Tabs are really great for learning how to play guitar. They show you exactly how to play a song note for note and you don’t have to know very much about playing a guitar to understand them. However, a major problem with tabs is they do not represent tempo or timing accurately. This can be a real problem when you are trying to figure out the rhythm of a riff. Unlike sheet music, a tab will tell you everything about what to do with your fretting hand, but very little about how to strum.

I found this program called Guitar Pro a few years ago. Basically what it does is it takes a tab file and it plays it back to you in the form of a MIDI. If you aren’t familiar with the sound of a MIDI, it’s similar to the sound of a polyphonic cell phone ring. Now although you wouldn’t want to jam with a cell phone, it does the trick for helping you learn a song because you can see the tab being played as you hear the notes. Also, the program gives you the ability to slow down the tempo so you can hear and see it played slowly. This feature alone is what makes it an amazing tool. Guitar Pro isn’t a simple program either, it interprets all different forms of guitar technique including slides, hammer-ons and pull-offs bends, muting, harmonics, tapping, tremolo and much more.

The program is also a fully featured tab editor. It allows you to easily enter notes using a keyboard, mouse clicks, or a midi instrument. The program displays both tablature and standard notation and an array of different instruments and tunings. You can create a tab that plays back as an acoustic song tuned half step down, or as an electric in standard tuning. You have complete control over the sound of the instrument.

There really are way too many features to go over in a post like this, it would require 10 posts to really cover the feature list. However, I have to mention the ones that apply to developing guitarists. There is a fully functional digital tuner, a scales tool with dozens of exotic and mainstream scales in every key, and a chord database with pretty much everything you would need.

Here is a short screencast video that I made that shows some of the basic features of Guitar Pro 5. In the video I play a tab of the live version of Stairway to Heaven. I show you how you can slow down and speed up the tempo, mute individual tracks, and change the tuning and type of strings. These are the best features for the learning guitarist.

As you can hear in the above video the sound quality is very good considering it is synthesized. That is due to the Realistic Sound Engine (RSE) that is new in Guitar Pro 5.

Here is a video of Guitar Pro 4 from the Guitar Pro website that shows how to compose a tab. Guitar Pro is in version 5 now, but this video still applies.

Here is a summary of the long list of Guitar Pro 5 features:

• Mac OS X and Windows compatibility
• Realistic Sound Engine (RSE) for better sounding instruments
• Create, Edit, and Play tablature
• Select 25%, 50%, 75%, 125%, or set your own tempo
• Supports all guitar playing techniques (hamer-ons, bends, and so forth)
• Mute individual instruments or mute all but one track with one click
• Select from hundreds of instruments and tunings
• Includes learning tools like chord and scale charts
• Digital tuner included
• An active online community with thousands of tabs to download
• The ability to import text tabs, midi files, MusicXML, PowerTab, and more
• Amazing print features that print professional looking music sheets
• Export to PDF
• So many more features it’s mind boggling.

I can’t stress how powerful this tool is. I can accredit so much of the skill that I have learned over the past few years to this program. I am just learning sweep picking now and I would have been lost without it. Once you get yourself a copy of Guitar Pro check out GProTab.net and MySongBook.com. They both have an awesome collection of song and lesson tabs as well as an active forum community.

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