How to tab a basic riff in Guitar Pro – the essential guide
Whether it’s voice memo recordings, videos on your phone, hastily scrawled tabs or a combination of the three, guitarists each have their own ways of documenting riffs and song ideas. As a solo musician, I found Guitar Pro to be the best tool to turn those ideas into songs. Having discovered it just a couple of years into playing guitar, it was also a crucial tool that helped build my music theory understanding.
In this series of guides, I hope to share what I’ve learned in the 15+ years I’ve been using Guitar Pro. Today, I’ll be introducing you to the basics of tabbing out a riff in Guitar Pro as well as giving an overview into the theoretical side of your compositions and how you correctly tab those out.
If you don’t own Guitar Pro, you can download a free 7 day trial for Guitar Pro 8 (the latest iteration at the time of writing) for Windows or macOS and follow along. I’ll be using v7.6 for this guide, but all the features I’ll be talking about will apply to the latest version.
You can apply this guide to an original composition, but you can also use a riff you’ve learned from another artist. It’s how I learned a lot of Guitar Pro’s features in those early days when my own riff ideas were limited (i.e. rubbish).
1. Creating a new file in Guitar Pro
Opening Guitar Pro will bring up the projects screen. As you save more projects, add tabs of your favourite artists, etc. your recent files will begin to populate and allow you to jump right back in where you left off.
For now, we’re just going to click ‘new file’.
2. Choosing your guitar type
It’s now time to choose your starting instrument. You can see there are four tabs: Stringed, Orchestra, Drums and MIDI. We’ll be looking solely at ‘Stringed’ for this guide and will explore the other instrumentation options in future guides.
When ‘Stringed’ is selected, you’ll see two columns with your ‘master’ instrument on the left and the different permutations of that instrument on the right:
Acoustic – Nylon, 12-string, Steel, Resonator
Electric Guitar – Overdrive, Distortion, Sitar, Clean, Jazz, 12-String
Bass Guitar – Acoustic, Fretless, Electric, Synth, Upright
Other – Banjo, Ukulele, Mandolin
Once you’ve settled on your guitar, you’ll have four further settings to tweak:
Instrument track name
Notation type, e.g. tablature, standard and slash notation
The number of strings and tuning
The sound of your guitar that you’ll hear during tabbing and playback
All of these settings can be changed after this point, so don’t feel like you need to agonise over them. I’ll show you how to do this in the next step.
For this guide, I’m going to use the following settings:
Information: Jazz Guitar, jz.guit.
Notation: Tablature and Standard Notation
Upper Staff: 6 strings, standard tuning
Sound: Jazz ES
3. How to tab out a riff in Guitar Pro
Before starting, familiarise yourself with the layout of Guitar Pro. Below is an example of a ‘full screen’ view where you’ll find ‘Edition Palette’ which includes a lot of your note and effect tools; the ‘Global View’ where you’ll find all your instrument tracks and each bar of your song; and the ‘Inspector’ view where you can change the song information and edit your instrument type, amp, effects and playing style.
To begin tabbing out your idea, you need to input the corresponding fret number(s) on the string(s) being used in your riff.
Bar one will show our two staffs; the upper for standard notation and the bottom for our tablature, which represents the 6 strings of our guitar, with the highest line being the high ‘E’ and the bottom being the low ‘E’.
A new project will default to highlighting the lowest string, signified by the yellow square. You can use your mouse or directional keys to change the string you’re on or move to the next beat in the bar.
Below are two tabbed examples, an E Minor chord arpeggio and an eight-note riff across the low E and A strings.
Guitar Pro will default to a quarter note duration on a new file. Use the (+/-) keys to increase and decrease the note duration while highlighting the chord/note based on how it’s played. Use the space bar to begin playback and hear what you’ve tabbed out and refine the note durations where needed. If it’s still sounding a little too fast or slow, double click the tempo at the top of the page and adjust until it feels right.
If your bar is highlighted in red when moving to a new bar, this means there are too few or too many to fill the bar. 4/4 is the default for all new projects in Guitar Pro and means that a single measure/bar is made up of four quarter notes worth of music.
When tabbing out your idea, it’s important to make sure that your note durations add up before moving to the next bar. It’s easy to get the hang of when you’re writing in 4/4, but becomes trickier when writing in odd time signatures.
Here’s an easy way to visualise how different notes fill a bar of 4/4:
If your riff is an odd time signature, fear not! I’ll be talking a little more about that in the next section of this guide.
4. Understanding the notation behind your riff and how to tab it out
Your riff should now be sounding familiar to you, but it might still be missing something. Here are some techniques to get your riff sounding as accurate as possible.
Time signature
When I first started tabbing out ideas in Guitar Pro, I wasn’t all that knowledgeable about time signatures, so much so that I beat my head against the wall trying to understand why my arpeggio crossed a bar and a half of 4/4 long before realising what 6/4 was.
If you think that’s the case with your riff, record a voice memo of you playing your riff and then tap along and count out the time.
The top number in a time signature relates to the number of times a note is played, the bottom the speed of those notes. For example, 6/4 is a measure made up of six quarter notes.
If your riff starts in an odd time signature, you can double-click the symbol in the first bar and change it. If your riff has multiple time signature changes, use the keyboard shortcut CTRL/CMD+T (Windows/macOS, respectively) in the respective bar to change it.
Rests, ties and dotted notes
Along with ensuring each note of your riff is the right length, there are some things that can’t be done with just the (+/-) keys.
Rests
There may be a gap in your riff where no notes are being played. In notation, this would be marked as a rest, which can be inserted into Guitar Pro using the (R) key on your keyboard. Use the (+/-) keys to set how long your rest lasts for and make sure it sounds right when you playback.
Ties
Similarly, your riff may hold a note across two bars, e.g. played on the final beat in bar one and held on the first beat of bar two. For example, it may be that the note needs to last for two quarter notes, but your bar of 4/4 on has one quarter note remaining. You can’t notate it as a half note, because that adds up to five quarter notes or 5/4. To notate this, tab out the first note and then move to the next beat in the bar/next bar and press the (L) key. If you’re using a tie on a chord, press (L) on each string that the chord is fretted.
Dotted notes
When a half note is too long, but a quarter note too short, you need a dotted note. A dotted note is when you add half the value of your chosen note duration, e.g. a dotted quarter note is a quarter note plus an eighth note. To notate a dotted note, use the ‘period/full stop’ key on your keyboard on the note you wish to change. The next note you tab will also be dotted, so be sure to remove this if not needed.
Note articulation
The final thing to discuss is how you articulate the notes in your riff. I’m just going to highlight the most common articulations for now, but we will look at more intermediate ones in the next guide.
Legato slides
Press (S) on the first note and then tab out the following note. The two (or more) notes will be linked and play as a legato slide transition during playback. This applies to slides up and down the neck.
Hammer-on/Pull-off
Press (H) to link multiple notes where you’re performing hammer-ons and pull-offs.
Palm muting
Highlight the note(s) that you want to be played with a palm mute a press (P).
Let ring
If you want the notes in your riff to ring out together rather than ending once the next note plays, use (i) on your keyboard to enable the ‘let ring’ function. You’ll be surprised how effective this is at taking your riff from sounding robotic to natural.
Dead Notes
If you use dead notes as part of your riff, you can press (X) on any given string and set the note duration. Different strings with a dead note will produce different sounds so try out a combination that works for you.
Bends
Press (B) on the note you want to bend and then tweak the force and duration of the bend to your desired effect.
Next time, we’ll build on what we’ve learned here and start to build a complete song in Guitar Pro as we explore customising your guitar tone, adding additional instruments and utilising repeating sections and automation.
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