Adding guitar parts and tablature.
NotePad makes creating guitar parts easy by offering the ability to translate standard notation directly to TAB.
In this lesson you will learn how to:
To prepare for the following steps, we'll copy some music into the regular guitar staff.
To copy the right hand piano part to the Guitar staff:
Note. To begin at this point, open "Tutorial 7a.MUS."
Use the Selection tool to copy the right hand Piano music to the standard (top) Guitar staff.
There are a few ways to enter into a tab staff. We’ll start with the most basic, copying music directly from a standard staff into tablature.
To copy music to a tab staff:
In order to correctly place the notes on the strings, NotePad needs to know what fret to use as the lowest. If you wish for a particular passage to be played further up the neck, you can specify the lowest fret for NotePad to use.
NotePad now displays the fret numbers representing the pitch as played on the lowest possible fret in standard guitar tuning. However, you may wish to choose different fret numbers or strings.
Use the Selection tool to copy music directly into a TAB staff. NotePad transcribes the notation into tablature automatically.
Note. When copying and pasting into a TAB staff, some notes may appear yellow instead of black. This is how NotePad displays a note that cannot be played with the current lowest fret or tuning. In order to play this passage, this pitch will need to be changed.
You can edit tab numbers and move them between strings manually with the Simple Entry tool. This method gives more control over the movement of single and non-contiguous fingerings. For example, you could change this passage to start higher up the neck
To change the string and fret number:
Note. When using Simple Entry on TAB staves, the keyboard commands are slightly different than with standard notation staves and will use both the number pad numbers and the QWERTY numbers on your keyboard to accomplish various tasks. For the purposes of this exercise, QWERTY numbers will be specified as such. All other numbers will be from the number pad.
Note. Fret numbers in layer 2 (like the "3" in this example) are red. See Entering Multiple Voices for more information on layers.
Use the up and down arrow keys to move fret numbers to different strings.
In addition to copying from a standard notation staff, you can also enter tab directly into a tab staff, either with your mouse or your computer keyboard. This comes in handy if you are working with a tab staff only, or already know the tablature and not the standard notation.
To enter directly into a tab staff with Simple Entry:
We will enter the dotted half note in measure 5, which is in layer 2.
Note. You can also add multiple notes on the same beat to build a chord (in the same layer), either by clicking them in with the Simple Entry tool, or by adding them with the keyboard. To add an interval with the keyboard, type
Remember to choose the correct duration before clicking-in or typing-in fret numbers.
Note. Once you've entered notes in the TAB staff, you can copy and paste into a regular Guitar staff to produce standard notation that matches the TAB.
Previous | Next |
User Manual Home |