Sound, Music & MIDI Collection 2

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Text File | 1995-06-06 | 12.3 KB | 213 lines

GUITAR TOOLS DOCUMENTATION: This is version 2.2. I have fixed a few bugs and changed a few things to make guitar tools run a bit better. I have added a little guitar riff to the first of my program. If you have a sound blaster it should work with it. I am giving you a taste of what is coming up. With the next release I hope to be able to play any tab through the sound blaster. !! NOTE: !! If you are using windows, the sound part will not work. If your computer freezes up when you first run guitar tools, then your sound card is not compatible with the drivers I am using. It really shouldn't freeze up, most of the time it will just give you an error. At any rate if Guitar Tools doesn't work, or you wish to use it from windows, then you will have to delete the following two files: play and smoke.wav. After doing this, things will work normal without the sound. If you could then E-mail me with what type of a driver your sound card uses, I will try to make sure it will work with the next version. This includes making it compatible with windows. To run Guitar Tools, just type tool at the dos prompt. Some things you should know about Guitar tools. Make sure that your mouse driver is installed before you run Guitar tools. Also there are two .prf files. These files are critical!! Do not delete them! MOUSE CONTROL: Use the mouse to select the items in the menus. Just by hitting the left mouse button once will activate the menu or menu item that the mouse has selected. You can also select a position on the screen by moving the mouse to where you want to insert Tab or Staff and then press the left mouse button. You will be placed in an appropriate spot. To jump up and down from page to page, one can also use the mouse. Selecting the top ====== double lined bar will move you up a line, until you reach the top line. Selecting the bottom ===== double lined bar (which also has the line number, and chord/solo mode displayed) will move you down a line until you reach the maximum line number. This has proved to be a pretty handy feature when one wants to browse through the tab quickly. By clicking on the line above or below the tab line, one activates a text editor. I call the top line the 7th line and the bottom line the lyric line. The 7th line is the line above the staff where you can place symbols to represent hammer ons, pull offs, chord names, etc. See the section on preferences for setting the 7th line symbols. When you have selected one of these two lines, the cursor will turn yellow and you can enter what ever you want. This will be saved with the tab information that is inputed. For staff mode, there is a lyric line, which is the bottom most line. This works the same way as the TAB lyric line. When you transform STAFF into TAB, the lyrics inputed during STAFF input are copied over. KEYBOARD CONTROL: One can also select the menus by using Alt-f, Alt-d, Alt-t, and Alt-p to access the following menus: file, display, tools, or preferences respectively. To add a tab number type in the fret position 0-21. If a 1 or 2 is the first number, Guitar Tools will wait to see if the number is going to be a two digit number (ie. 17,21,12) or not. If you want it to be a two digit number then type the second digit following the first digit. If you only want to input a single 1 or 2, then after typing a 1 or 2 press any other key other then a number key. If the number is not a 1 or a 2, then depending upon the mode that you are in, the cursor will move to the next position. If after typing in all of the tab you realize that you need to insert a space in the Tab or Staff that you have entered, press the s key. This will insert a space, and move everything forward one space. To delete any space type delete (This also hold true for any tab number you wish to delete. To put a measure bar in the STAFF or TAB type Alt-m. If there are notes where you want a measure bar, first insert a space and then put a measure bar there. If you do not insert a space, the measure bar will write over the notes. Type delete to delete a note. One can also press backspace, or the space bar to delete a measure bar, a tab number, or a space If at anytime you don't want to go through with the action from one of the menus that has been selected, hit the Esc key and that will put you back into the normal display. MENU FUNCTIONS: FILE: All of the menu items under file are pretty self explanatory. SAVE and LOAD. You don't have to specify a file extension. Guitar Tools will add the correct one when you save a file and when you load one. You can still load .Tab and .Stf files, but they will be converted into .Gtr files. If you save a file while in the STAFF display, then when you load it, it will be loaded as a STAFF file and guitar tools will come up in the STAFF display. The same holds true for saving a TAB file. So make sure you are aware of where you are at when you save files. You can also load in any ASCII file that has some sort of tab in it. First make sure that the tab has no binary characters in it. If it does, Guitar Tools will freeze up. If it is a text file then it won't have any binary characters in it. Save the file as an .asc file. So if you have the file guns.tab, from the DOS prompt or WINDOWS file manger change the file name and save it as guns.asc. Then run guitar tools load the file. One