TurboGuitar — a lean Guitar Pro viewer for macOS

The player

Everything you practice with.
Nothing you don’t.

The TurboGuitar window. A sidebar lists three tracks — Lead soloed, Bass muted — while the score shows Midnight Run as standard notation and TAB, with the playback cursor moving through bar 3. The transport bar below shows the speed at one times, 96 BPM, and the loop switched on. — A real capture, not a mock — lead soloed, bass muted, cursor live in bar 3.

0.25× – 2×Presets and a slider, with the BPM you’re actually playing at. Pitch stays put.
loop a rangeDrag across the bars — or ⌘[ ⌘] at the cursor — and drill them until they aren’t hard.
metronome · count-inFour clicks, subdivisions, and a count-in at the piece’s own tempo — slowed down with it.
picks up where you left offSpeed, zoom, loop, hidden tracks and your place in the piece, remembered per file.
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 a spread, thumbnail sidebar, reopens on your page.
full screenToolbar and sidebar get out of the way. Nudge the top or left edge and they slide back — like Preview.
convert optionsSet the tempo, transpose, and add a tab staff with tuning presets and a capo — before the page becomes a score.
⌘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.

About

Made by Triton IT.

TurboGuitar comes out of a small independent software company in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. We do architecture reviews and build custom software for other people during the day — and tools like this one when a thing we wanted to use didn’t exist yet.

It’s free, it’s notarized by Apple, and there’s no account to make. If you have a question about it, or you want something like it built, the same address reaches us.

triton-it.nl

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 0.2.1 · notarized by Apple · macOS 14+