Guitar Pro 6 (bilingual software)

Since getting Guitar Pro, I have been learning a lot of new songs I'm finding on-line. There are a tun of sites out there with Guitar Pro files with all kinds of songs people have written out the tab for. You load them into Guitar Pro and get the tab and can play them back with some fairly realistic guitar sounds. It has other sounds as well as some songs include bass, drums, etc.

You can also use Guitar Pro to write out your own songs. I've still got a long way to go but am writing out some simple riffs I've written, which is very easy with this program.

Guitar Pro is a cool program.

Hey music lubbers. I wanted to write this review anyway but even more so that GP6 has received some tough criticism. Much of the dissatisfaction is from owners of previous versions of Guitar Pro. Since I'm new to the product I have a different perspective, one not colored by certain expectations. By the way, I'm also a software developer so I can add that to the equation as well.

From my "dual point-of-view" GP6 is both a great musical tool and a well-done piece of software. The slams it's gotten for being unresponsive, hard to use, buggy, etc. are a bit exaggerated. I believe those who have trouble with it don't have computers with the required firepower; it does ask for a fairly modern machine and it's not kidding! Though I've had it crash a few times, this is certainly no worse than Firefox; moreover, the program does very frequent updates that happen hemidemisemi-automatically.

It has a rich and satisfying palette of tools for painting your musical masterpiece. It has a plethora (oh yes El Guapo...a plethora!) of RSE2 instruments to fill up your canvas. Some of them sound great (fine oil paint), some are "good enough" (acrylics) and some are like throwing a crayon into the dryer (uh, don't try this!) Strangely, the best sounding ones are guitars and similar stringed instruments; oh wait, this is *Guitar* Pro, not Bassoon Hero!

I also love the effects/amps you can use to shade and enrich your tableau. They really make a dramatic difference to the sound, just as they do in the real world. You can try out effects you don't quite understand instead of "Daddy, what does a phaser do?" "Well son, it's used to kill Klingons." Yeah, dad's a trekkie, not a musician.

You probably already know that there are thousands of GP-based tab/chord downloads out there; unfortunately, it's hard to find sites that use the new .gpx format at this time. Regardless, GP6 can import all of its predecessor formats and others such as Power Tab. It also does a nice job with many ASCII tab files, which surprised me somewhat.

As nice as all of these features are, composition/playback is the heart of the package. Let's just keep it simple here. You can represent just about any musical notation and the scores are easy to manipulate. You'd likely go bonkers trying to figure out how many possible built-in scales there are, and what each term means; learn Latin and Italian if you really want to know what these are (c'mon, you really just wanna impress chicks--I know you!) The playback will let you set each track individually so you can use it for backing while you play...say...your bagpipes. And if you want to input via something other than a computer keyboard, voila, summon the useful (albeit slightly hokey) virtual fretboard/keyboard. Better yet, attach a MIDI piano/synth and do a live 'captcha'.

Anyway, you can find all of this out yourself, I'm just letting you know what I find impressive about Guitar Pro 6. Get a copy and let's all paint some great scores together!

I've always kind of liked this program. As a way of saving your own transcriptions it was a solid editor. And in playing its own formats as well as those in Power Tab it was a much friendlier interface than most. The transcriptions for my Truefire courses always come in Power Tab (open format, free player) but I would use Guitar Pro to run them since the interface was much more user friendly.

Along comes version 6, and I upgrade. Lo and behold, the ability to import and play a Power Tab file is now crippled. It may import, but if it does, the odds are pretty good it won't play properly. And before you get ready to reply, "It imports and plays for me," take a deep breath and listen to what you are getting. A/B it with what comes out of GP 5 and you will see what I mean. Oh, and you couldn't do this in the trial version so there was no way of knowing that this had happened. There are a number of users on the Arobas forum who actually think these files are supposed to sound like this. Also note that for some reason, some GP 5 files (or from versions before that) don't even import correctly, although I haven't yet figured out what causes that for one but not the other. Incremental/fix version used for transcription/save maybe.

The workaround for these woes, if you have an up to date copy of GP 5, is to import it into that, save it in the Guitar Pro format, and then read it into GP 6. BTW, I figured that out myself - they were absolutely no help in coming up with it. And it's instructive that when the first complaints came out, their initial response was hostility first and silence afterward. At this stage they have barely acknowledged it, and only recently have made some statements to the effect that they will work on "improving" Power Tab support. Although this is also close to their beginning work on GP 7 so it's even money whether they will wind up making you buy the upgrade to get the fix.

From the perspective of using it as an editor, it was improved. But a lot of the features added offer me no particular value. I don't care much about the multitude of improved, but nevertheless fake sounding instruments, or support for accidentals. So for me this wasn't a worthwhile upgrade, and it's a pretty safe bet I won't be doing any upgrades to 7 until it's been out for a while, I'm satisfied it isn't broken somewhere else and that it actually has some new feature I consider worthwhile. Not holding my breath though. I have not experienced a lot of the crash issues, but since I don't use a lot of the sound crap that's probably not unusual. Those issues ARE there though, and it appears that this may be one of the reasons they aren't fixing the the PT support from reading between the lines in the forum comments.

So in short, if you are thinking about getting this so you can play all those free tabs sitting out there in multiple formats, you might want to take a pass or try to find a copy of Guitar Pro 5 sitting around. Or if you own GP 5 and don't mind doing double work, just go that import/save route if you want the new stuff (better editor but that's about it for me). And also be aware that if you download a tab from and older version like 3 or 4 you might not be able to use it either, at least not if GP 6 is your first purchase.

The interface IS nicer than Power Tab. If you don't have GP 5 my own suggestion would be to just stay with that, and spend the money on some transcription software like Transcribe! or Amazing Slow Downer and figure the thing out yourself if you are buying this as a learning tool. If you are a creating your own, feel free to take the jump but keep the stability issues in mind. In a world of Guitar Hero, does anybody even still look at tab any more anyway?

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