note. The file has to be in the same directory from which Guitar Tools is running. After loading the file, the TAB will now be in the editing buffer. You can then add lyrics, 7th line information, measures, spaces, or what ever you want. If the file is extremely long, you might have to break it up into pieces. Guitar tools will fill up all of the memory it can. Once it is filled up it will give you an error message that it has reached it's limit. This won't crash the program, it is just to let you know that it did not have room to bring the entire file into memory. It will bring in about 15 lines of tab. So if your file exceeds this limit break it up into two files or more if necessary. PRINT: The print option allows you to create an ASCII file of the current song in the TAB buffer. These are nice looking files that can be sent to a friend, the net, or printed out. No more of those ugly dashed lines that drive me crazy! When the print command is initiated, a window will open up. You will have your choice of specifying the title, author, who tabbed the song, the option of including 7th line information and also the option of including a key to the symbols you are using for the 7th line. If you do not want a title, leave it blank. If you do not want to specify who tabbed it, leave it blank, and that will not be added to the file. If you do not want to include the 7th line, then replace the yes, which by default will be present, with a no. Same with the 7th line key, just replace the yes with a no. The current filename will be the default file name. This will not overwrite the .Gtr file that you might have already saved. The print command will create a .Pnt file. Still from this menu you have the option of changing this name. The file that is created can be printed out. To print it out one can just send it to the printer with DOS print filename.pnt or from windows, or What I do is load it into Word Perfect and select the double column option. This puts a lot more tab on one page and it makes it look nice. If you have access to Word Perfect you should try this and see how nice it looks. One has to reduce the font size just a little bit and then they will fit perfectly in two columns. DISPLAY: You can change back and forth between displaying Tab or Staff by selecting Tab or Staff in the window that will pop up when you select Display. This will not transform Staff into Tab, for that option see Tools. TOOLS: Under tools we find staff-->Tab. This option will change the piano music into Tab by selecting it. One must be in the Staff display and have notes entered for this to work. There are also the options of Chord or Solo. This is how you can control the way the cursor behaves when entering in TAB. If it is in the Solo mode the cursor moves from left to right. If it is in the Chord mode, then it move from top to bottom. The current mode is displayed close to the bottom on the ==== barred line. One other tool is the transpose tool. This is intiated from the TAB display. It changes the TAB back into STAFF notes, and then re-transforms them into TAB using the new preferences which have been set. There is also a line name option. By selecting this it will turn the eBGDAE or ABCDEFG along the tab and staff off or on, depending on its present state. PREFERENCES: Under preferences we find two options. The first is transpose. These are the options that control how the staff is transformed to TAB. You will have to play around with these and get them to your own liking. Some songs may do better with the preferences set different. For example if you are getting two many open chords and they are becoming cumbersome to play, raise the open Chord preference up a bit to limit the number of them, or put it up to 5 to make it so that no open chords are used unless absolutely necessary. The best way to see what these do is to experiment with them. The other set up preferences are the 7th line. Here you can define what you want your symbols to be for Hammer ons, Pull offs, etc. These you have the option of printing out when you select print. Both preference types are saved after you change them. Every time you load up Guitar Tools they will be the same until you change them again. STAFF EDITING: When the current display is the STAFF display. You will see the treble cleft. Here you can enter in notes. Many may wonder where the Bass cleft is at, but I played arround with a ton of songs, and the guitar's range is in the treble cleft. If you want to play something that is played in the Bass cleft range, then transpose it up into the treble cleft range and type it in. To input a note, hit the space bar. If the cursor is at the positon where a A should be, then a A will be inserted on the screen. To delete a note, just move the cursor on the note you want deleted and press del. To insert a sharp note, move the cursor to the positioin of the note and press the # button. You do not need to hold the shift down, press the 3 and it will insert a sharp for you. To keep things a bit simpler, there are not flats, but one can change a flat into a sharp with no problem. A C-sharp is the same as a D-flat, A A- sharp is the same thing as a B-flat, etc. The sharp notes will be red on the screen. One can then transform this music into TAB! This about sums it up. If you have any questions or comments fill free to contact me: Troy Johnson 100N 680W #21 Smithfield UT. 84335 801-563-4035 troyj@chaos.idec.sdl.usu.edu Thank You!