One really good feature on Guitar Pro that I have been using a lot lately…
If you have an audio file of the song, such as a backing track, you can load it into another track. You can then map the song’s temp to the tab so that they play at the same time.
This is a little tricky, and takes some patience, but it does work well.
And then you can mute the GP tracks and play the audio track, or play selected GP tracks along with the audio, etc.
It’s great for checking if your transcribing is correct against the original track, or for practicing against a backing track. Remember you can still loop sections and slow it down. And, of course, you get scrolling tab along with the playback.
Forgive me if I just missed something, but can anyone comment on the difference between the Android, iOS and desktop versions?
I don’t generally pull out the laptop and do most stuff on my old android tablet using songbook pro (which is just that a songbook with tablet features).
As with many phone/tablet apps, it is a much reduced functionality. The desktop app has an easier interface and much more powerful tools.
If you only want to use it to play back existing tabs, then it’s fine. But if you want to use it for any serious editing then the difference is clear.
As with many phone/tablet apps, the interface is simplified to accommodate the smaller screen and reduced user input capabilities (on-screen keyboards are inferior to physical keyboards, touch screens are usually inferior to pointer-based input devices).
You can do basic editing in the tablet version but, IMO, for serious editing the PC version is far, far better.
Of course, with that superior capability is a busier, possibly more intimidating, user interface, but that is usually the case with these sorts of apps.
If you want to edit tabs (perhaps for transcribing), spend a bit of time with the PC version, and you won’t bother with the tablet version except as a way of playing back the files you edited on the PC version.
Hey folks, thinking about giving this a go, I have close to 0 knowledge about rhythm notation and this seems like a great tool.
My biggest question is, how do you go about learning the use of the software and channel it into practice?
Just create songs you want to practice from 0? play around with it?
I was digging for info and see your question went unanswered.
I injured my forearm in a bout of stupidity and decided to buy GP and work thru a lot of the transcribing lessons while it heals up.
I am using GP to:
create tracks I can play along with. The drum parts are pretty new to me and this is an interesting learning.
transcribe lessons and songs I want t learn into tab. I find this is giving me a jump-start on playing them since I have already given a good think-through of of the notes/chords before ever sitting with the guitar.
creating things in my head from a new file. This is not simple for me, but it is interesting to see where I have to learn stuff.
So far, this is going fairly well for straight 4/4 time songs, but once I started to try shuffle rhythms, it got tricky. I can get some to work, but not all. This is what I am digging for now in the forums before I start a thread.
I’d say the software is a handy tool, but you will need to spend time learning to use it. It isn’t too hard for straight forward stuff, but there may be things you’ll need to search out.
