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This month's Gear Test takes an excursion away from hardware based effects processors and effects to take a look at three of the leading Tablature and Score Writing packages out on the market.
The programs are Musedit, Guitar Pro and Power Tab.
If like me you have a couple of ring binder files stuffed full of transcriptions that you've spent god knows how many hours laboriously writing down then one of these programs is an absolute must have for you!
First up is Musedit, this program is distributed by Yowza software and has been around quite a while now, indeed it has been advertised in many of the off the shelf magazines claiming to produce score to the quality found in Guitar World etc.
Does it live up to it's claim?
Well ,yes, the score it produces can be very good in terms of content i.e. Rhythm slashes, lyric insertion, chord boxes etc. but the actual print quality does seem to be poorer than the others on test. Musedit is also the most confusing and difficult of the programs to get your head around, the layouts and note boxes just don't lend themselves to making the job easier, remember I only want to Tab a tune out not read a phone book of a manual to work out what I should and should not be doing. That said if you can work it out then the results are pretty good.
Take a look at the example p.d.f. of Jimi Hendrix's All Along The Watchtower, I think you'll agree the results do look as though they have come from Guitar World Magazine.
The downside with this software is the price , it weighs in at an astonishing £50 ($79).
Next up we'll look at Guitar Pro. This software is quite heavily supported on the net and has a large library of files for you to download.
On opening the program you see a six line staff (not to hard to work out what that represents ) and a flashing cursor. All you have to do is select the note length click the cursor over whichever string you want the note to be on and type in the fret position, the program automatically moves onto the next position for the next note and even fills in the bar lines when you've completed a bars worth of tab.
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