Guitar PRO 5

Guitar Pro 5

For many years already, the Guitar Pro application has been a reliable assistant to guitarists, bass guitarists, and other musicians. Guitar Pro 5 represents the evolutionary peak of this product by the Arobas Music Company. This new version eliminates those minor drawbacks of the earlier versions and also adds a series of new helpful features.

The Guitar Pro 5 application is actually a powerful MIDI editor intended mainly for guitarists and bass guitarists. And it is mainly used as a tablature builder that allows you to simultaneously record notes for the tabs. The application allows making, editing and playing complete multitrack compositions with string, keyboard, wind and percussion parts, as well as recording vocal parts, lyrics, and composition info. In addition, there are plenty of other features which can be helpful in your musical practice: tuner, metronome, chord builder and finder, scale constructor, and lots of others.

The first thing to be paid attention to working with finished tablatures is the realistic sound produced when playing scores. The RSE (Realistic Sound Engine) technology ensures the kind of sound resembling that of real musical instruments (with some reservations, of course). Besides, there are lots of various sound settings! You can choose between guitar models, amplifiers, fancy features, and studio effects. And every single element of the sound chain allows you to change the settings and get a great sound variety.

The track control panel is in the lower part of the screen. Here you can select which tracks are to be played and which ones are not. You will also find sliders and knobs to control volume, timbre and balance (for a single track or for all of them together), which allows you to do the mastering.

As for recording your own tabs, it is all designed and arranged so that the work could be fruitful and comfortable at its best. All the buttons necessary for the stave and tablature operations are grouped in the left part of the screen.

The number of opportunities for score arranging exceeds the needs of almost any musician:

• changing clefs and adding accidentals for a clef;
• reprises, two or three repetitions (dedicated buttons);
• selecting note and pause duration, dots and double dots, ligatures, and formats;
• triplets;
• gradual increasing or reducing the volume or tempo;
• slides, vibratos, tremolo levers, tightening, and note silencing;
• slap and tapping indication (showing which fingers are involved);
• indication of the string pass direction and stroke direction (mediator hits);
• grace notes, trills, gruppettos;
• dividing a composition into sections with bookmarks;
• barré indication;
• adding chords (from the catalogue);
• showing the rhythmic pattern;
• automatic placing and turning the note tails;
• adding lyrics;
• timer.

Considering its rich opportunities for composition arrangement, the Guitar Pro 5 application can be helpful not only to guitarists but also to other musicians.

The application also provides some extra opportunities helping musicians in that hard work of mastering the theory of music, or just in composition analysis and learning. For example, the chord builder will help you analyze the variety of different chords by letting you see the positions of the notes on the fingerboard and listen their sounds.

When learning scales, Guitar Pro 5 can be of help too: there are graphic previews for all the existing variants, indicating the intervals between the steps and providing the opportunity to play the scale.

When working at the rhythm and accuracy of your play, you will certainly make use of the metronome, speed trainer, countdown option, and looping the selected parts of the score. All these features are accessible through the buttons on the playback control panel. The opportunity to see a virtual fingerboard or keyboard will also add some convenience. The intuitive tuner will help you tune your instrument as accurately as possible.