As readers of Troll Cave Music will probably have picked up by now, I love guitars. I play guitar, but admittedly not very well. Part of it is that guitar is one of the absolute hardest instruments to replicate with computers. However, computers can help in some ways.
I have recently come across such a guitarist-assistance tool, TuxGuitar. TuxGuitar is a music transcription program, but it goes way beyond that. Best of all, it's open source and free.
Basic Overview
TuxGuitar is an open source application that boasts the following features:
* Tablature editor
* Score Viewer
* Multitrack display
* Autoscroll while playing
* Note duration management
* Various effects (bend, slide, vibrato, hammer-on/pull-off)
* Support for triplets (5,6,7,9,10,11,12)
* Repeat open and close
* Time signature management
* Tempo management
* Imports and exports gp3,gp4 and gp5 files
Translate for me, please!
I see TuxGuitar as a guitarist's electronic notebook, of sorts. You can write out your music as guitar tab and traditional score at the same time. It also boasts a wide variety of guitar effects that are missing from most non-guitar-oriented programs, like hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends, etc. All of these are easily accessible in the toolbar. To make transciption even easier, you can even add a fretboard image to the UI, and pick off the notes by their fretboard position. So there's 3 separate ways to enter the notation, and the program figures out the other two for you. You can also add chords, and it will include the Chord image above the transcription of the notes. TuxGuitar also gives you the option of other instruments, including bass, drums, and other items like organs. Differences in the notation (Bass clef, for example) make native support for other instruments essential, especially if you want to make notation for the whole band. There's also the ability to add lyrics to the sheet, so you can generate pretty complete sheet music.
Drums do suffer, though, since they do not (yet) support traditional drum notation. Instead, percussion mode uses General MIDI note numbers to represent the drum "tab". This is OK if you're planning on using those directly into a MIDI-enabled drum module, but pretty useless when you print out the drum tab.
So I can see it, so what?
Transcription is a good foundation, but TuxGuitar goes one step further. It also has enabled a music player, so you can hear what the transcription sounds like. This is OK, except for the thin, horrible samples that are embedded in the program. The web site does give instructions on how you can reconfigure to use other programs for the playback. You could, for example, reroute the MIDI out into REAPER, Ableton Live, etc., if you really wanted to.
Windows? Mac? Linux?
Yes, yes, and yes. TuxGuitar is available for pretty much any OS you're running. And if not, there is also an online Java app so you really can use it just about anywhere.
Why Use TuxGuitar? Can't we do this in [random DAW]?
I've been asking myself the same question - if this is just a MIDI player, can't I do that in REAPER? Yes and no. I don't see myself ever using TuxGuitar to record a masterpiece. This is not a DAW, and doesn't pretend to be. It's a MIDI authoring and playback tool on steroids. The real strength, as I mentioned earlier, is a guitarist's notebook. You can transcribe your fragments and keep them safer than notepaper scribbles (which I always lose). Recording guitar audio is nice, but you don't always remember where/how you played a specific passage. With TuxGuitar, you can tab it out based on the fretboard without even knowing the notes themselves. (I think I just felt a collective shudder at the thought of people playing without knowing the notes. Relax. It does happen.) The other side of this coin is that you can use it to help translate traditional notation into guitar tab, so you can use it as musical middleware, if you will.
When you look at the TuxGuitar site, many users are posting their own full-blown compositions in TuxGuitar. Ambitious, and weak, since using the normal TuxGuitar playback reminds me of everything bad and wrong about the old days of .MID files back in the day.
Final Thoughts
TuxGuitar is a nice little tool that doesn't really presume to be more. Although it has some DAW-like features, the ability to create sheet music (and tab) of your work is a great win. I have countless random scraps of hand-written tab of a good riff here or there, and I lose them with great frequency. Being able to properly document what I'm working on (with all the bends, hammer-ons, etc) is a wonderful thing.
The best part? It's open source, zero cost gear, so no need to cost-justify it.
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