Preparing a Guitar Part

If you are preparing a guitar part, here are some tips that you should find useful.

Note that Composer version 1.0 does not support display or editing of guitar fret diagrams, nor tablature notation. These two guitar notation features are planned, with high priority, for a future version of Composer.

If the guitar notes are displayed one octave too low, perhaps in the bass clef instead of treble clef:

     Follow the instructions in Transposing Key of an Instrument. Guitar notes are normally shown one octave higher than their actual pitch. In the Transpose Instrument Key step of theTranpose Wizard, set the transposition for the guitar track to "Note read as 'C' actually sounds as 'C' below plus 1 octave".

     When you display the guitar part, make sure that there is no checkmark by the Show Concert Pitches menu item in the Track menu.

     If after transposing the guitar part, some bass clefs are left in the part, and you want to change them to treble clefs, add a treble clef at the beginning of the measure for the guitar part, and delete any subsequent bass clef in the guitar part.

To display chord names above the melody notes:

     Determine which tracks in the song have mostly notes that belong to the chord harmonies, as opposed to tracks that have "passing notes" between chord notes, and other notes that do not belong to chord harmonies. Use the Transcribe Chord Names command, and select these tracks as the ones that Composer will use to anlalyze and display the chord names.

To display rolled out chords as vertical chords rather than written-out arpeggios:

     Follow the instructions in Editing Arpeggios.

To notate harmonics such as the following:

     Follow the instructions in Editing Notehead Shapes.

To add a pitch bend to a note, such as the following:

     Follow the instructions for graphical editing the pitch bend curve in Note Pitch Bend.

To add a vibrato to a note, such as the following:

     Follow the instructions for graphical editing the Modulation Wheel Controller curve in MIDI Controller Data.

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