Guitar Pro 6 review

Guitar pro six is a guitar TAB/music notation software for writing and reading tabs and sheet music. It also functions as a learning tool to some extent because you can play back and play along with guitar pro tabs at any speed you like, meaning you can use it to slow down a song,(by changing the tempo), while you're learning it, and gradually speed it up as you become more familiar with it. This would be a great method to teach your brain how to sight read tab, or even music, but if you're not that dedicated this software is still fun to play around with and useful for other things.

Guitar pro enables you to fairly intuitively compose tabs for your own music and can also be used to read,(and learn), tabs for a ton of songs that other people have posted on the Internet for free. The programs interface is fairly straightforward, down the right hand side of the screen you have 6 little tabs to click on, the first being a notation button signified by a traditional little note symbol, to be honest a first this section scared me a little, as a non music reader there were a whole lot of unfamiliar symbols here but eventually after a little read of the guide that comes with the software and some playing around it didn't take long to get used to how they all work and what they're for. That said, if you're dealing with simple 4/4 time tab you can just use your arrow keys or your mouse and the number buttons on your keyboard to write tab without any other details, but it pays to play around because you can do fun stuff like add wah and different kinds of picking and fade ins and outs and panning and the like.

The second tab is a picture of a guitar and this is where you choose the midi instrument that'll play back your tab, you can loop your tab and click on different instruments to see how they sound, some of these are bog standard midi sounds but some of the wind instruments are pretty nice and the synths are OK. You can add a capo and change your instruments tuning and also the style of playing in this section, the options are pretty extensive but not so much that you get lost in them, guitar pro offers extra sound banks for around $8 each too but what you get with the program is enough really, not that $8 is out of the question if you really wanted more variety,(I bought the drumkits add on, because you only get no choice basic percussion sounds with the software as is). Without buying any extras you get three kinds of guitars, (electrics with single coil pickups, electrics with humbucker pickups and acoustic guitars), basses, keys, bass synths, brass synths, lead synths, pad synths and sequencer synths,(the synth sections are a little light on, one or two instruments each, but I figure this program is made for guitar players so synths are not the focus here), strings, brass instruments, reeds, pipes and last but not least idiophones, weird name, but it just means instruments that make notes via percussion rather than other means. Most of these instruments sound fairly decent, though you'll always have that midi fakeness, that too clean or too dirty sound that you get which works for synths because they're supposed to be like that.

The next two tabs however can change that midi sound to make it more interesting,(and in all honestly I'm a bit of a fan of straight midi sounds, they take me back to my childhood Gumby viewing days), you can add and play around with and reorder 14 amps, 44 effects,(some of which have pedals you can position with your mouse to change the levels on a specific effect, which is really fun), and 9 master effects units like ambiance and room dynamics and EQ and the like, the tab is an overall EQ and dynamic filter that works on your song as a whole,(i.e each individual track can have different amps and effects but the final master effects effect every track). For somebody who loves tweaking like me this amount of tweakabity is great, you can definitely get a nice sound of this program.Each track you make can be panned left or right and it's individual volume changed also with some pretty straight forward knobs and faders at the bottom of the screen.

The next tab is a chord maker/finder, if you click on the little add sign you can either use your mouse to manually create a chord and the program will find a name for it and a bunch of related chords or you can click on one of the notes and chord types in the lists on the left of the chord box and you'll be given a bunch of corresponding chords in different positions to choose from. You can then click on the chord button to add that chord to your tab or if you've already written it in to add a little chord chart pic to the top of your sheet of tab as a reference,(you can remove this if you like while leaving the chord in your tab by clicking the chord button on the right that you created by choosing or manually creating a chord but it seems like a good idea to leave it there), this is definitely useful for strummy type songs or even for copying a chord in for picking purposes so you can copy and paste your notes from it and remove it when you're done. The chord adding process feels a little convoluted at first but once you get used to it it's a good thing.

The last tab on the right is a little microphone and this is where you can type in lyrics or notes and the way the software then places them over your tabs is OK, you can chose where your lyrics start from in the tab and lyrics are placed over notes or chords and the space bar is used to skip a note or chord, however a little more control over this would be nice, it does the job but I think lyric placement is a tricky thing that if you really want to get right you should probably do by hand anyway. But you can also use this to write notes over your tab,(i.e "play this part softly"). You have five lines to write over your tab too, which is probably more than enough, but it would be nice if you had the option to add more, even though you would probably never have to do that. 
In the tools section above your tab you also have a digital tuner, a scale finder that can tell you what scale your selected piece of tab is in,(great for people with very little theory knowledge like myself who want to be able to say to musicians with theory knowledge,"this song is in A", say, and then hear them make up a kick arse lead or bass line or piano part based on that), you can transpose you tabs up and down automatically, you can choose which strings you want to let ring out and which you don't and you can do the same for palm muting.
You can also add percussion, use an instrument panel,(from the "view", drop down menu),to see where the notes and chords in your tab are supposed to be played on a guitar neck and export your tabs as GP5 files,(the previous version of guitar pro), as MIDI tracks for more endless tweaking in a DAW like Cubase or Fruity Loops, as an XML page,(which is some kind of universal exchange format for music scores), as a WAV file or as a PDF document or PNG,(slightly fancier image file than a jpeg, but you probably knew that). You can also import midi files, xml tab pages, power tab files and tabledit file,(I assume these last two are similar programs for tab editing), and guitar pro will read turn them into its own tab files, this is especially cool for taking a midi track you've made elsewhere and creating written music from it.

You can also write tab and then add a track for another instrument you have no clue how to write music for and paste your original tab into that instrument tab and it will be transcribed for you, this is great if you want to get other musicians to play what you're writing. You can also use midi input from a keyboard or a midi guitar,(Fretlight guitars have a bit of a partnership going on with Guitar Pro also but I use a yourock guitar because they're cheaper), to create tabs/sheet music of what you're playing, while you're playing it, which is really cool, it takes a whole lot of work away if you know how to play something and want to create tab for it without having to sit down and write it/type it in.Unfortunately you can't hear what you're playing through the guitar pro sound engine, you have to use the output of your midi device, but this is fair enough, the rate at which this program can keep up with midi input probably means that while it's doing that it can't do much else.
Guitar pro also have an iPhone/pod app that you can use to write tabs on the go and then use itunes to extract and open in the desktop version, I use this too because I'm a sucker for music related apps, its obviously not as complex as the desktop version but its what convinced me to buy the desktop version because it was still pretty great.
At this point in time Guitar Pro 6 costs about $50, which is pretty good, considering it does more than just what you would assume, (i.e. write and read tab).
Click on the link below to have a look at it on Amazon.