Version 2.33 reviewed by Darrin Koltow - 01/18/00

If you're a guitarist looking to start composing your own MIDI music, or you need some help in learning a lick from a MIDI tune, take a look at the reasonably priced TablEdit.

TablEdit is specifically geared for composers and players of stringed instruments, especially guitar. Import tunes from different formats; create or edit notes, chords, and rhythms; then print the resulting music in both tablature and the standard treble clefs.

The Interface

The interface is straightforward; note placement is achieved by hitting Enter after you select a note with the arrow keys or the mouse. Or, place notes directly on the fretboard. Place accidentals with keyboard toggles: “d” for sharp on/off, “=” for naturals, and “b” for flats on/off.

The fretboard display, among other indicators, tells you that TablEdit is written specifically for guitarists, as opposed to other musicians. When a tune is playing, the fretboard shows how each chord and note is fingered, while the treble clef and tablature staves show the music itself. However, it's frustrating to use the fingerboard to enter notes onto the tablature or treble clef staves; you can fret a note on the fretboard to have it placed on a staff, but to delete the note, you must move to the staff and do so. It would be much more intuitive to remove a note on the fretboard by clicking on it again, or by right-clicking it. But with the manifold ways of getting notes on the clef, this is more of a peeve than a problem.

There's a startling variety of effects that are idiosyncratic to the guitar; pull-offs, hammer-ons and slides are all available, as well as effects that beginning guitarists may not be familiar with. Harmonics, both natural and artificial are also possible. But it was disconcerting to see that a simple slide produced an immediate crash.

There's another palette that reflects the great pains taken to give guitarists all the effects and techniques available in the real world: the Strokes and Fingerings palette. With this set of tools you can specify which fingers fret which notes, whether to use downstrokes or upstrokes for pick-playing; and which right-hand fingers do the plucking for fingerstyle guitar. Dynamics from “ppp” to “fff” are available in yet another palette.

There's a nifty keyboard palette that let's you quickly plop down notes; in fact, short of the chord-builder tool, this may be the fastest way to compose chords in TablEdit – a bit ironic, given that the program was written for guitarists. Showing again painstaking attention to detail, the app will report the piano keys' note to you, if you hold the pointer over it for a short spell.

Although the notes on the standard treble clef stave are easy to discern for simple tunes, there are a few opportunities for improvement here: on dense clusters of notes, some notes get lost when you do a print of them. This problem parallels the problem of notes getting audibly lost during playback. Another problem with dense note clusters is that their individual notes become hard to read on the screen. A search through the numerous display options, which let you change font sizes and the sizes of the tablature numerals, produced no way of enlarging the notes on the treble clef. A work-around to this, if you're trying to see if an obscured note is a C or a C#, for example, is to simply look to where the note falls on the fretboard, or to look to the tablature staff.

Another compensation for the note cluster problem is the ruler, which lets you change the view scale of your composition. For example, if you want to go from viewing five bars of music at once to two bars, you simply click on the ruler to make the change.

Chords

The chord builder utility TablEdit sports is pretty handy; it's got a decent variety of about 25 starter chords, and makes it pretty easy to add your own. You can select a new name for your chord, or select “Reco” – for “Recognition” – on, to have TablEdit deduce a chord name based on the entered notes. You have many options to choose from as you create chords; you can select a root, an inversion, a fret position, and whether to add a plus or minus-5 or 9. TablEdit also lets you play the chords you select, before you actually cut them onto the staff; it arpeggiates the notes, giving you a mini ear training lesson, if that's what you're after.

One troubling aspect of this otherwise hardworking chord builder is the set of check-boxes, one for each note in your chord, that's apparently intended to let you omit notes. When you click any of these check-boxes, nothing happens. Despite this being an obvious oversight, the effect on the composer is really minimal: you can simply place the chord as-is, and delete the notes on the staff.

Tuning

In the tuning dialogue box, TablEdit seems to be appealing to players of instruments besides the guitar. Besides the standard tuning, there's an option to tune to “Bouzouki GDAD,” and also an option for the accordion. On the left of the tuning dialog are speaker icons you click to sound the notes you're tuning to. Super miniature arrow controls are present here, too, and allow you to tune to something that's not specified in the drop-down box. Unfortunately, you can't elect to design your own custom tuning, and save it with an appropriate name of your choosing, as you can with the chord builder dialog.

Here's a boon the tuning window offers to musicians and composers: you have the option of having the tuning you select change the note values of your composition, or only how those notes are fingered on the instrument. If you want to specify a fret to place your virtual capo across, you can do that, too.

Playback

There are at least a couple of indicators showing that TablEdit is not the ideal playback medium for the tunes you create with it. First is the aural choppiness of complex songs. On the Pentium 166 with 24 MB it was reviewed on, TablEdit dropped notes and had jerky tempo for an imported piano jazz MIDI file. In this particular instance, the Media Player app that ships with Windows sounded better.

And in the help file there's a section that reads “… if you have a sound card whose sound, when it reaches your speakers, seems far removed from that of a real instrument, the fault doesn't lie with TablEdit but, rather, with the sound card itself.” From here, this help topic goes on to recommend a separate application that produces better playback. Another playback issue is the apparent “slipping” of the MIDI driver setting to the lowly “PC Speaker” setting, during one particular session to create a rhythm track.

The versatile Transpose feature may help you forget some of these playback concerns. If you want to change where on the fretboard a tune is played, Transpose allows you to easily move to other frets or other keys. You can transpose everything from notes and chords to complete compositions. A related feature that guitarists will like is Fingering Optimization. With this feature, the help file states, a tune written for piano, for example, is rendered playable for guitarists.

The Verdict

Despite its flaws, TablEdit is a great deal for the $55 price tag. It's apparent that TablEdit has been around for some time, and continues to evolve and improve. Guitarists will be hard-pressed to find another application with as many features, with such a simple interface, that's made specifically for their instrument.

Pros

• Hammer-ons, pull-offs, harmonics, and other guitar-specific effects
• Numerous display options, including font selection
• Versatile Transpose feature; move across keys or frets
• Fingering optimization to render a non-guitar tune to guitar
• Many choices for custom tuning

Cons

• Choppy sounding playback
• Fingering Optimization may mangle some tunes to an unrecognizable point
• TablEdit crashed when a simple slide was attempted
• MIDI driver setting sometimes slips