I’m a keen guitarist, and I find one of the most important things about playing music is practising composing and recording, even if the result isn’t going to win you any Grammies. To record my music, I have the ubuquitous Audacity, which I’ve used since my Windows days.
Now I was worried about a program to use to compose music on Linux. On Windows, I had used Guitarpro, an excellent piece of software that worked with MIDI. It had multiple tracks, graphical representations of a guitar’s fretboard and a piano’s keys (only n00bs use this feature, though), something called Realistic Sound Engine, which made instruments sound much more natural than the monophonic MIDI alternative, as well as a whole lot of other features.
I tried out two popular Linux alternatives to Guitar Pro: KGuitar and TuxGuitar, as well as one that I found in the Add/Remove window, called Songwrite.
Let’s start with TuxGuitar. TuxGuitar was the first of these programs that I used. I got it during my first week in Linux, and have used it extensively in the last few months. TuxGuitar has almost all of Guitar Pro’s features, except RSE support, which none of these programs have. TuxGuitar is a complete Guitar Pro clone, down to the interface and menus (unfortunately, unlike in Guitar Pro, you cannot change the location of yout toolbars). This might be a good thing for some, but personally I’m against cloning Windows software.
This is where KGuitar wins. KGuitar has some nice additions to Guitar Pro’s features. The coolest by far is the Rhythm Constructor. This lets you input notes and tap out the rhythm with your mouse. A firstclass idea and executed well too!
Then there’s the automatic bassline generator: you give KGuitar a chord progression and it gives you back a bassline. The basslines are nothing revoluntionary, but if, like me, you’re too lazy to write your own, this can come in handy quite often.
Another small instance of KGuitar’s uniqueness that I love is the track properties dialog, which lets you choose your tuning and shows you the diameter of your strings. You can’t select the diameter, but it gives you an instant visual reference when selecting the tuning, and it’s attention to detail like this that makes this my favourite tablature editor for Linux.
KGuitar has got loads of other features; the three I’ve mentioned just struck me as really cool. Its only drawback, for me, is the fact that it’s a KDE app. It’s not as pretty as native GNOME programs, and it’s slightly slower than TuxGuitar. However, these are not exactly significant problems and they don’t bother me at all.
The last program I tried is called Songwrite, and all I have to say about it is don’t go there! I’m saying this based on first impressions, but when you see the interface, which is like a nightmare visitation of stone-age aesthetics, you’ll want to close it immediately. The program turned out to be more usable than it looked, due to the fact that it has no extra features– let alone visual fretboards, this program can’t even do hammer-ons and pull-offs. Songwrite is really not an option.
You could also use Guitar Pro with Wine, but this was (for me, at least) a bad combination, and resulted in terrible performance
My favourite of these is obviously KGuitar; I’ve found it better even than Guitar Pro, which is a pleasant surprise. TuxGuitar is an able competitor, and it’s definitely worth trying. About Songwrite, I shall write no more.
