Band in a Box The award-winning Band-in-a-Box is so easy to use! Just type in the chords for any song using standard chord symbols (like C, Fm7 or C13b9), choose the style you'd like, and Band-in-a-Box does the rest. Band-in-a-Box automatically generates a complete professional quality arrangement of piano, bass, drums, guitar and strings in a wide variety of popular styles, Jazz, Pop, Country, Classical and more. I use it often for practicine improvisation. When I was teaching, it was one of my favorite tool for working with students.
Finale This is a difficult program to learn and a little on the expensive side, but it is the best notation software in the world. Finale, Finale Guitar, Allegro, PrintMusic!, NotePad Plus, and NotePad offer a full range of power and price to suit your notation needs. Finale Notepad is free and has most of the functions you will need to write beautiful music notation scores. It also generates guitar tablature and much more. And best of all, you'll never outgrow the Finale family. Files was created using products of the same version number can all be shared. For example, users of NotePad, NotePad Plus, PrintMusic!, Allegro, Finale Guitar and Finale can all share files with each other. Files are interchangeable with same and later versions.
Power Tracks is a Full-featured, multi-track music sequencing and digital audio recording. Includes powerful, unique features such as the Audio Chord Wizard, TC Helicon Vocal Harmonizer, and RealDrums.
Guitar pro is a similar program. Although it does cost for the program, it is not expensive and easily worth the money and more. It is much more guitar oriented than finale and Band-In-A-Box. It will import Power Tab songs and Tabledit songs. Please support these fine programmers and pay for the program. It will give you many years of use and pleasure. Thousands of songs are posted on the net in this format. It is a program all serious guitar players should have. I have purchased it as well as every upgade that is released. It is a great program. The sound play-back is incredible. Below is the link where you may download the program.
Tabledit is one of my favorite music/tablature programs. Well worth the small price they charge. It is relatively inexpensive and they allow you to upgrade free every time there is a new version. It may be the program I use the most of any on my computer. Good tech support. I highly recommend this program!
TEFview is Tabledits FREE viewer. It obviously does not have all of the functions of the full program but does allow you to view and play and even print the files created in Tabledit. I strongly suggest you get the full Tablet program, but if you are only going to use it for reading and playing TEF files that you find on the Internet, it will work just fine for that. Don't confuse this with the Tabledit Demo. The demo allows all of the editing functions of the full program, but without the print function completely enabled.
Tabrite Software is no longer in business, but , is available free. There are many Tabrite files still around in the Internet at: The Banjo Hangout or Phillip Mann's Page The softeware is also avilable for free download there. This was a program created by myself and my brother at a time when the only tablature software available was for Mac only. We ran the company for 10 years but could not sacrifice the time needed to continue developing and improving it. In truth, our biggest compeditor, Tabledit just created a better product for the same money. My only motivation for created Tabrite was to fill a need I had for my banjo students. I switched to Tabledit as soon as their produce surpassed ours. There are still a lot of the tabs in that format, and the printouts are excellent, you might consider the free download, however, Tabledit does have a function in their "open" menu for opening a tab created inTabrite, so if you have Tabledit on your system, I would stick with it.
These are my favorite places to look for banjo tabs.
The Banjo Hangout - hundreds (maybe thousands) of banjo tabs. My first choice for banjo tabs. It also has classified ads, media archive, lessons, reviews, software, a forum and much more.
Phillip Mann's page - tied with the banjo hangout as my favorite banjo site.
Banjo Newsletter - The best banjo publication in the world. Has some tabs and audios free. Most is subscription, but worth the money if you are a banjo person.
These are my favorite guitar sites on the net.
The Banjo Hangout - I had to include this site, even though the name implies that it is only banjo material. There is a lot of great guitar stuff there. Check it out.
mmissary has more Band-In-A-Box songs than anywhere I have ever found.
Jazz Guitar Online great jazz guitar material and links.
For a great price on strings of all types try: Just Strings
Notes from Tom has great deals on classical guitar strings. I have been buying from him for many years.