You can support bug-free code and non-English versions!

If you have found a bug, or you'd be willing to help with translations, please contact me: jes_jm@yahoo.com

Introduction

This program is used to write out guitar tablature in the typical style of ascii tab, often found around the internet. The code is based on TkTab by Giovanni Chierico. Many of the ideas for the user interface came from tablature mode written for the Unix editor emacs. Mac and Windows binaries were created with freely available tk wrappers.

Features

The program makes 30 fretboard positions available for one-keypress entry (5 on each string.) The following is an example keyboard layout for United States keyboard (first row is numbers, second row QWERTY, etc.) "Base" refers to the movable position of the player's hand.

              STRING

            E A D G B E
          --------------- 
F  base+0 | 1 2 3 4 5 6 |
R  base+1 | q w e r t y |
E  base+2 | a s d f g h |
T  base+3 | z x c v b n |

Also, Shift-[1-6] will insert a note at fret 0, allowing constant access to the open string position (fret 0). More details on the above are in the included README file.

Other notable features include the following:

• 4, 5, 6, or 7 string tablature
• User-customizable instrument tunings
• Eleven note "modifiers" (hammer-on, pull-off, etc.)
• Two note entry modes for cursor advancement appropriate to rhythm guitar or solos
• Undo/redo, cut/paste, edit multiple documents simultaneously
• Lyrics entry/editing
• Multiple languages and keyboards supported
• Platform independent code
• Free!!
• Open Source (the Unix version is the tcl/tk source code)

Importing/Exporting ASCII Tablature

Check out the new tools for importing and exporting plain ascii tablature. These tools require perl to run. They are available, here.

Screenshot

Download

The following are available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/etktab

PLEASE NOTE: The program initially runs with English language and United States keyboard support. To use other languages/keyboards, you must download the program, and appropriate language and keyboard support files from the site and load them in via the the 'Preferences' menu. More details are in the README.html files included with the program and the language support files.

	etktab-3.2.tar.gz	eTktab for *nix (requires tcl/tk 8.0 or newer)
	etktab-3.2-1.noarch.rpm	eTktab as a RedHat Linux Package (requires tcl/tk 8.0 or newer)
	etktab_3.2-1_all.deb	eTktab as a Debian Linux Package (requires tcl/tk 8.0 or newer)
	etktab-3.2.exe	eTktab for Windows (executable)
	etktab-3.22_X.4.dmg	eTktab for Macintosh OS X (Universal Binary)
	etktab-3.22.dmg	eTktab for Macintosh OS X Panther or OLDER (10.3, 10.2) (PPC executable)
	etktab-3.2.sit.bin	eTktab for 68k and PPC Macintosh Classic OS (executable)

Feedback

Comments welcome: jes_jm@yahoo.com

Hosted by: