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About Project

KGuitar project was started for developing an efficient and easy-to-use environment for a guitarist. There are many tasks that guitarists do every day and that can be made easier to do when using computer. Examples of such tasks include finding of chord fingerings, writing & reading tabulatures, converting classic note score to the tabulature form and vice versa, transposition of the whole song or its parts and many others.

A lot of programs already exist for such purposes - from the tiny chord fingering calculators (that really don't calculate anything and cheat by looking up a database) to the big bloaty monster programs that can do anything, and, besides, cost a lot of money.

However, all such programs have severe disadvantages. There is non-serious stuff, like "programs" written on Visual Basic and JavaScript, that don't ever worth metioning. Little and popular "chord calculators" often look nice, and sometimes even calculate and don't just look up a fixed database of chords, but they still cost a little sum of money and are very limited in its abilities (basically, it's hard to find even a chord calculator that understands different tunings of 6-stringed guitar). And, even worser, there is no such programs for *nix OSes (at least I don't know any).

Big monster programs that claim to do everything needed by a guitarist also have several disadvantages. They cost more money (up to prices of large commercial musical studio software, such a Cakewalk sequencers, etc) and often are really limited in its capabilities too. They're mostly for Windows environment and thus, have a lot of restrictions and spirit of this system - starting of very closed source to the very limited customizations. Last, but not least - they are often "written by guitarists for guitarists" (a great commercial motto) that often means just poorly written code. Didn't wanted to give names, but check the Guitar Pro software on not so high-end computer or just under Wine in *nix - and you'll understand what I'm talking about.

Some *nix software that do such things exists also. But it's often doing only one thing (and doing it poorly - most software I've found on this topic was written ages ago - somewhere in the beginning of 90's).

So, I (GreyCat) have decided to develop a full-sized guitarist environment, based on many existing concepts and also developing new, useful and powerful concepts.

The main features of KGuitar include:

• Free GPLed program;
• K Desktop Environment GUI;
• Powerful and convenient tabulature editing, including many effects and classical note score editing for classic instrument players;
• Full and very customizable MIDI to tabulature import and export;
• Support of extra data formats, such as ASCII tabulatures or popular programs' format, such as Guitar Pro's or TablEdit;
• Chord fingering construction tools - chord finder & chord analyzer;
• Highly customizable to suit a lot of possible instruments (not only 6-stringed guitars, and even not only guitars), including drum tracks, lyrics and other MIDI events.