The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #11277   Message #83085
Posted By: John in Brisbane
31-May-99 - 09:31 PM
Thread Name: Ideas For Guitar TAB
Subject: Ideas For Guitar TAB

There has been some recent minor discussion on this subject, including the 'Ashokan Farewell' thread. I only recently discovered that the TAB display and printing options exist on a sequencing package that I have owned for a couple of years known as Power Tracks Pro. It is produced by PG Music, the company that makes Band In A Box, and was a freebie when I bought BIAB. It seems to do a fairly good job of producing TAB, but I'm no expert on this subject.

Some quick thoughts on this:

If you download a MIDI from the Mudcat search box, you can transform it into TAB using a few key strokes in Power Tracks Pro, as well as playing it, transposing it, changing speed. The registered version lets you print and save it. The more money conscious could conceivably copy and paste the screens into Word or similar. It prints the standard notation immediately above the tab, and if you're very keen I believe you can also enter the lyrics to play along with or print.

I suspect that there are quite a few older versions of this package in the market place that were distributed as freebies. I've seen them in the second hand classifieds here for just a few dollars. My version is 3.5 (DOS and 3.1) and it works just fine on Win95.

You can download V5 of Power Tracks at the following address, but it won't save or print. I don't know what happens after the 30 day demo period.

http://www.pgmusic.com/demo.htm

My older version of this doesn't have the fancy digital recording options but is otherwise almost identical in terms of looks and function.

While Power Tracks doesn't pretend to be a fair dinkum manual score entry program like NoteWorthy Composer, it works quite well with piano keyboard MIDI scoring and is fantastic if you like fiddling with the volume controls for each MIDI channel (that part is virtually freeware.

Regards

John

PS The one part of Power Tracks which is not particularly intuitive is finding the Notation window. Just Click Windows, New, Notation. Then you just open any MIDI file you have saved on disc, press the Options button in the Notation Screen, then Click the Tablature Option.