Notating a Guitar Piece with Tablature

The first thing to recognize about writing guitar parts with Finale is that standard notation and guitar tablature are completely interchangeable. You can copy music from a standard staff into a tablature staff (or vice versa), and Finale does the translation automatically. Therefore, the method you use for composing guitar music depends heavily on your proficiency with standard notation versus tablature. If you are composing at the piano and are more familiar with standard notation, you will enter into the standard staff. If you are composing with a guitar, you will likely want to enter your composition directly into the tablature staff. I will cover both methods.

For this example, we will assume you are composing for a standard guitar-string tuning (E, A, D, G, B, E).