GUITAR PRO 5

It is rare to find a web-savvy guitarist who has not yet encountered Guitar Pro, the consummate tablature editor.
The latest version is Guitar Pro 5, which brings an array of new possibilities to what is already the industry standard of tablature software. The most interesting feature of Guitar Pro 5 is the Realistic Sound Engine or RSE. It replaces the basic MIDI tones of yore with high fidelity samples from a Stratocaster and Les Paul guitars (as well as bass and drum samples) and provides an array of effect options to simulate an enormous variety of familiar tones. The tones are generally named in thinly veiled reference to the names of specific amps, pedals, and songs. Some are more obvious than others, but for the most part I suspect most of us would be able recognise the intended tone from the title, but perhaps find the tone to be a little off upon listening to it. The tones range from some specific songs such as Sunday Bloody Sunday (Single – Sunday) and Voodoo Child (Hey Jimi – Voodoo), to more general ones like a Fender Twin with a Big Muff pedal (American Clean – Pi Distortion).  To me, the general ones are more convincing, simply because the more specific titles make too obvious the discrepancies between the simulation and the original. They are perhaps too ambitious given the limitations of the engine, however it is hard to complain given the impressive jump up from the simple MIDI tones that they replace which are not even in the same league. It is really quite an excellent system.
I tried out full tabs for Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child (Slight Return), and U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday for applying the corresponding RSE tones to the guitar tracks. Undoubtedly all three sounded great when combined with the actual music of the songs they intend to imitate, but I still felt that none were especially close. The Hendrix and U2 tones are fairly generic ones that add a wah and delay sound respectively, while the Teen Spirit tone is far too clean sounding to be believable.
Essentially we are provided with a wide and varied palette of tones, but only a few that seem to mimic precisely what they are intended to. This makes me wonder what RSE is meant to add to the utility of Guitar Pro. What is so important about having so many variants of guitar tone available for what is at the end of the day a program for creating tabs which we will use to compose, teach, or learn to play a song with a real guitar?

Tabs that can be found on dedicated Guitar Pro sites such as MySongBook.com and GProTab.net are a testament to this. Many tabs that can be found online do not utilise the RSE, but it is easy enough to modify them after downloading.

The quality of sound available now makes it tempting to use the playback function as a backing track to play along to. Unfortunately, using the function itself is not quite as precise as it needs to be for this purpose – running an averagely complex four track score I experienced some sporadic lagging in the playback, admittedly minor, but still enough to cause some frustration when playing along to it. This is on an above-average PC at the time of writing, with 2.1 Gigahertz dual core processor and 4 Gigabytes of RAM. This meets the recommended requirements according to www.guitar-pro.com, although it certainly is not a dedicated audio machine. It is likely that this is not such an issue on a computer that is specially equipped for the rigors of recording and sound editing. Unfortunately for us average users, even the function to export a recording as a wave file is limited by this issue, as it works by capturing the sound of the Guitar Pro playback, and in fact this creates more issues as it takes some effort to avoid a rather quirky sounding final product. In practice however, though it is imperfect it is certainly useful in a pinch so long as it isn’t relied upon too heavily to keep time.

What we have in Guitar Pro’s Realistic Sound Engine is a significant advance in guitar software technology. Certainly there are some kinks that could be worked out, but anything that can help with a new way of engaging with music and particularly sheet music, a notorious weak spot for many guitarists, is an important thing.

 

For more information and to download a free trial, check out their website:

www.guitar-pro.com

 

Mike W.