[freespirit]

I am thinking about buying guitar pro,does anybody know anything about this program is it worth me buying it.
I am only a beginner of about 3 months,working hard on my chords also finger exercises trying to make my fingers do the right moves at the right time.
would guitar pro change any music into tab.
would appreciate any advice or comments on this programme is it too
advanced for a beginner.

[clefless]

There are a few things I dislike about Guitar Pro. Firstly, I cannot figure out how to get different length notes on the same beat. Whenever I try, they tie and chose the shorter time. Secondly, the soundbanks they offer don't sound great and shouldn't be considered anything more than a bonus in the purchase.

I do like it's ability to chose sections and repeat them at varying times (eg: start at 1/4 speed, then play back at 1/2 and then 3/4, etc...), and the midi import works pretty well on it. That's a nice feature when you can't find sheet music but can find an accurate midi file. It does have a habit of messing up the timing when importing a text tab, and will not play the entire piece, if at all.

I paid full price for it about a 10 months ago, and I barely use it now. Free tabs you can get online are mostly incorrect or incomplete. I've been buying sheet music instead and concentrating on sight reading.

[allthumbs]

I use it for writing music for lessons more than anything else. It does have a steep learning curve and it certainly helps to have a background in notating different note values to make them fit a bar. More than once, I have worked out a tune on guitar and then found I had to get creative with time signatures when I notated it.

[fly135]

Guitar Pro won't change any tab into music. I believe it may import midi files, but I never use that function.

Now here's my opinion.... Guitar Pro is awesome! If you know where to look there are still plenty of tabs for GP online. IMO, the tabs are *not* mostly incorrect, but that's a matter of interpretation. I find that most of them are in the correct key and do a good job of giving you what you need to learn the song.

I've used Guitar Pro in conjunction with Hal Leonard transcribed books and had good luck with the GP tab being complimentary to the books.

With Guitar Pro you can slow down and loop sections of tab. Many tabs contain drum, bass, keyboard, strings, etc... so that you can create backing tracks, plus remove any track, or play along with your own part until you learn it. As a beginner I'm guessing you are wondering if GP will help you learn, not so much allow you to create your own tab. If so then I highly recommend it. I use it as a learning tool and can't really comment on it's tab authoring functions.

[clefless]

Guitar pro will import Powertab, TablEdit, MusicXML, Midi, and ASCII. The last is the important one as it will import any text file of tab, provided you want to spend some time fixing its time signature, etc... afterwards. The import functions are invaluable since they enable you to use sources from just about anywhere.

However, if you look at tab on paper, you can guess, provided you know the song, that the baseline (or melody) has longer or shorter notes on the same beat than the opposite. When you open / import into GP, it will never distinguish them and they will always have the same length on the same beat (unless you completely choose to ignore the sheet notation, which was why I bought it to start). If you are trying to learn a song and you don't know that the baseline is half notes while the melody is in quarters, you will end up with some pretty awful sounding results when compared to the actual piece of music.

As an example: a practice from me from four months ago that I learned from tabs. Listen carefully to the baseline. Now, listen to Peo Kindgren play it. Ignoring the great gap in skills and tempo, and listening to the baseline, you can hear where tab can fail, and where GP fails because it creates improper sheet to go with the tab. This isn't really the fault of GP though, there isn't enough information embedded into tab for it to be able to tell for sure if it should be two half notes, or two quarter notes.

If there is a way to untie those, and set the proper lengths of those notes, I would love to know how to do it. I've gone through the docs, tried every feature that looked plausible in every menu and navbar, and still haven't figured out a way to do it.

I do agree it is great for practicing (when you are familiar with the material), song looping, backing tracks, etc.. They are all great features, but accuracy is really lacking. If you are looking to do new material, you really need to have heard it a few times and listen carefully to avoid making the same kind of mistakes. Watch out for the tabs you can find on sites as well. There is a reason that there are 7 different versions of that song, none of them are the same, and only one will be even close to being correct. I've seen tabs with the wrong time signature, wrong placement on the fretboard (sound the same notes, but different tone), missing notes, etc... and it took me about a month to re learn how to play some songs once I started taking lessons. I had to change fingerings quite often so that I could do better transitions while extending note lengths.

I guess what I am getting at is it can be a good teaching tool, but don't let it be your only tool to start, or you could fall into the same traps I did.

[LarryKu]

In GuitarPro 5, you can add two voices to a staff. You have to switch to the appropriate voice before entering notes. The upper voice in GP5 is called "Lead" and the lower voice is called "Bass". There is a "Voices" item in the "Edit" menu and also buttons in the tool bar for switching between the two voices.

To add notes of different durations at the same point in a measure, they must be entered in different voices.

[clefless]

Excellent, thanks for the information. So simple and I never though of trying that. Now, if only there were a way to specify such things in raw tabs, i could take back all of my complaints.

[freespirit]

Thanks everyone for your feed back on guitar pro you have all given me good points about it and I think I will buy one.
so be ready for loads of questions when I can't work it.
Thanks again for you valuable info.

[raybaro]

I use it to create midi drum tracks to practice to

I'll import it on my daw and use a VST to play it just in case I don't want to go into pain with recording real drums

[stratplayer]

you cant go wrong with guitar pro i have been using for about a year it is truly a awesome tool.