How to compose a complete song in Guitar Pro – the essential guide
Sometimes song ideas come fully formed, but most of the time, your ideas will take time to come together into a cohesive whole. When you don’t have other musicians to bounce ideas off, Guitar Pro can act as a useful stand in.
In this guide, I’m going to show you how to compose music for other instruments, introduce you to some of Guitar Pro’s intermediate tools and share some tips on how to build the structure of your song. This isn’t a songwriting guide, so I’ll only be using a four bar piece of music to showcase everything. However, we will cover all that’s needed to give you the grounding to how to compose a complete song in Guitar Pro.
Before you continue, if you’ve never used Guitar Pro before, I highly recommend you read our How to tab a basic riff in Guitar Pro feature. I cover the basics there and lay the foundations for where we’ll be continuing in this guide.
How to add accompanying instruments in Guitar Pro
For this guide, I’ve tabbed out a four bar progression playing F# diminished, Bm7 and Em with a “jazzy” rhythm utilising dead notes and hammer-ons. This will be the foundation for showcasing additional instruments, customising sounds and advanced articulation.
You can download the Guitar Pro file so you can hear the rhythm and use this file for your own practice, as well as listening to and editing the lead guitar, bass and drum tracks.
To add a new instrument track, click ‘Track’ in the main menu and ‘Add…’.
Drums
Unlike when tabbing guitar, there’s no set line that a part of the kit must be tabbed on, but I would advise creating a system that makes sense. This is how I organise the kit from top line to bottom:
First and second lines: Cymbals
Third line: Hi-Hats
Fourth line: Toms
Fifth line: Snare
Sixth line: Kick
Top tip: Fill an empty bar with sixteenth note rests. I’ve found it gives me more freedom from the beginning for the placement of kick, snare and cymbal fills to compliment the back beat.
To see what number relates to what part of the drumkit press Fn+CMD+F6 (CTRL+F6 on Windows) to bring up the ‘DrumKit View’. You can also find this in the ‘View’ menu. Note that when you click to hear a sample of any of the pieces of the kit, it will add it into the selected bar of your tab.
The key ones to note for your first beat are:
35 = Kick
38 = Snare
44 = Hi-Hat (Closed)
46 = Hi-Hat (Open)
Keep your beat simple to start with and ensure it pairs well with your riff. Once you have the core groove locked in, then you can refer to the ‘DrumKit View’ and start embellishing with fills and cymbals.
Bass
The process of tabbing bass is identical to guitar, just with fewer strings (most of the time). Write out whatever feels good for you based on your knowledge and experience with bass guitar. Once you’re more actively tabbing out bass and drum parts, you’ll be better at writing more nuanced parts.
How to customise your instruments’ sound in Guitar Pro
Now that we’ve tabbed out the parts for all of our instruments, we can start to look at refining their individual sounds.
Add a capo to your guitar(s)
Select your instrument track and make sure that ‘Track’ is selected in the ‘Inspector’ column. Click the box where your guitar’s tuning is shown and you’ll open the ‘tuning’ dialog box. At the bottom you can choose to add a capo or partial capo. You can do this at the beginning of a project, but if you do it after the fact there’s a button to ‘adjust the fingering’ so that the notes are transposed correctly.
Change your guitar model, effects and amp
Sticking in the ‘Track’ column, click on the guitar name, which in my example is ‘1. Jazz ES’. This brings up a drop-down menu with the first option being the different styles of your currently selected guitar, as well as the option to change the guitar type or change to a different instrument. There are ‘signature’ sounds for many of the guitar types, so if you’re hunting for something specific, be sure to explore the options available.
Below ‘1. Jazz ES’ you will see symbols of a headstock, amplifier, mixer and stompbox. Clicking this will open up your signal chain. In ‘Soundbank’ you’ll see your guitar and here you can change to a different type of guitar, e.g. L. Paul, Strat, Tele.
Beneath this is your effect chain, which in my case has my amplifier, reverb and EQ. You can tweak the settings or change the amp and pedals in your effect chain to suit your preferences. There are presets built-in to all of them or you can build your sound from scratch.
Top tip: I recommend highlighting a bar or section of music and then going into the ‘Sound’ menu to activate a loop when tweaking the settings, so that you can hear what’s being changed live. When paired with ‘Count-in’ this is really handy for when you’re practising playing along.
Add the ‘human touch’ through interpretation
At the bottom of the ‘Track’ column, each instrument will have an ‘Interpretation’ section. This is a great set of tools to give the playing style some personality. You can dictate when the instrument is played with a pick, fingers or bass slap, and dial in the intensity of palm muting and accentuation.
3. How to tab different articulations
Continuing on from the adding the ‘human touch’, there are so many techniques at play in a single riff. While we looked at the basics in our first guide of this series, here’s some of the more intermediate articulations that I use regularly and how you tab them out.
I’ve included the keyboard shortcuts below, but you can select all of these effects quickly with the ‘Edition Palette’ enabled.
Up and downstrokes – Press (Shift + U / D) to add an up or downstroke to accurately tab your rhythm playing
Grace notes – Hitting a note before or after the beat super quickly? Press (G) for a grace note that plays before the beat or (Option+G / CTRL+ALT+G) for grace note(s) on the beat
Vibrato – Press (V) to add a touch of vibrato to a note or chord
Staccato – Press (!) when highlighting a note or chord to add a staccato effect. Super handy for those rhythmic stab sections or for plucky lead lines. A staccato note has a • above it in the staff
Slide in from above/below – When you’re not sliding from a specific note, but want that effect highlight your note or chord, go into Effects > Slide > Slide in from Above / Below based on how you’re playing
Be sure to refer to the Guitar Pro file of this project to see these effects in situ.
Building your song’s structure in Guitar Pro
Whether you’re composing a prog epic or a tight verse-chorus pop anthem, these tools will help add dynamics to your song and make the project easy to navigate.
Use repeat signs
Rather than tabbing out your riff or chord progression each time it’s played, use repeat signs ( [ ) and ( ] ) in the first and final bar to keep your project tidy. You can use alternate endings where the instrumentation changes.
Label your song’s sections
Select a bar, click ‘Section’ in the main menu and then ‘Edit…’ to add a letter and/or name to any section in your song. This will appear both above the staff in the respective bar and along the bottom of the screen.
Pan your instruments to improve the mix
Finding that your two guitar tracks are drowning each other out? Hard pan one to the left and one to the right. You’ll be amazed at what a difference such a small change makes.
Get good at automation
Press F10 and you’ll bring up the ‘Automation’ screen, where you can automate volume, tempo and panning changes throughout your song. These variables can add both personality and dynamics to a song.
Experiment with effects and different instruments
Want to build tension in the intro? Add a couple of bars to the start of your project, duplicate your guitar track and then add a low-pass filter to it, then in your original guitar track, tab the root chord as a whole note, and add a long fade ( < ) or automate a volume swell before the song kicks off.
Maybe your bridge section sounds a bit samey? Ditch the guitar and try out a violin, synth or woodwind instrument and see how that affects the mood of the piece.
In the final part of this guide series, we’ll be looking at how Guitar Pro can streamline the recording process as you take your finished projects to the studio.
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