Guitar UpscaleOpen the guitar

Record a guitar idea and save it as MIDI

Play a riff on the virtual fretboard, record it, fix the timing in the piano roll and download a MIDI or Guitar Pro file.

By Oleg Chibikov, the author of Guitar Upscale

An idea for a riff comes at a bad time: on the train, at lunch, away from the guitar. Guitar Upscale gives you a full fretboard on your phone or laptop. You can play the idea, record it and send it to your DAW as a MIDI file. Recording, the looper and file downloads are part of the Composer plan.

What MIDI is

A MIDI file stores notes, not sound: which note, when it starts, how long it lasts and how hard it is played. Any DAW, such as Cubase, Ableton Live, Logic, Reaper or GarageBand, can open it and play it with any instrument. That makes MIDI the easiest way to move an idea from one app to another.

Record your idea

  1. Open Guitar Upscale and pick the key of your idea with the key button. The fretboard then shows only the notes of that scale, so wrong notes are hard to hit.
  2. Set the tempo in the play panel and turn the metronome on.
  3. Press Record and play. Tap single notes on the neck, or tap and hold chord buttons.
  4. Press Record again to stop. The take goes to your song list as a new song.

Hold the Record button to choose where the take goes: a new song, or a new track in the song you have open. A new track plays along with the song, so you can add a second guitar part over the first one.

Fix the timing

Notes played on a touch screen drift off the beat. Turn on Auto quantize next to the Record button and each note moves to the nearest line of the grid as you play. The grid length is 1/16 at first. Hold the button to pick another length.

For finer edits, open the piano roll from the control panel. You can move, stretch, copy and delete notes, change their volume and move them up or down by a step. Press Q to snap the selected notes to the grid.

Build a part from loops

The looper records short loops on up to 8 channels that play together. Record a chord loop on one channel, a bass line on the next and a melody on a third. Each loop lasts whole bars and stays in time with the others. Save the loops as a song when you like the result.

Download the file

  • Guitar Pro. Press the download button in the play panel to save a .gp file. Guitar Pro, TuxGuitar and other tab editors open it as tab.
  • MIDI. Hold the download button to save a .mid file for your DAW.
  • Right after recording. Turn on "Save MIDI file immediately after recording" in the settings and each take downloads as soon as you stop.

Tips for better takes

  • Record short parts. Four or eight bars are easier to fix than a whole song.
  • Use the scale. Pick the right scale first, and the fretboard leaves out every note outside it.
  • Name the take. Click the song name at the top to rename it, so you can find it later.

Not sure which scale fits your idea? The scale charts describe the mood of each one.

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