Johnson Audio

I have used Guitar Pro 5 and while it has always been the defacto TAB software for guitarists the program sucked a little on OS X, for instance it only allowed a single TAB open and when you closed a TAB the entire program shut down which was annoying to say the least. Also the floating tool bar was reminiscent of Microsoft word and faded to semi-transparent when not in use which I found pointless. What it did do though was make writing guitar TAB pretty easy and when you played it back, sound pretty good using Guitar Pro’s Realistic Sound Engine (RSE).

I’m glad to say Guitar Pro 6 has had a complete overhaul of the user interface and has fixed both of the problems mentioned above by allow multiple documents to open in tabs like you would see in a web browser and the toolbar has been moved into a left hand panel. This left hand panel has 6 buttons which allow you to switch between panel views, the first opens the Editing toolbar which contains all of your notation options. The second opens the Instrument panel where you can choose the tuning of the guitar (or bass) and what RSE soundbank to use (guitar has option of Les Paul, Strat and Jazz guitars). The third button opens the Audio panel which lets you choose an amp, effects pedals and master effects such as reverb and chain up to 5. The fourth button opens the Mastering panel which include compression, limiter, gate, eq and reverb. Button five opens up the Chords panel which allows you to choose the chords that are used in your song and add them to the top of the TAB sheet and finally the last button opens the Lyrics Panel.

The result of these enhancements has made Guitar Pro 6 much easier to use, quicker to write TAB with and more realistic sounding on playback. This isn’t just a minor upgrade, if you are a Mac user this is this upgrade that finally makes Guitar Pro really worth the $60 price tag.