Musicians prepare for the studio with songwriting program

By Tom Morrison

It starts with a single note on a single guitar track and then it becomes a map to a full-length song with multiple guitars, a bass, drums and a vocal melody. It’s a tool for songwriting and becoming prepared for recording in a studio. It’s a way to connect with other musicians and it’s a way for musicians to document all of the ideas in their head.

The tool in question is Guitar Pro, a computer program used for writing out music for almost any instrument and learning music by other artists. It has the ability to play back music in the program from either a MIDI library or its Realistic Sound Engine and show the notes as they’re being heard. Music can be written in either musical notation or tablature.

Guitar Pro was created by Arobas Music, a company founded in 1997 in Lille, France with a single dedication to creating this program. The program has since gone through six versions, with the latest being released in April 2010. However, the fifth version of the program is still widely used because some consider it to be more user-friendly.

Some musicians are using this program, and others like it, as a tool for songwriting. Brandon White, formerly a guitarist and vocalist for Windsor metal band Assassinate the Following…, has been using a version of Guitar Pro for about eight years. He said the program helped him learn how to write songs.

“You learn so much about the rhythms and note values and the mathematics behind everything and how to compile stuff. You really learn a lot about playing it and tinkering with stuff. That teaches you about transitions and how to make stuff flow when you’re writing your music,” said White.

White usually writes a song on the program first by coming up with a guitar riff and then writing other instruments on top of that “and the rest just trails on from that riff.” White laughed and said his band probably wouldn’t have existed if he didn’t use this program.

“Without Guitar Pro I would not have any of the ideas that were in my head documented and actually tabbed out, so without that it would probably be impossible to teach everybody (in the band) what was going through my head.”

The program is also used by Michael Ieradi of the Ottawa band Today I Caught the Plague. Ieradi drums and writes songs for the band, which has toured with Protest the Hero, The Devin Townsend Project, Periphery and others. The program was useful for him when the band formed in 2005 because it allowed him to write songs with the only other initial member, vocalist Dave Journeaux.

“We just started writing the (Ms. Mary Mallon) EP ourselves and tried to find people afterwards,” said Ieradi. “Because we don’t play every instrument, as well as we wouldn’t need to, we decided to use (the program), write the music and then try to find people afterwards.”

Ieradi has a similar process to White for writing songs on Guitar Pro and said it’s useful for any of the six members in his band to present an idea.

“For a band like us where it’s a little more technical and complicated … no one’s pitching like, ‘Here’s this chorus that I have that I’ve written the vocals for.’ We’re a little more orchestrated, so then everyone gets to orchestrate their own idea. You get somebody’s full idea when they’re showing it to everybody else.”

Ieradi also said the program changes your perspective on writing songs collaboratively because a person can write music for an instrument they don’t play and they interpret songs on those instruments differently.

“I find that it’s really beneficial in that sense because you get a different idea that you made that you never jumped to yourself. If you play your own instrument, you kind of get into certain tendencies and certain things you focus on.”

When it came time for Assassinate the Following… and Today I Caught the Plague to record their debut full-length albums, both already had every song and every instrument tabbed out in Guitar Pro.

Ieradi said his band treats Guitar Pro as “the first stage of pre-production.” Pre-production traditionally involves an artist recording demo versions of all of the songs on an album before entering a professional studio. This gives the artist a better idea of how the album should sound and ideally cuts down on the amount of money spent on recording.

Today I Caught the Plague uses both the Guitar Pro method and the traditional method.

“Our guitar player, Ben (Davis), as he’s been tracking pre-production, he goes in, changes the parts and tries other things and records the files for pre-production, but then often changes it on Guitar Pro,” said Ieradi. “So he goes back and forth between a live recording and pre-production and just really gets a feel for both ideas.”

In some ways, the Guitar Pro method is more useful, Ieradi said.

“You get to really go in there and tear apart the songs note by note because it’s just MIDI and there’s no tones or poorly recorded pre-production where you miss a note or two. You really want to hear everything so every harmony is bang on, every note from every other instrument is bang on. It just kind of clarifies the idea you’re trying to get across.”

White said having everything planned out on 2010’s Massacre of the North saved the band a lot of time, especially when it came to recording the drums.

“We had the click track that we created in Guitar Pro, along with the guitars from Guitar Pro playing in (drummer Russell Farley’s) headphones, so that saved us a few hours right there of work.”

According to Glenn Fricker, the studio engineer for the album, it was a lot more than a few hours of saved time.

“He did the entire album in nine hours, which would have normally taken four or five days in the studio,” said Fricker, owner of Spectre Media Group in Tecumseh.

Another way the program saved the band time in the studio, White said, was if a part of a song needed to be changed, they could change it in the program until it sounded right. They didn’t need to waste time playing their guitars until they came up with the best way to play something.

Fricker recently put out a two-part YouTube video series on eight tips for a band to get ready for the studio. The final tip was using Guitar Pro.

“Everything’s written out. So when your bass player comes in and hasn’t done his homework, the guitar player can work out what was written down and go, ‘Oh, OK. I can play that.’ Because nine times out of 10 the bass player is a shitty guitar player. That’s just the truth,” Fricker said.

