What is currently the best/easiest tab software?

General Music Discussion
#1

Hi guys,

I used to be an avid user of Power Tab back in the day and I was wondering if anyone can recommend a good modern tablature software which is easy to use please? Is guitar pro the best?

A feature I really want is to be able to include fretting hand fingerings for the notes, you don’t tend to see this often on electric guitar stuff.

Cheers,

#2

I really like Guitar Pro. It’s intuitive and the UI is clean

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#3

Guitar Pro is definitely the most evolved. I just don’t like how you can’t modify the tabs from their store.

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#4

Soundslice is pretty cool, basic version is free too.

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#5

Wow thanks for the speedy replies, I guess I will be giving guitar pro a go then. Cheers!

#6

I agree with everybody about Guitar Pro.

HOWEVER, if you think programming is fun (and have that twisted mindset), there is a free program that can make make beautiful sheet music, including TAB, called LilyPond. This is a taste:

https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.20/Documentation/snippets/fretted-strings

But it’s not interactive, you have to type into a file and then run it, so it’s definitely not for most people. It can also generate MIDI files, etc.

PS: What I am trying to do now is be lazy and type music in ABC notation, and then run the free abc2ly program (included with LilyPond) that generates a file that one feeds to LilyPond… a lot of steps, but ABC notation is pretty clever (in the sense of being minimalist), although it’s not TAB.

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#7

True, lilly pond can be awesome.

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#8

If we mention Lilypond, and I don’t see why not, then we might as well include Vextab:

https://www.vexflow.com/vextab/tutorial.html

And if we’re including Vextab, we might as well shamelessly plug Tabbyhack, my toy project which lets you play your guitar and it transcribes Vextab for you (and ASCII tab) — recently updated for maximum sexiness:

https://jzohrab.github.io/tabbyhack/

Tabbyhack doesn’t work on mobile, the screen layout is too involved.

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#9

Guitar pro is pretty powerful for the $70 that it is. And the soundbanks are like, really not that bad for fleshing out ideas and checking if something ‘works’. I sometimes share music projects online just using the audio guitar pro produces (in fairness, most of them are intended to have a little bit of comedy, so, grain of salt.)

But anyway, for making decent TAB and sheet music, imo it has everything you need, and really if I were making pro level TAB books there would probably only be a few little tools or features I’d want that GP doesn’t have. The staff notation produced is also quite good and clear, the things it can’t do are probably only important for professional engravers.

Soundslice is free at the lowest tier, and it does basically everything guitar pro does, and with similar ease of use, except the midi soundbanks are basically just ‘functional’ (I don’t know if there’s a way to import different sounds, there may be) , and there’s much less customization of the different visual elements.

However with soundslice you can sync notation to video or audio, which is huge. Soundslice is basically “Transcribe” and Guitar Pro together, and all web based so the idea of dealing with files or sharing is much simpler.

Also soundslice’s customer service and general mission as a company is A++++

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#10

Thanks Jake for taking the time to explain sound slice, it sounds like it is a different offering then. I’m not sure I would use the video stuff, I plan to use whatever program to do some basic transcriptions and to use it for practise.

There is one thing though, where can you get decent quality transcriptions these days? I remember back in the day there was a really good community behind power tab and some of those transcriptions were very accurate, the people making guitar pro tabs were not even close.
I’ve had a look at some of the transcriptions out there for guitar pro and they are still pretty bad, is maybe there’s a place I don’t know about to get accurate tabs?

#11

For practicing and playing along, food for thought:

  • Guitar pro is more flexible because you can more easily add different instrument sounds and get more particular with the mix, tempo, tempo increases, etc
  • Since soundslice allows you to sync with the actual recording or video, there’s a more ‘direct’ (for lack of a better word) experience playing along with something as you’d be playing with the actual song/part as opposed to a midi representation of the song/part. This is best for the things midi is worst at: time feel, accents, tone, etc. Also worth mentioning that if the GP file has a mistake, you’re trying to play along to match that mistake, whereas with soundslice if something you’re playing sounds off with the actual recording then it’s obviously worth investigating

For transcription, even if basic, it’s hard to overstate how useful soundslice is, at least in my experience/opinion. I’ve been doing a whole lot of transcribing for…geez, 25-ish years now (christ :older_man: ) and I often have to transcribe things fast , and so far soundslice has been the fastest and easiest way. I think if you’re never to transcribing or doing more basic work, it’s even more helpful.

