TurboGuitar — a lean Guitar Pro viewer for macOS

The player

Everything you practice with.
Nothing you don’t.

The TurboGuitar window. A sidebar lists four tracks — Lead soloed, Bass muted — while the score shows Midnight Run as standard notation and TAB with the playback cursor moving through bar 7. A transport bar with tempo and volume sliders sits below. — A real capture, not a mock — lead soloed, bass muted, cursor live in bar 7.

tempo 25–200%Slow it down or push it. Pitch stays put.
loop · metronome · count-inDrill the hard bar until it isn’t.
tracksShow, hide, mute, solo — per-track and master volume.
live cursorTab and standard notation follow the playback, always in view.
pdf viewerSheet PDFs open natively: 1–6 pages side by side, thumbnail sidebar.
⌘E exportSave whatever’s loaded — converted PDFs included — as Guitar Pro 7.

PDF → interactive score beta

Paper in. Playback out.

That folder of sheet-music PDFs? TurboGuitar reads the notation off the page and turns it into a score you can play, loop, and slow down.

1

midnight-run.pdf Two bars of sheet music: standard notation on top, guitar TAB below.

Open a PDF

Any standard-notation sheet — mixed notation + TAB pages are fine.

2

rasterized at 600 dpi

The same two bars with the TAB stave blanked out, leaving only the standard notation.

TAB detected · erased

TurboGuitar preps the page

TAB staves are detected by their wider line spacing and erased, so the OMR reads clean notation.

3

midnight-run.gp · playing The converted score playing in TurboGuitar: the current bar is highlighted amber with the playback cursor on the third beat.

The converted score playing in TurboGuitar: the current bar is highlighted amber with the playback cursor on the third beat.

It’s a score now

Audiveris reads the notation and the result opens straight in the player. Keep it with ⌘E as a .gp file.

Beta. Needs Audiveris installed in /Applications. TAB-only PDFs won’t convert — there’s no notation on them to read.

Under the hood

Lean by design.

No editing, no mixer racks, no project windows. TurboGuitar is a thin native SwiftUI shell around alphaTab, the open-source engine that parses, renders, and plays the score. Every control — toolbar, track list, transport — is real macOS chrome.

TurboGuitar.app  (SwiftUI)
├─ toolbar · tracks · transport   ← native chrome
└─ WKWebView → alphaTab           ← the engine

Get TurboGuitar

Free download. Audiveris is optional — you only need it for PDF conversion.

Download for macOS

Version 0.1.0 · notarized by Apple · macOS 14+

Everything you practice with.Nothing you don’t.