TuxGuitar is a full featured music composition tool that can be really helpful to musicians, whether they use their computer to compose music or not.

The program looks really complex at first sight – at least for a music newbie like me – so I have the feeling it may overwhelm more novice users. But the amount of available tools, along with an extensive help section and documentation really encourages you to give it a go.

TuxGuitar features a nicely designed interface with clear, simple lines that turns your music composition tasks into a lighter work. Besides composing right on the tablature, you can also have a virtual guitar fretboard or piano keyboard to make composition even easier. What's more, the program lets you play the songs you just composed, using one of the many instruments included in it.

In spite of a confusing first impression, TuxGuitar well deserves a chance from all music composers: it's nicely designed and features many interesting tools.

Download TuxGuitar 1.0 RC3 in Softonic

What's better than learning to play a musical instrument to unwind from a busy day? Although my advice would be to take an instrument and start playing it learning bit by bit, more methodical and expert users may advise you to follow a guide and practice theoretical exercises.

aGuitar Pro lets you manage your guitar or bass progress with exercises on the notes and on the accords. There are many advanced lessons you can follow and surely it can be helpful for advanced students as a reference point. The program features testing tools to sample your knowledge of the harmonic world.
Unfortunately, I don't see it as an easy tool for beginners. This is because of the way information is displayed which seems to be too technical. It would have been good to have a simple mode display for beginners so to ease things when learning and testing basic notes.

The tab reader and tab editor are also interesting as they can modify or create music sheets with text and notes of your favourite songs. It would have been good to have a function to search for songs online in free databases, but you will have to do it manually.

aGuitar Pro can be useful to study and test your knowledge of guitar theory if you are already a medium experienced player. It also includes a tab reader and editor, which ease the transcription of songs for professionals.

Download aGuitar Pro in Softonic

Finding suitable software to help you out with learning a musical instrument can sometimes prove to be more difficult than just sitting down and teaching yourself. An inproportionate number of programs scrape the surface and don’t provide the flexibility, depth or support that you need to be able to go beyond being a novice. Thankfully, in Guitar Pro you will find a complete tool that will take you from tuning the guitar, through learning the scales and as far as composing your own sheet music.

The main interface is a daunting array of buttons on both the top and bottom of the window. On further inspection it becomes clear that the majority are involved with composing and each one refers to a very specific element. With this in mind, there are actually very few that you need to be familiar with to get going and as your guitar skills progress, so too will your familiarity with the software.

Some of the gizmos included in the software can actually come in useful and let you do everything from one place. The digital guitar tuner and the metronome are extremely handy to have and save you the bother of going out to buy them or of searching through your cluttered room for either. Once prepared, you can get started on the individual note library that lets you visualize the fingering as well as listen to how they should sound. Moving on, you can practice the large variety of scales that each come with a plethora of variations.

Getting the basics down is all well and good, but when it comes to composing or playing sheet music, Guitar Pro has it licked. Using the virtual keyboard or guitar, although tedious, will yield results when you want to compose something of your own, but for optimum results you can hook up your own MIDI device (such as a keyboard) and get cracking on tracks that are as simple or complex as you want. The extra dimension of a separate MIDI device lets you get ideas down much quicker while also giving you the ability to experiment with variations of a piece.

It’s difficult to point out faults with Guitar Pro, but having mentioned the cluttered interface, it could do with a facelift in the form of tabs or something similar that would better categorize and clean up the buttons scattered around the screen. The help file covers each topic without going into excruciating detail and if you’re after some extra resources, you’ll find tablatures, lessons and exercises on the Guitar Pro web site.

A good one-stop solution for beginners and experts alike, Guitar Pro succeeds in delivering the variety and depth required to taking the next step to rock-stardom!

Download Guitar Pro 5.2 in Softonic

GuitarFX guitar software enable you to turn your computer into a guitar effects processor. Simply plug your guitar into the microphone or line input of your sound card, run this software, then press "Start" button.

To stop playing pre-recorded guitar sounds click once on a picture of a small red lamp placed left to fx-slot with "Playback wav" title. Enjoy real-time crazy distortion smoothed by power filters and shaped by multi-band equalizers! Author of GuitarFX offers several presets, including "hard rock", "high gain lead" and "solo" effects. However, you can click through several menus to easily create custom tones. They can be saved as pre-sets for future use.

Pre-sets can be assigned to "hot keys" F1..F12. Among the effects, you can apply 4 types of distortion, noise gate, wah-wah, compressor, EQ, flanger, reverb, chorus, delay and a number of other filters and effects. You can save your recordings to your hard drive. GuitarFX has the "software effects chain builder" with 16 fx slots. Clean guitar signals go to the top fx slot, then they are passed through all fx slots from the top to the bottom and go to the sound card output from the bottom fx slot. You can move any fx slot up or down.

Download Guitar Effects Processor Pro (GuitarFX) 3.04 in Softonic