Guitar Pro

Guitar Pro is computer software which serves the purpose of making it simpler for musicians to compose music, editing directly into a tablature and/or musical partiture, and study music by offering advanced playback capabilities. It can also be used as a MIDI sequencer.

History

There have been three popular public major releases of the software: versions 3, 4 and 5. A few minor releases, with bug fixes and minor features added, were also made available. The license included free upgrades to all minor releases. Upon release of a major version owners of previous releases were allowed a 50% discount to upgrade their software. Guitar Pro was initially designed as a tablature editor, but has since evolved into a full fledged score writer. Up to version 4 the software was only available for Microsoft Windows. Guitar Pro 5, released on November 2005, undertook a year long porting effort and Guitar Pro 5 for the Mac OS X was released on July 2006.

Background

The software makes use of multiple instrument tracks which follow standard staff notation, but also shows the notes on tablature notation. It gives the musician visual access to keys (for keyboard instruments) and strings (for guitars, basses, banjos, etc.) for the song to be composed, and allows live previews of the notes to be played at a specified tempo. It allows for certain tracks to be muted and provides dynamic control over the volume, phasing and other aspects of each track. Included in version 4 onwards is a keyboard that allows pianists to add their part to a composition. Guitar Pro outputs sound by means of a MIDI library and/or, as of version 5, the "Realistic Sound Engine" (RSE), which uses high quality recorded samples for a more realistic playback. By using its live preview feature musicians may play along with the song, following the tablature played in real time. Files composed using Guitar Pro are recorded in the GP5, GP4 and GP3 format. Such files are available for free on several websites, including songs of both underground and popular bands. However, copyright issues raised by the Music Publishers' Association (MPA) pressured some of these sites to close.

Uses

Guitar Pro is a software meant to help musicians and aspiring musicians to compose, transcribe, edit and study music. It also helps the sharing of compositions among groups of people and other musicians. Guitar Pro 5 is also well suited for classical music study and composing. Prior to version 4, it wasn't possible to remove the tablature from the screen or printout, making it a little confusing for classically-trained musicians to edit standard notation scores; and impossible to achieve print-outs without the tablature notation. This limitation has been lifted as of version 5 and many improvements to standard notation and printout quality introduced. Guitar Pro is also a useful tool for guitarists when learning to play songs.

Problems

In some cases, version 5.2 has been found to use a large amount of system resources. This has been seen to be above 200MB of RAM in some places. Also, RSE still has some kinks that need to be worked out as they don't correctly play on many media players.

Open source alternatives

Recently a few open source scorewriters started to work or import and play Guitar Pro files albeit with limited functionality when compared to the original (most notably worse playback, synchronization, display layout, printout quality and lack of RSE playback).

• TuxGuitar can import Guitar Pro files, Java/SWT based, works in Linux/Debian, Windows, Mac OS
• DGuitar can import Guitar Pro files, works in any operating system with Java Runtime Environment 1.4.X
• KGuitar can import Guitar Pro files, works in Linux, but has had no releases since 2005.

External links

• Guitar Pro's official website
• Guitar Pro Tabs
• Guitar Pro Tabs Search Engine
• Guitar Pro Tabs
• Free Guitar Pro Tabs
• Guitar Tablature
• Guitar Pro tablatures
• Guitar Pro tabs and MIDI files
• Guitar Pro Community
• Guitar Pro Tabs, Partitions and Exercices