How Guitar Pro can streamline your recording process
We’ve now looked at how to tab a basic riff as well as composing a full song in Guitar Pro, so hopefully you’re feeling confident in using the software. While it’s an excellent tool for developing ideas into fully-fledged compositions, Guitar Pro has a number of benefits to all aspects of your guitar work.
In this guide, we’re going to look at some of the ways in which Guitar Pro can streamline the recording process; exploring its impact on the way you write, practice, collaborate and collate your ideas and how all of those aspects feed into recording. What we’ll be exploring applies to both solo artists and guitarists in a band that intend to either record and produce themselves or work with an engineer/producer.
Practise at your own pace
The world of guitar tablature is daunting for a beginner – and even sometimes for a veteran. Thankfully, Guitar Pro has long been the default choice of fans and artists when it comes to accurately tabbing out songs. Tab books will often come with Guitar Pro files as standard.
Being able to hear and see the notes and chords being played makes a world of difference when learning a song. When you combine that with Guitar Pro’s playback speed, metronome and loop functionality, practising guitar becomes infinitely better as you can set a comfortable pace, learn parts efficiently and refine your timing.
The more songs you learn in this way, the more you’ll learn about different articulations and the theory behind your favourite pieces, which will build your knowledge and inform the way you write and perform.
In addition to this, if your favourite artist and/or song hasn’t been tabbed and you want to try your hand at learning it by ear, Guitar Pro can be incredibly helpful. Whether you’re working it out the full piece or using a stem separator to pick out the part(s) you want to learn, tabbing the part out in Guitar Pro helps in multiple ways.
You have both a visual and aural guide to refer to as you’re learning
You can use the playback speed and metronome to practise at a comfortable pace before getting to 100% speed
The more you tab out parts in Guitar Pro, the more efficient at it you’ll become
You’ll develop your musical ear and each subsequent piece should, in theory, take less and less time
Write parts you can’t play
The beauty of Guitar Pro is you tab something out and it plays it, so what’s to stop you just trying something nuts to see how it sounds? It may turn into a practice routine for you that both elevates your playing and becomes a key component to your song. It may be something you transpose to another instrument such as synth and turn into a lead line. Give it a try and I guarantee it will help unlock some creative ideas.
Create an organised archive of ideas
You might be sitting on an ever-growing folder of voice memos or videos of different riff ideas and chord progressions. I know I am! But a habit that I’ve been trying to form is transferring those ideas into Guitar Pro – and here’s why.
Too many times I’ve looked back at an idea and realised I’ve filmed it at a terrible angle and can’t actually make out what I’m playing and spend the limited time I have on trying to relearn the part by ear. That issue grows exponentially with voice memos! Tabbing out the idea in Guitar Pro removes these issues, while also developing your proficiency with the software.
Even if you’ve documented an idea clearly, there’s very little you can do with it as a recording on your phone. And unless you’re hot on naming and categorising your recordings, it’s easy for those ideas to become disorganised and great riffs and progressions being forgotten for extended periods of time.
By staying on top of your latest bursts of inspiration, you can quickly build an organised archive of ideas that are in the best place to be developed over time and turned into fully-formed ideas or finished tracks.
Bonus tip
This isn’t a Guitar Pro tip, but one that I feel is still beneficial to share. I periodically upload any video recordings of ideas to a drive as both a backup and for better organisation. When naming these recordings, I include the key and/or tuning of the idea and some descriptive element. This could be ‘new intro idea for X track’ or describing the vibe of the idea, e.g. heavy, dreamy, energetic, etc. These naming conventions make it much easier to categorise ideas and easily scan through them to find what you’re looking for.
Easily collaborate with other artists
You might be great at following my previous point, but if you’re consistently running into creative blocks and unable to progress an idea, why not enlist the help of another artist? This can be scaled in the smallest or largest ways, whichever suits your creativity best.
Share and write parts with your bandmates
We don’t always have the luxury of regularly jamming and writing with our bandmates – your band may even live across countries or continents. Guitar Pro makes sharing ideas incredibly easy, whether that’s exporting an idea as an .mp3, sharing a MIDI file of the project, which a bandmate can drop into their Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), or if they are a Guitar Pro user, simply sharing the project file.
It can also be a great way for you and your band to write parts outside of your home instrument(s). For example, you might have an idea for a drum part that you want to share with your drummer. Equally, your drummer might have a melody in mind for guitar. You can go super ambitious and channel my second point on writing parts you can’t play to challenge one another and potentially create something you’d never have attempted by yourself.
Develop ideas with artists across the globe
If you’re a solo artist or simply looking for some new creative perspectives, the same approach can be applied to artists across the world. With a multitude of Discord servers, subreddits and forums dedicated to sharing music, you can put ideas out into the ether and see how others interpret and develop them.
Collaborate with a broad range of instrumentalists
As you may remember from part one of this guide, when you create any project in Guitar Pro, you can choose to have the music written out as a score. While there are many guitarists that read and write sheet music, it’s most commonly found in jazz and classically trained musicians. When you have a suite of orchestral instruments in-software, what’s to stop you taking a stab at scoring some string parts for your track and reaching out to players to help develop and potentially record these parts?
Your score won’t come out as a perfect piece of sheet music, but it will be a much more effective way of communicating your ideas with instrumentalists, especially when paired with the project. When you find a player that’s keen to collaborate, they can take that score, clean it up and then record the parts as you envisioned them.
Streamline the recording process
Each point preceding this feeds into streamlining the recording process, but this is the most direct way that Guitar Pro can speed things up.
We’ve already touched upon exporting MIDI data to import into a DAW when collaborating, but how does this aid the recording process? Let’s say you’ve composed a complete song in Guitar Pro, with multitrack parts, accompanying instrumentation and even automation, panning, etc. The final step is to record it.
Ordinarily, this would involve building a recording template in your DAW with section markers, tempo information, audio and MIDI channels, etc. When you export a Guitar Pro project as a MIDI file and then drag-and-drop that into your DAW (I am using Logic Pro for this example), it automatically creates separate channels for each part, using the DAWs in-built instrument library to give each part a distinct sound, as well as any automation data as well as the song’s tempo. Unfortunately, should your song have any time signature changes, your DAW will not create markers for these changes, and this has to be done manually.
You now have an accurate template (time signatures notwithstanding) of your song(s), which massively reduces how much pre-production time is needed before beginning your recording. This is doubly useful for recording engineers who are not familiar with your music and can be a good way for them to know what you’re trying to create with the recording.
Additionally, if you intend to use any instrument libraries, you will already have the MIDI data in place from the import. This can not only save time, but make a huge difference in setting the ‘vibe’ early on, allowing you to ease more naturally into recording your parts.
There you have it! Our essential guide to Guitar Pro is complete – I hope you’ve found it useful. Don’t forget, you can download the demo project file we referred to in part two to get you started in the software.
The post How Guitar Pro can streamline your recording process appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
