For the past few weeks, I’ve been using Guitar Pro (7.5) to write a fingerstyle guitar arrangement with the help of my music teacher on the song W:Wonder Tale. This week I’ll be writing about my experience with the program and kind of how it works.
First of all, I believe that this is a great program with lots of things to learn. Even now, I still don’t know a lot of things the program can do or what all the different buttons are for. However, I have a pretty good understanding of the writing part for guitar. At first, I was having trouble even adding measures, but I eventually got it. The way you input notes is pretty simple (at least for the tablature).
I input the notes through the tablature instead of the actual staves where you would read A,B,C, etc. With the tablature, you can just input the fret number on a certain string and it’ll automatically fill in the note in both the tablature and staves. You can also adjust the rhythm of the notes either from the side or the plus and minus keys.
There are a lot of specifications to notes you can choose, whether or not it’s dotted, a set of notes should be plucked at once or arpeggiated, tied, and lots more. I think it’s good to watch some videos on the basic functions, but afterwards, you can kind of just open a new file and mess around with settings and try things out. That was how I learned most of the things I use although there were some things that I had to look up. However, I haven’t experienced any technical issues yet.
One thing I found a bit troublesome, at least for me, was the need to specify the duration of each note. I understand that it’s necessary to be read correctly and for the program to play it, but you have to select the note and then manually adjust it using the plus/minus key or by clicking since there are no individual shortcuts for quarter notes, eighth notes, etc.
Overall I think that Guitar Pro is a great program. It is around $70 USD though, but there’s a free 30-day trial which you can use to see if you like the program.