Guitar Pro
More info
- Owner
- Arobas Music
- Type
- App
- License
- Proprietary
A French tablature editor whose file format became the guitar world's de facto standard for sharing parts.
Guitarists read tab more often than standard notation: one line per string, one number per fret. Arobas Music's Guitar Pro let you write tab alongside conventional notation and play it back with MIDI sounds, which made it as much a practice tool as a notation program.
What really spread it was the files. .gp3, .gp4 and .gp5 circulated by the hundreds of thousands on tab sites, and the format became entrenched enough that the open-source TuxGuitar and several web players learned to read it. MusicXML is the better choice for swapping scores with other notation software, but nobody in a rehearsal room asks for an XML file.