You mentioned being a Guitar Pro user. Maybe you can fill me in a bit on what it can do other than being a TAB editor.
I watched some videos and saw that it has stretch points for audio, has varispeed playback, and has looping, which are all good things for transcribing. Can it slice an audio file too? I’ll often slice out passages of an audio file in Reaper and set marker points for those isolated passages so that I can easily jump to each passage and loop it for learning. And I’ll often use the audio properties to change the pitch of the file to match my guitar so that I don’t have to retune.
I saw too that measures in TAB/music can easily be resized (this is a major pain in Musescore).
I see that it can display chord diagrams. Are these easy to manually edit? (It’s janky in Musescore) And it can display scales on a fingerboard diagram. Can the fingerboard diagram be manually edited? Can multiple fingerboard diagrams be displayed? There is a fingerboard diagram plugin available for Musescore, but it is directly tied to notes in the TAB/music staff like a virtual midi keyboard, which is kind of useless to me.
And I see that it has some builtin plugins. Are these only for MIDI playback or can they be used realtime with a guitar? Can they be used with the audio track? Something I do in Reaper when learning parts by ear is to put eq and stereo tools on the audio file track to better isolate parts.
Maybe there is other nice stuff in Guitar Pro that I haven’t mentioned here?
What I would ultimately like to have is something that is really good for transcribing passages as well as for creating documents that include text, audio, TAB/music, and diagrams. Something like a mix of a word processor and Guitar Pro, so that elements don’t have to be exported from one application and imported into another while having to deal with all those separate files and directories.
I only got up to version 5 I think, it always had some basic editing limitations, not even proper copy/paste/insert/transpose functions or they didn’t work, way crashy too.
But really useful for looping a tab section and setting it to increase speed at each repeat. I recall Pipeline from the Reaper forum posting about how that helped him improve a lot.
And that’s what I mainly used it for, learning songs and solos, original composed solos and technical sections etc.
I did write some stuff on it but these days for composing I mostly use the simple sound recorder on my phone which has some basic edit functions. I just verbally describe the chords and actions at the end of some idea. I might do two or three sections added on in later takes but at some point if deemed a keeper idea I just record onto the DAW.
So I’m not using any TAB editors at all these days. I look up the free tabs of songs [Ultimate guitar ( & Songsterr which is an online TAB player etc.)] and work stuff out by ear if no good free tab exists.
So you would be a power user compared to me, I would probably still use it but don’t have it installed on the newish rig atm.
Been a few years now since I last used it for anything. Up to version 8 now, I might take a look at that manual.
I installed version 8 today on Manjaro linux. It did crash the first time I used the designer mode (allows stretching measures and moving notes), but it hasn’t done so since. There is a way to do basic fretboard diagrams, but I’ll have to explore it a bit more. And I may try to work out the audio side of things for linux (wineasio is needed I think) for low latency to see how the effects are with a guitar plugged in. But so far everything seems to work ok on my initial play around.
For learning by ear, Reaper has most things covered. But using some things are kludgy. And there is no good way to tab things or do diagrams.
I did use most of the articulation functions expertly and am a sight reader/player of tab and anything they could add to be closer to advanced DAW editing I would already be familiar with so in that sense I’m a Gtr Pro pro
Looks like scale diagrams aren’t too useful. There is no way to change the overall size or position that I can see. This is what you get (can change number of frets and marker style and color):
I added a ‘1’ label to the first fret marker, but it’s illegible. No way to change font size either. And that is with the score zoomed to 130%.
Lyrics aside (which is pretty nice), text can be added, but it’s more of a short one liner thing. Not too useful.
I monkeyed around in Guitar Pro some more. The TAB side of things seems pretty nice (compared to Musescore). Everything else seems pretty blah. You can import audio (a single audio file) for transcribing, but functions for moving around in the waveform view are very light, and the functions that are there are more clunky than streamlined. For example, playback. There is no way to jump back to a precise starting point. In Reaper you can use stop to go back to your starting cursor position and pause to move the cursor to the current position. In Guitar Pro you can’t. When I’m working out a lick by ear, I might quickly listen to it 3 or 4 times to get the line in my ear. In Guitar Pro that means having to relocate your beginning playback position every time you press play. Even tapedecks eventually had relocation points. And no markers. And lots of other aspects seem pretty clunky like that.
I guess most people are using Guitar Pro as a TAB viewer/player rather than as an editor/transcribing tool.
Apparently there are some ways to use Reaper and Musescore together, so I may look at working that out. I’m not a big fan of Musescore (it makes too many simple things convoluted), but I can get around in it ok. And nothing is going to beat Reaper on the audio end of things. But I imagine that opening both, opening files in both, and doing whatever to sync them is going to be on the clunky side.
No, I never heard of it. But it doesn’t look to have audio file support. I’m looking for mainly a transcribing tool for learning licks, etc. I can do it on paper in a bit of shorthand way, but it’s not ideal.
I’m wishing big here, but what would ultimately be great is something like a lesson editor. Text, images, audio file support (with necessary functions), music/TAB, diagrams, multitrack + plugins, that could export a single file with everything contained in an archive. Something like a word processor with more advanced audio and music/TAB. So for example, you could create a document with your transcription of a guitar solo, with the audio for the solo included, and a rhythm backing track to play over, thoughts in text about what you think is going on, chord and scale diagrams as needed, maybe even a simple drawing to explain some concept. And you could just share the single file.
I used the free version a bit some years ago, it had and probably still has some excellent versions of old songs by famous guitarists, e.g Peter Green, there’s a great take of a ballad he either wrote or popularised, a song by Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed that features standout Dominant 7th lines/arps, and other full on guitar hero stuff from the 50’s, 60’s etc. It’s technique you can use in other styles.
I printed out all that but didn’t have it filed properly, but yeah, there’s some good material in Tabledit archives for sure.
I spotted a couple of lessons and community slices that I might check out further.
I’m not a fan of software as a service, but I think they’re going about it in a different way. With the lesson and community stuff, the price being very reasonable, and your stuff staying put if you decide to downgrade back to the free plan, I wouldn’t mind supporting that at all.
I’m trying Soundslice today for a simple transcription. It seems clunky too. From the getgo is has the same basic issues as Guitar Pro with playback. No way that I can see to repeatedly begin playback from the same point. And no way to move to precise points. Maybe Reaper has me spoiled, but these things seem like very basic necessities.
Reaper just needs TAB notation (and fingerboard diagrams). But no third party is going to put in that much work for an addon. I know that there are some simplified TAB options, but they’re pretty funky, imo.
