Stupid Question Regarding Octaves..

[Kemuel]

At least I think this is a stupid question, considering I've never seen anyone else ask it.

I started to take a look at putting together my own custom track today, figured I'd like to start contributing to the boards I've been lurking around since Christmas, and being pretty hopeless with both guitars and Anvil studio, checked out Freetar Hero's editor.

Don't worry, not asking about the editor so much as what I'm editing with it.

After a lot of roundabouting I came up with a PowerTab for the song I wanted to do including the musical score. I'm a closet flautist, so converting music from a staff as opposed to tabs comes a lot more naturally to me, but I realised I've got no idea how the GH frets and chords match up to actual musical notes.

I've noticed as much that you simply repeat frets as you go up an octave, but does Green simply=Middle C and the rest fall around that, or whatever just seems most normal for the song just work?

Frets are also confusing me, does Green+Red fall a semitone between Green and Red, thus making it lower than Green+Yellow? So far I've got Sum 41's Hell Song's opening riff worked out fairly comfortably based on guesswork, but I need to get my head around chords for the verses.

Depending on how this goes, you might be seeing more of me around here =)

~Kem

[Kemuel]

At least I think this is a stupid question, considering I've never seen anyone else ask it.

I started to take a look at putting together my own custom track today, figured I'd like to start contributing to the boards I've been lurking around since Christmas, and being pretty hopeless with both guitars and Anvil studio, checked out Freetar Hero's editor.

Don't worry, not asking about the editor so much as what I'm editing with it.

After a lot of roundabouting I came up with a PowerTab for the song I wanted to do including the musical score. I'm a closet flautist, so converting music from a staff as opposed to tabs comes a lot more naturally to me, but I realised I've got no idea how the GH frets and chords match up to actual musical notes.

I've noticed as much that you simply repeat frets as you go up an octave, but does Green simply=Middle C and the rest fall around that, or whatever just seems most normal for the song just work?

Frets are also confusing me, does Green+Red fall a semitone between Green and Red, thus making it lower than Green+Yellow? So far I've got Sum 41's Hell Song's opening riff worked out fairly comfortably based on guesswork, but I need to get my head around chords for the verses.

Depending on how this goes, you might be seeing more of me around here =)

~Kem

[Fangor]

There is no hard and fast way to map real notes to GH frets, otherwise we could easily just write a program that does it for us. My technique is to look at an entire phrase of 4-8 measures in the "tab"(I mainly use tabs for the staff) If there are no more than 5 different notes that are relatively close (1-4 halfsteps) in the phrase, then you are in luck and can map each one to a different fret. Large leaps like the octaves you are wondering about give you an opportunity to "cheat". Whenever i see one of these, I look ahead and see which direction i need to move after the leap, and place the note such that the following notes can smoothly move up and down as necessary.

There are times when you shouldn't cheat though. If one note is serving as a pedal tone make sure that gets mapped to the same fret each time, otherwise it will feel weird.

For going up and down scales, you have several options:
doubling up on each fret works if the song is slow enough, otherwise it generally involves picking too fast to be fun.

Breaking the scale into sets of 3 or 4 notes tends to work best for me so that you just do something like gryb rybo for an eight note scale.

Chords give you even more opportunity to cheat because it's hard to hear individual notes. When you have enough room to work with though, i generally map 2nd and 3rd intervals to adjacent fingers(unless the chord progresses from a 3rd to a 2nd, in which case I go from 2 frets apart to 1 fret apart). If your space feels kind of tight, just cheat and map chords however necessary to fit within your 5 frets. But as you described already gy followed by gr can work perfectly fine substituting for a decending progression even if it doesn't look that way in the music.

Oddly enough, what i've found to be "fun" and what RO seems to do with official songs, is ignore most actual guitar fingerings, and stick to similar guidelines for mapping notes from a staff.

[Fangor]

There is no hard and fast way to map real notes to GH frets, otherwise we could easily just write a program that does it for us. My technique is to look at an entire phrase of 4-8 measures in the "tab"(I mainly use tabs for the staff) If there are no more than 5 different notes that are relatively close (1-4 halfsteps) in the phrase, then you are in luck and can map each one to a different fret. Large leaps like the octaves you are wondering about give you an opportunity to "cheat". Whenever i see one of these, I look ahead and see which direction i need to move after the leap, and place the note such that the following notes can smoothly move up and down as necessary.

There are times when you shouldn't cheat though. If one note is serving as a pedal tone make sure that gets mapped to the same fret each time, otherwise it will feel weird.

For going up and down scales, you have several options:
doubling up on each fret works if the song is slow enough, otherwise it generally involves picking too fast to be fun.

Breaking the scale into sets of 3 or 4 notes tends to work best for me so that you just do something like gryb rybo for an eight note scale.

Chords give you even more opportunity to cheat because it's hard to hear individual notes. When you have enough room to work with though, i generally map 2nd and 3rd intervals to adjacent fingers(unless the chord progresses from a 3rd to a 2nd, in which case I go from 2 frets apart to 1 fret apart). If your space feels kind of tight, just cheat and map chords however necessary to fit within your 5 frets. But as you described already gy followed by gr can work perfectly fine substituting for a decending progression even if it doesn't look that way in the music.

Oddly enough, what i've found to be "fun" and what RO seems to do with official songs, is ignore most actual guitar fingerings, and stick to similar guidelines for mapping notes from a staff.

[Kemuel]

I guess I'm thinking a little too much about this, I suppose so long as its consistent it doesn't really matter too much. In the end just want to do a good job

Sorry I'm a little slow replying, but thanks a lot for the help!

[Kemuel]

I guess I'm thinking a little too much about this, I suppose so long as its consistent it doesn't really matter too much. In the end just want to do a good job

Sorry I'm a little slow replying, but thanks a lot for the help!