These limitations were all potentially tolerable, but the show-stopper came when I tried to export a complete multitrack score, which apparently Tux Guitar cannot do. The interface for copying and pasting in Tux Guitar is horrible, and it is almost easier to just type in all of the notes a second time rather than copying and pasting. It also didn’t handle the vocal track very well, and required me to program it using tablature instead of standard music notation. But I found that Tux Guitar’s multitrack tools don’t scale very well, and the interface becomes quite clunky when you have more than one track in a song. This post was originally conceived as an introduction to Tux Guitar, sort of like my previous post about LMMS, and I set to work on the tablature score for a song I recently recorded called “ My Abode,” which was going to be the centerpiece of this blog post. I have been overall content to use Tux Guitar, aside from the synthesizer annoyance described above, but I recently discovered a few other limitations. (For the record, I am using Tux Guitar 1.3.1) As you can see, Tux Guitar outputs a clean but not especially beautiful score, which looks like it was made by a computer. As an example, here is a score for the solo fingerstyle guitar version of Lullabye. If you can’t figure out how to do something using the GUI, the local help files and online documentation are very good.įor most of the last 5 years I have been using Tux Guitar exclusively for my tablature notation projects, most of which are solo fingerstyle guitar pieces. The tablature notation is very rich, and includes all of the standard fretboard techniques such as hammer-on/pull-off, pitch bending, vibrato, muting, etc. It can do polyphony up to four voices in a single track, and also has multitrack features. Once you get Tux Guitar up and running it is a very capable program. I have no idea whether the Windows or Mac OS versions have the same issue. Note that I have only ever used Tux Guitar on Linux. Tux Guitar will still work just fine without a synthesizer attached, you just won’t be able to hear any sound output (which kind of defeats the purpose). It can be pretty frustrating to struggle with the Qsynth and Tux Guitar settings when really what I want to do is fire up a piece of software and get my creativity going. On one of my computers I have never been able to get the two programs to successfully talk to one another, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why. If this sounds complicated, then that’s because it can be. When I start a Tux Guitar session I have to start Qsynth first, and then make sure the two programs are talking to each other before I can proceed with the notation project I have in mind. The connection can be made through JACK or directly between the two programs. I connect it to Qsynth, which is a GUI front-end for Fluidsynth. When you install Tux Guitar you also need a software synthesizer in order to hear any sound output. Tux Guitar is really just a notation editor and sequencer, and does not include a synthesizer. There are two Free software tools which I use for writing guitar tablature on Linux, which I will review here. When my garage band broke up I spent a lot of time writing down all of our songs in tablature so that I wouldn’t forget how to play them. Learning about tablature opened up a whole new world of guitar music and playing technique for me. Reading standard music notation has never been easy for me, but tablature is simple to understand because I think of guitar music in terms of where I put my fingers on the fretboard, not in terms of the names of the notes I am playing. My friend let me take the magazine home, and I learned how to play the whole song that day. “The lines are the strings, and the numbers are the frets.” I stared at it for a few minutes, and then tried to play a few bars. When I was 15 years old my friend showed me a guitar magazine that had the music for a song we both liked, and it was written in tablature. As long as I had the chords and knew the tune, I could play any song. When I was 10 years old my dad gave me a chord chart and a few John Denver songs to learn, and I was off to the races. I am a self-taught guitarist, learning to play mostly by ear.
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