn't free but it's easily worth a mere €60 as far as I'm concerned. That's less than one night out on the beer .

MagicMarker

+1 for guitar pro

The Volt

Sound bud, shall check it out

Kaiser_Sma

Is guitar pro any good for bass players? Whenever i see guitar pro tabs it's inspecific as to weather it's for guitar or bass.

Malice

Kaiser_Sma wrote: »

Is guitar pro any good for bass players? Whenever i see guitar pro tabs it's inspecific as to weather it's for guitar or bass.

In my experience unless it's a badly-written tab it will contain both guitar and bass . Each Guitar Pro tab contains a number of tracks. Each track generally corresponds to an instrument e.g. a track for guitar, one for drums and one for bass. Each track can be viewed and played back independently of the others. For example you can mute the guitar and drums and just listen to the bass or you can mute the bass and play along to the guitar and drums. As mentioned previously, for difficult parts you can slow them down and loop them.

Kaiser_Sma

Awesome thanks

Mr. CooL ICE

Back in the day (before on-line tabs were banned), I loved Guitar Pro. Its a little bit buggy in places, but overall, its extremely intuitive and excellent for learning from. I highly recommend this for your guitarist

As for bass; since I'm a bassist, it's what I used to always use. A lot of songs are tricky to learn bass by ear due to bad production, etc, but it lets you change each track so you can simply boost the volume, or even cut everything else out completely.

Malice

LordChessington wrote: »

Back in the day (before on-line tabs were banned), I loved Guitar Pro.

I have just a small query on this. Am I right that per the sticky in this forum, online tabs haven't been banned, discussion on copyrighted tabs has been? Can't we can post up our own tabs of our own music? Also, are you saying that you don't use Guitar Pro any more? In which case, please let let rest of us know what you use instead .

LordChessington wrote:

Its a little bit buggy in places

What problems have you had with it?