Monday 24 November 2003

Power Tab

If you play guitar or bass and haven't heard of Power Tab, then you have got to download this software and try it. I only discovered it last week. Of course you probably know there's lots of ASCII (text) guitar tablature out there (e.g. OLGA) but there's also tablature available in Power Tab format. Power Tab is a free Windows program that displays the tablature perfectly and even plays it for you. The tab files often have both guitar and bass scores together. After you download and install it, go to Power Tab Central and start finding the songs you want learn to play. I had a great evening finding over twenty songs and was really impressed with the quality of most of the transcriptions.

There's numerous features but one the best is that you can output a score as a MIDI file. This allowed me to add a drum track to it and then drop the guitar so I'm left with a bass and drum backing track. To get the drum track, I imported the midi file into Band In A Box and let Band In A Box create it. Yeah, call me lazy but it's cheap and easy. Then I export this back to a midi file. Next, I import both these midi files into Cubase SL and select the right parts for playback. Simple!

Power Tab is a great learning tool if you're a guitarist. Indeed you can customise it for any stringed instrument.

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