FIRST LOOK MUSIC SOFTWARE REVIEW:
Guitar Pro 5 for Mac and Windows
Company: eMedia Music
Web site: http://www.emediamusic.com/guitarpro.html
Price: $60 US
Reviewed by Jim Hilbert
Editor’s note from John Nemo:
Guitar Pro 5.1 was announced during Macworld San Francisco a short while ago, while Jim’s review below was in progress. Please be patient until we evaluate the update. Here is guest reviewer Jim Hilbert’s FIRST LOOK at eMedia Guitar Pro. He and I will work together as soon as we can. This software performs equally well on Mac or Windows.
Jim writes:
I’ve been a guitarist for quite some years now. I have been able to read standard music notation but it was never a format that I took to easily. Tablature, or TAB, on the other hand, used in conjunction with standard notation, is a great way to learn and to write music for guitar.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guitar_tab
eMedia Music’s Guitar Pro 5 is a great program to help the musician learn, compose, transpose, and listen to music. My first use of the application was to transpose a piece of classical music from standard notation to TAB format. I thought this was going to a real test of the intuitiveness of the software. Could it place my fingering into reachable locations on the fret board? Well, I was disappointed but not surprised. This piece of music is played all over the fret board, and was going to be challenge.
Guitar Pro 5 did a great job in the first position, but as the music progressed up the fret board to 5th and 7th position the fingering became unreachable. This is a setback but one that is easily correctable. By using the Alt or Option key and the 4 arrow keys it is a simple keystroke to move the note to a string that you find comfortable. This occasionally found me actually picking up the guitar and trying out the various fingering combinations to find which one worked for me. In the screen shots in measure 46 you can see the changes between the fingering generated in Guitar Pro on screen 1 and my changes on the screen 2.
SCREEN SHOT #1
SCREEN SHOT #2
Now that the only problem I found with Guitar Pro is out of the way I can, in free conscience, go on with the praises of this unique software.
After I transposed this piece of guitar music and stored it I was able with only a few clicks to have it transposed to TAB for 5 string banjo. With a couple of corrections for fingering and some notes that were not in the range of the banjo it worked perfectly. Guitar Pro has a multitude of guitar tunings built in (you can also add your own tunning) and the TAB will come out great. There is a list of dozens string instruments that are built in, from bouzoukis to zithers (well maybe not zithers), but you get the idea. This 3rd screen shot is the banjo transcription of the same John Renbourn piece.
SCREEN SHOT #3
The display is very helpful as it has a graphic of the fret board (like the banjo in the screen 3) or keyboard that you are using. After you write a section of the music you can play it back and see the fingering (highlighted in red) on the fretboard. This would be very helpful to students to visualize the finger positions. Play back is also necessary to check if the notation is correct.
If there is a problem it is very easy to correct and delete or change the note or its fingering position. Most of the inputting can be accomplished using the right hand number keys and the arrow keys to move across the score. With the use of a MIDI keyboard the music can be played and the notation will be written in TAB and standard notation. The paper printout of the score is very clear.
You can also add lyrics to the score and up to simultaneous 256 tracks! Take that, Wagner! It has a built in percussion sound generator and voices for many instruments and styles of guitar playing. After writing you can listen to the entire piece and adjust the volume, type of instrument, reverb, etc., until you get just the right sound.
Any of the tracks can be muted as you wish to focus on a certain instrument or passage. I do not have a good built-in audio or speakers on my computer so I cannot attest to the quality of the synthesized sound generated by Guitar Pro. But for the purposes of writing and learning music I’m sure it will be more than adequate.
Some other features are:
Cord charts in any tuning you want. (Nice for those of us tied to DADGAD or some other open tuning.)
Scale tool to give you a lyrical idea from the common to the exotic
Digital tuner
Metronome and countdown to the start of a measure
MIDI exportable file system
ASCII Import and export for the widely spread ASCII TAB format
WAV file export
BMP export for TAB images.
I have yet to use all the functions and probably never will get to use them all. But this is a great program and works with ether MAC (OSX10.4+) or Windows (98/2000/XP) systems.
Jim Hilbert
Tucson, AZ
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