Introduction and Terminology

Introduction

GuitarTab was written out of a need for a decent guitar tablature program for the Macintosh platform. A year or so ago I headed out on the web to find a guitar tablature program and couldn't find one that had any of the features that I wanted, so I set out to write one. GuitarTab is the result of a lot of late nights, so if you do enjoy the program, please register the program to support shareware to encourage others like myself to keep writing quality software for the Macintosh. Many thanks to the patience of my wife while I spent hours locked in my study trying to write and improve this software.

Terminology

The GuitarTab documentation uses some terminology that will be helpful to understand to get the most out of the documentation.

Any references to items in the Menubar will be in italics such as File->Save. Definitions terms will be underlined as seen below. Items that are in bold require the user to click on something such as click on the quarter note button in the GuitarTab window.

Definitions

Fret: A fret refers to a single note entry on a string. Each fret can have effects applied to it that are unique to each fret such as bends, slides, ties, hammer-ons, pull-offs, vibrato. Actions that are specific to frets are located in the Fret menu in the menu bar.

Event: An event is a collection of 6 frets (along with all of their effects) that includes the text above and below the event. Each event has a duration, and all frets in that event will have the same duration (unless an effect is applied to that fret that shortens the duration). To make events that have notes with differing durations, you will have to make two events, and tie the frets from one event to the frets of the next event. Actions that are specific to events are located in the Event menu in the menu bar.

Track: A series of events that make up the guitar tablature. Actions that are specific to tracks are located in the Track menu in the menu bar.

Chord definition file: Chords can be defined in a text file called a chord definition file. The format of this file is explained in the "Chords.txt" file located in the same directory as the GuitarTab application. Just open the "Chords.txt" file with any text editor (SimpleText or BBEdit) to view the contents. The "Chords.txt" file is always loaded upon startup of the GuitarTab application and may be modified and filled with you favorite chords. You may also select Chords->Load Chords... from the menubar at any time to load a different set of chords from another chords definition file.

Moveable chord: Chords can be defined to be moveable such that when you use Event->Shift Up or Event->Shift Down the chord name that appears in the top event text will be changed as you shift the event up or down.