[dj]

Hi,

There is no replacement for hands-on experience with the instrument.

Try borrowing a guitar for a while and learning a bit about it. You don't have to become a new Segovia (or Eric Clapton, depending on your type of music) but getting the feel for how the notes fall under your hands is important, especially as notes on a guitar are, as your friend pointed out, laid out very differently from a keyboard.

There are a number of freeware midi-to-guitar tabulature programs out there. Look at guitar music in one of them, then load your own music (from .mid files) in and see how it looks.

For one thing, guitars are tuned, usually, in 4ths per string, with a variation of only about a 3rd available on three of those strings in any given chord, so the harmonies are spread further and more sparsely than with keyboard music: 6 notes max over about 2 octaves as opposed to 10 notes over about 3 (with close keyboard harmony).

Start off by looking at guitar music, of which there is plenty everywhere, then try writing some simple one or two line pieces to get the idea of where the notes fall.

Good luck.

David