The most important part of Fricker’s job is getting a good performance out of a band and he said the program helps him accomplish this.

“It’s not my job to help somebody write their (expletive) songs. I’m not a songwriter, I’m a (expletive) producer so it’s my job to give and inspire a performance out of somebody,” said Fricker. “If they know what they got to do before hand, I can help them get that performance.”

Martin Bak, owner of SLR Studios, has also worked with bands that use the program, but he doesn’t use it in the studio. He said the MIDI library “sounds funny” and not every band should use the program.

“It’s different with how prepared they are,” Bak said. “Some love it and some hate it because they don’t want to get into writing it all out and want to come to the studio and feel it.”

Both Fricker and Bak said it’s not a good idea to use the program for styles of music, like blues or jazz, that rely on improvisation, but it’s useful for music with intricate parts, especially metal. Fricker took it a step farther and said he would recommend it for writing out modern rock and pop-punk because that kind of music is also about precision.

A possible downside to using a program like Guitar Pro, Bak said, is it might make a musician too prepared.

“Maybe writing it and getting used to it so you’re in the studio, even though you might write something better, you’re used to it being a certain way so it’s harder to part from an original performance,” said Bak.

“In my experience, there’s no such thing as planning out too much,” said Fricker.

“You can plan it out as much as you want, but really you’re the one choosing everything that you’re doing in the program,” said White. “It’s not the program that makes the song too robotic, it’s all you.”

“If there are (guitar solos) that are in the song and you’re not really taking the time to add some feel behind it then I just feel it becomes robotic and it can sound like your tab on a record,” said Ieradi. “The drums will be stiff, all the guitar playing will be stiff. You get used to kind of using vibrato and things like that in the program, which if you don’t know how to interpret it, it just becomes you as a Guitar Pro file.”

As long as two or more musicians are using the same version of the program, they can easily send each other their Guitar Pro files through e-mail. All versions of the program do not have back compatibility so a Guitar Pro 6 file (.gpx) will not open in Guitar Pro 5. A Guitar Pro 5 file (.gp5) will open in Guitar Pro 6, but sometimes it does not convert properly.

For example, Guitar Pro 5 allows you to change the tone of a guitar multiple times on a single track, but in Guitar Pro 6, a songwriter needs to create a separate track for each guitar tone. If a Guitar Pro 5 guitar track with multiple tones is opened in Guitar Pro 6, there will only be one guitar track in that program and it will have the same tone throughout the entire song.

Ieradi and White have shown each other songs they have written on Guitar Pro.

“We would show (White) our new songs in Guitar Pro and he would get just as excited as he would if I was showing him the actual recording, which I always found really funny,” Ieradi said. “He would show us a song and we would completely be able to understand what was happening because we all use this program to write.”

Since the time of his interview, White has moved from Canada to London, England and he said he plans on using Guitar Pro to stay connected with other musicians.

“I’m going to be using Guitar Pro and my little Line 6 recording software every single day because if I didn’t have that, I wouldn’t have my guitar and I’d probably kill myself,” he said with laughter.

Ieradi is no stranger to using this program with people on another continent. While he was filling in on drums for This is a Standoff Standoff for an overseas tour, he wrote “The Consequence of Fratricide,” which became the first song on their debut full-length album LORE.

“When I got home I was really excited to jam and they had all learned the song and we just kind of counted things in and played a brand new song that none of us had ever heard together in the same room start to finish,” he said. “It was kind of bewildering.”

Today I Caught the Plague also posted the Guitar Pro files for almost every song on LORE on www.ultimate-guitar.com. The website is used by musicians who want to learn songs from relatively well-known bands. It provides user-submitted tabs in the form of text, Guitar Pro and similar programs PowerTab and Tab Pro, which was created by the website.

“A lot of people just asked us for them, that’s pretty much it. They e-mailed us and said they wanted the tracks,” Ieradi said. “We have no problem with people learning our songs.”

Before Assassinate the Following… broke up in August 2012, the band had another album written out on Guitar Pro and White sent out the file to five different people and got tips back.

The band never recorded the album, but White has been using the program to record some of the songs, and other songs he’s written, on his own at his house. He exports the drum tracks from the Realistic Sound Engine on Guitar Pro 6 and uses those as the drums for the song when he puts them into recording. Afterwards, he records the guitars, bass and sometimes vocals.

Sometimes White will make separate tracks for the different parts of a drum set “and mix it like you would a drum kit in a studio” is order to “humanize” the sound of it more.

Higher-profile bands like Scale the Summit and Protest the Hero, who have toured with Today I Caught the Plague, also use Guitar Pro. Protest the Hero guitarists Tim Millar and Luke Hoskin run Sheet Happens Publishing, a company that uses Guitar Pro 6 to print artists’ music in combined tablature and notation form.

Additionally, the Guitar Pro website lists artists from Canada, the U.S., Turkey, Brazil, Siberia and parts of Europe who use the program.

Guitar Pro may not be useful for all types of music, and not every artist wants to have their songs mapped out, but there is a community of musicians out there using it to learn songs, write songs, record songs and share ideas.