From Midi to Tabs to First Song

April 14th around 10:30 PM I said to Bhallu,
"You're absolutely right!! We need to learn a song as a starting point. I've been fooling around with the guitar exploring its concepts for last 2 months. Need a kernel for the Real playing."

As luck would have it Bhallu was playing the Shadows song "Theme for young lovers".
As children we'd slipped away into cosy sleep on the gentle Shadows tunes with the Niagara Falls NightShade revolving in the dark room.

Its Single string playing with little complexity made this the ideal song to learn.
Also an old haunting childhood favourite. Just what we needed.

We needed the Tablature i.e the finger positions on the Guitar fretboard.
GuitarPro 4.0 converts midi input to tabs.
AmazingMidi a GPL Freesoftware converts wav file to midi.
But we only had mp3. I Used winamp to convert the mp3 to .wav.
Converted that to midi, albeit not a good midi.

Then Bhallu hit upon the idea of searching for online midi versions of the song.
He found a Shadows fan website "http://www.antioch.com.sg/edgar/memory/"
from where he downloaded the readymade midi with multiple tracks for each instrument.

Also got some intro to Shadows - who they are etc. Never knew this before. We'd just heard the music never knew much about the band itself.

GuitarPro converted the midi into tabs in a snap. It also played back the midi while displaying the sheet-music, the positions on a guitar live.

Problem!! The melody strings ie treble strings are shot or out-of-tune.
No problem I told GuitarPro to just transposition to lower octave. Thats it!! We can play some part of the song on the bass strings.

It was a great feeling for me to strike the first notes from a song and tab.
The whole process might have taken 1-2 hours.

Bharat then tried his hand at it and started improvising by using Hammer-ons and pull-offs instead of normal fretting.
So now we're set on the road to our first song!!