by Guitar Pro 6 was released last Thursday, and this upgrade is a total reinvention and reimagining of version 5. From the moment of the first sight of the GP6 splash screen, you know you are in for a much more wild, but refined, ride:
You can write your own guitar TABS with Guitar Pro 6. The editing tool are conveniently located and easy to use. You create the TAB, and GP6 will write the rest of the standard notation for you.
You can also find sites online where other users have uploaded their GP6 TABS for you to download them and “play” them in Guitar Pro. You can slow down any part of the music. Learning new songs at your speed and pace with GP6 makes it a great tool in your virtual guitar gig bag arsenal.
It’s a pretty wild experience to hit the space key on your keyboard and have your TAB come to life as Guitar Pro plays, and highlights, the music for you! You can also print out the TABs for take-it-with-you convenience.
You can even re-edit TABs you downloaded from the internet. Maybe you found a mistake or you want to add a new orchestral part — with Guitar Pro 6 — making music you way is super easy and keen fun: Drag. Drop. Done.
You can highlight certain instruments to have only them play for being heard. You can make your own mix to bring the drums to the forefront. The black box in the color timeline indicates which instrument is in the live window view and where, in the measure, the song is currently playing:
Here’s the instruments breakout for the smash Guns N’ Roses hit “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and you can see how the person who created this excellent TAB named each instrument after the superstar playing it — and that makes it really easy for you to pick out the player you want to hear in the mix. Just click the name to listen and you can click on a new instrument during live playback, too:
Guitar Pro 6’s greatest advancement is in the enhancement of its Real Sound Engine (RSE) audio playback. Here’s the RSE blurp from the GP6 website:
The RSE (Realistic Sound Engine) technology includes the realistic studio recordings of instruments, as well as some effect modelisations that are the result of years of research.
You’ll get access to over a hundred soundbanks, and over fifty effects pedals and amps. We provide many presets for all styles, and you can also configure your own effect chains. You can apply a mastering to the final result, with a compressor-limiter, a reverb, and a 10-track equalizer.
You can also listen to your scores in MIDI sound.
If you do any musical computer work, you’ve been exposed to lots of horrible sounding MIDI instruments and voicings — but with GP6’s RSE technology, your ears won’t bleed — because the modeled sound is rich, full and rounded. You can create an entire concert in your computer.
Guitar Pro is the industry standard for writing and sharing guitar TABs and the upgrade to version 6 is worth the limited-time special pricing of $30.
If you’re new to Guitar Pro, you won’t go wrong jumping on version 6 right now — future updates to the software are automatically streamed to your computer and that makes for an invisible and delightful musical experience.
The full price of $60 isn’t too bad either!
It looks amazing for that low of a price, actually.
I agree, Gordon. The “full price” is incredibly cheap — especially when you consider how many Guitar Pro TABs are already out there waiting for you to download.
Hal Leonard at GuitarInstructor.com charges a dollar for a TABbed song — it’s a 100% professionally done TAB job, though — but you can only print it once.
If you want to increase your songs library, you can quickly see how much Guitar Pro will save you in the long run — as long as the TABs are good. People vote on the quality of uploaded TABs, so the “more stars” the better the transcription.