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Haolenuke
Lokahi
USA
117 Posts |
 Posted - 04/06/2010 : 8:58:55 PM
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Aloha,
Arobas Music has just released Guitar Pro 6 (GP6), their upgrade of Guitar Pro 5 (GP5).
If you are interested you can download a demo copy or purchase the software here:
http://www.guitar-pro.com/en/index.php
I have been using GP5 extensively for that last few months and GP6 is a major improvement. Some of the features that are particularly important for Hawaiian music are:
- It is easy to cut and paste text with Hawaiian orthography into GP6.
- The number of measures in a line can be easily adjusted. If you have strophic music, like many of Leonard Kwan's songs with 10 measure long sections, you can arrange the measures so that the sections are clearly grouped.
- Including rhythm information in the tabs like Dennis Ladd did in Leonard Kwan's and Ozzie Kotani's tabs is an option. In my opinion Dennis Ladd's solution was more aesthetic, but GP6 does have the capability.
- GP6 can import Power Tab, TablEdit, MusicXML, ASCII, and MIDI files.
- GP6 can export MusicXML, MIDI, WAV, PNG, ASCII, and PDF files.
- GP6 has very good guitar sound reproduction.
Some improvements over GP5:
- GP6 can show the second note of tied notes in parenthesis.
- Slurs can be labelled.
- In GP6 it is possible to slide between a melody and a bass note.
- In GP6 the graphic for harmonic notes has been upgraded so you can differentiate between a quarter note and a half note.
- In GP6 harmonic notes are tabbed like this: <12>, <7>, & <5>.
- In GP6 you can have a initial bar with pick up notes.
Some issues with GP6:
- The graphic, and the MIDI player playback, for brush strokes cannot be contained within one voice (bass line or melody line). I'm not sure that the Guitar Pro folks intend to provide a fix for this problem, which is particularly serious if you are a fan of Leonard Kwan's Red Book. It is possible to work around this problem by inserting single voice brush stroke arrows with a .pdf editor like PDFill PDF Editor (http://www.pdfill.com/; $19.99), but the MIDI playback will not sound right.
- The MIDI player in GP6 has problems playing rasgueado where some notes last longer than others, as in Leonard Kwan's Nahenahe. The rasgueado ends up sounding like two brush strokes.
- The MIDI player seems to play the harmonic notes too softly. This has been fixed.
- If you have a slow internet connection, download the files somewhere with a fast connection, or buy the disk.
- You can't label a pull off. My mistake, pull offs can be labelled with a "P".
- As best I can tell, the MIDI player has a problem with ukuleles. I have yet to download the sound files for basses, and the guitar sounds are not available for 4 stringed instruments with the acoustic guitar sound files. This problem was fixed by downloading the full acoustic guitar sound file.
- One quirky minor issue is that the text for slides between voices, as in Ozzie Kotani's Awiwi, are displayed in red rather than black.
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Edited by - Haolenuke on 08/17/2010 07:54:01 AM |
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RWD
`Olu`olu
USA
850 Posts |
Posted - 04/07/2010 : 02:15:44 AM
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This is the software I use and I just upgraded after reading the post.
Thanks for sharing the info. |
Bob |
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Haolenuke
Lokahi
USA
117 Posts |
Posted - 04/09/2010 : 6:38:04 PM
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Aloha Bob,
Thank you very much for recommending that I use Guitar Pro 5! I thought that I was going to prefer Sibelius G7, but I was mistaken. GP5 has saved me many hours of frustration, and I expect that GP6 will be able to create publication grade tabs as soon as Arobus fixes just a few minor problems. GP6 makes Leonard Kwan's mele from The Slack Key Instruction Book much more accessible, not that I expect to be able to play many of those mele any time soon.
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Haolenuke
Lokahi
USA
117 Posts |
Posted - 06/10/2010 : 4:48:14 PM
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Aloha,
After working with GP6 for a few more months, I am still quite happy with almost all the updates from GP5. The Guitar Pro service department has been notified about the need to be able to restrict a brush stroke to a single voice (bass line or melody line) in Hawaiian music, but they are still thinking about whether to modify the software to allow single voice brush strokes. If you use GP6, or are thinking about updating to GP6, please consider contacting the service department about this issue. Most of Uncle Leonard Kwan's tabs in the red book utilize single voice brush strokes, and they neither look right, nor sound right, in GP6. Ironically, the brush strokes in Uncle Leonard's red book mele could be depicted and played correctly in GP5. Curiously the harmonic notes are still rather muted for some of the acoustic guitars in the MIDI player even after the MIDI files have been updated, while they sounded about right in GP5. Despite these lingering issues GP6 has many advantages for documenting slack key mele.
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RWD
`Olu`olu
USA
850 Posts |
Posted - 06/18/2010 : 07:39:29 AM
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A note to GP6 users:
One bug that can git you is(and they are working on it)--if you save a custom tuning to you tuning list your music gets stuck loading. You can use custom tunings and they do stay with the music but you can't save it to the list.
Small issue if you know about it. I guess there are a few other small issues but this is still a very good choice for tabbing software.
You can do four voices now, for instance.
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Bob |
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Haolenuke
Lokahi
USA
117 Posts |
Posted - 09/03/2010 : 5:01:38 PM
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| One more issue to watch out for is having symbols overlap one another. For example if voice 1 (the melody line) in a measure starts with a quarter note rest, and voice 2 (the bass line) starts with an eighth note rest, the rest symbols overlap. The Guitar Pro folks are working on this, but they hint that the solution is not right around the corner. |
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Haolenuke
Lokahi
USA
117 Posts |
Posted - 10/14/2010 : 06:37:02 AM
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Aloha,
Guitar Pro has instituted a web based feedback forum to help them prioritize updates to their software. If you are interested in the pros and cons of Guitar Pro and what they are doing to address the software's shortfalls, check out:
http://getsatisfaction.guitar-pro.com/arobas_music
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Guitar Pro 6 music annotation software released