The main reasons for this are a few elements that I seem to have a tough time ‘selling’ people on, but they are huge so I’ll keep trying:

  • The ability to just click on different parts of the audio track and immediately be ‘where’ you want to be , as opposed to rewinding and rewatching, is a GIANT time saver. As in, “hmm what’s that ONE note, I’m not sure, so let’s listen to it 200 times” if it takes one click for each listen, or if you just highlight the one note and turn on the loop function, this is a minuscule amount of labor compared to rewinding or sliding the timer ting back and trying to re-find the one note, 200 times.
  • Although there are other programs where you can do the above (audacity, Transcribe, garage band, any DAW) in soundslice you get the above but synced right to the correct spots in the notation, which in the long run makes error checking sooo much faster. For example, you try to transcribe a measure, then you listen back at half speed - while you’re listening the playhead is moving along the score so if anything sounds/looks funky it’ll be relatively easy to figure out what and where something went wrong.

But since soundslice is free, it doesn’t have to be a “X vs. Y” thing, you should imo just get guitar pro as well as a soundslice account, get savvy with the controls on GP (and you can just set the keyboard shortucts on soundslice to be the same as GP, very convenient) and when you want to try transcribing something, try it out in SS. I have a lot of students do this and there’s probably something like a 1-7 day learning curve with SS, and then it’s just no sweat.

There is one thing though, where can you get decent quality transcriptions these days? I remember back in the day there was a really good community behind power tab and some of those transcriptions were very accurate, the people making guitar pro tabs were not even close.
I’ve had a look at some of the transcriptions out there for guitar pro and they are still pretty bad, is maybe there’s a place I don’t know about to get accurate tabs?

Not to veer too OT, but it will help me give a better answer: why do you want to find other people’s transcriptions? Sounds like a dumb question I know, but it’ll be useful to know where you’re coming from to answer in a more directly relevant/helpful way.

In my experience, no source is always great. Songsterr is often very good but not always. Sometimes when I want a guitar pro file I google “[song name] guitar pro download” and get decent results. Another search I’ll do is '[song name] TAB PDF"
Most of the time I find the big free tab sites to be shite, mainly because of the formatting; the pure text TAB typically either doesn’t have rhythm notated, or has some sort of idiosyncratic rhythmic notation that’s maybe readable but nowhere as clear as something that’s made with some sort of notation program.

#12

I like Guitar Pro and MuseScore is a good free option, it has loads of plugins, soundbanks, and a good support community.

#13

Hi @JakeEstner thanks for the detailed response I didn’t realise sound slice was free, I will check it out.

I want to be able to get accurate tabs for complicated songs which I simply wouldn’t have the time or knowledge to be able to work out. An example of this would be some of Steve Morse’s work, I’ve learnt a few sections of his work which use fingerings I would not be able to work out. There’s also the time element, it takes me quite a bit of time to transcribe stuff and most of the time I just want to try and play it.

Cheers

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#14

For speed of entry and playing back ideas you really cannot beat the latest version of Guitar Pro. There are also online communities with free .gp files. Check out www.guitarprotabs.org and www.guitarprotabs.net. They both have pretty much the same selection and some of the tabs are a bit wonky but many are very high quality.

If you want something that is publishing ready look to one of the more “serious” programs like Finale, Sibelius, or Dorico…the learning curve is STEEP but if you spend the time you can generate notation and TAB that is of the highest quality.

For my students and my own practice Guitar Pro works great (also a great practice tool with looping and incremental speed increases during playback) most of the time and every once in a while I will want something to look as good as possible and I will use Sibelius instead.

Hope that helps…have a good one!

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#15

I’m gonna say Guitar Pro as well.
It is really versatile for the price.
I used Finale only when I needed to for one of my music classes.

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#16

Joining into the Guitar Pro chorus. I use it daily and love it.

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