How To Play Guitar Tabs

What is guitar pro 6? What is guitar pro at all? At its core, guitar pro is an application primarily used to create, edit and play back guitar tabs. There is of course a load of other features that complement or help these goals, but at its core guitar pro is a score editor.

I think that almost all guitarists are familiar with this piece of software. There are a lot of guitar tablatures on the web describing how to play a particular song, and a lot of them (and I do mean a lot of them) are written using this handy piece of software.

Here are some of guitar pro features, from the top of my head:

RSE – Realistic Sound Engine. With databanks of about 2gb this nifty feature adds more realistic sound to tab playback. Instead of more classic midi sounds you get out of the speakers, something that resembles more of the real sound of the real guitar. Although it couldn’t substitute the sound of real instrument, you can still use this for a background to add a little more depth and instrumental variety to your music.

I mean you can just… wait did I tell you that you can add a lot of instruments to the tab? I mean, you can have like 2 guitars and bass, and some flute and a couple of drum tracks all playing at the same time, which represents the original track that is being tabbed or the piece of music you compose much more closely.

You can compose entire tracks in guitar pro, check out how they sound, edit and re-edit the heck out of them, then record yourself, and in case you’re a single-man band, you can use the drums track and/or additional instrumental tracks in your own song. In fact, a lot of guitar hobbyists are doing it already.

RSE even has controls to fine-tune the sound of the instruments, like the gain, amp, distortion, overdrive… In fact, it has a huge database of filters, effects, reverbs, echos etc

It also has a chord database that you can use to find chords and a lot of their variations, with capo or without capo, however you want.

What guitar pro also does is provide you not only with a basic tab editor, but a musical notation sheet as well. So you type in the numbers, and you get the notes automatically! How cool is that? You can also edit the notes themselves.

Guitar pro also includes a fretboard with notes, so you can locate the notes you need, a guitar tuner, and even a piano keyboard, which shows each note location on the standard piano keyboard.

Of course, guitar pro also supports whatever guitar tuning you are using. So if you use DADGBE (dropped D tuning) instead of EADGBE(standard tuning), guitar pro will support that tuning in all of its other features.

Also, it has a pretty big list of known tunings so you can try out other ones without retuning your guitar yourself, and it will even transpose the guitar tab to this new tuning you choose and back to the original one if you want to come back to the standard tuning! You can make up your own custom tunings as well.

Talking about the tunings, there is a pretty neat guitar tuner, so you can tune your guitar using a microphone or plugging it directly into line in.

It also supports 6, 7, 8 and 12 string guitars. And that also applies to other varieties of string instruments.

Each instrument or track, has its volume and pan, and even a small equalizer.

For learning how to play some tracks there is all kinds of helpers like the metronome, looping, and speed trainer.

If you want to teach yourself rhythm you can use the metronome. To train your speed you use the speed trainer. It has 3 variables; start speed, end speed, and increase in speed each loop, all 3 in percents. Both apply equally well on simple training scales and chords, as well as whole songs.

While I could simply go on and on talking about the awesome features of guitar pro, and how it can make your life as a guitarist easier, I think the best way for you to find out would be to check it out yourself. There is a trial version available, which you can download and try right away for free!
Go ahead and download it, after all as Guitar World puts it, Guitar Pro is:

There is even a version for iPad and iPhone too! How cool is that?