Posts Tagged ‘guitar software’

GuitarWorks for DOS

ChordWorks was a chord-reference program. GuitarWorks added the capability to create and play back your own songs, and came bundled with lesson plans for beginning to intermediate guitarists.

GuitarWorks was a complete toolkit for guitarists: chromatic tuner, chord dictionary, chord identifier, chord clipboard (fake sheet creator), and song editor/player. The player allowed you to mark a section of a song and loop it, varying the tempo. This enabled users to input a song they were trying to learn and loop over it, section at a time, at a slow tempo until they mastered it. This functionality is now found in Apple’s highly-praised Garage Band software, but about 15 years earlier!

GuitarChords and GuitarTutor for Windows

ChordWorks and GuitarWorks were DOS-based programs. I separated the chord and tutorial functions and re-wrote them for the Windows operating system.

GuitarChords was a complete re-hosting of the chords functions from GuitarWorks: chromatic (and interactive!) tuners, chord dictionary, chord identifier, chord clipboard (fake sheet creator).

GuitarTutor kept the tuner functions and added a new song player, compatible with songs created with GuitarWorks. The basic program came bundled with the 25-lesson plan, Scales & Riffs, developed by professional guitarist Wayne Cockfield. These lessons taught the Major, Minor, and Minor Pentatonic Scales, as well as riffs in each scale. Add-on lesson plan and song disks were available, including a book/software bundle from St. Martin’s Press, How to Play Guitar, and Christmas songs.

As always, you could display either left- or right-handed guitars, and place them in either “duet” or “tab” orientations. Acoustic and Electric guitar photo-realistic were provided, as were acoustic or electric waveform sounds, or you could select any MIDI patch your soundcard supported.

ChordWorks for Guitar

In 1991, I started my own company, Six String Software. Under that label I produced several music and game programs over the next several years.

My first release was ChordWorks for Guitar. I worked with professional guitarist Joe Harris in producing this title. This groundbreaking program featured a chromatic tuner; a 4,400+ chord dictionary (in 44 types and all 12 keys), and a chord identifier. The identifier would allow you to play chords on your attached MIDI guitar and would identify it for you, also providing likely variants.

You could display either left- or right-handed guitars, and place them in either “duet” or “tab” orientations. Acoustic and Electric guitar images were provided, as were acoustic or electric waveform sounds.

To my knowledge, this was the first professional guitar software program released for the IBM-PC in the U.S.