Fretride vs Guitar Tab Maker

Fretride is a guitar practice and songwriting app for iOS and macOS, with a fretboard visualizer, playback engine, tab editor, pattern library, lessons, and practice games. The fretboard displays notes by key and scale degree, plays notes, and shows chord shapes across the neck. Its touch-focused editor handles full songs and techniques including hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends, palm mutes, and triplets. With an audio interface, the app scores timing and selected playing details; analysis runs on-device and microphone audio is not recorded, stored, or transmitted. Lessons and games are included in the free version, which allows up to three saved songs and needs no account. The app includes hand-recorded guitar samples and separate tracks for drums, piano, bass, violin, cello, flute, saxophone, and trumpet. Signed-in Pro users can sync songs, tabs, progressions, patterns, and lesson progress across devices. Pro also adds unlimited saved songs, custom arpeggio and strum patterns, additional guitar tones, and MIDI instrument sound banks. Monthly and yearly subscriptions are billed through Apple, with exact regional prices shown in the app before purchase.

Guitar Tab Maker is a free browser-based editor for writing guitar tablature from scratch, one fret at a time. Its six-line grid accepts fret numbers from 0 to 24, and multiple notes can be placed in one column to form chords. Tuning presets include Standard, Drop D, DADGAD, Open G, and Eb Standard; users can set tempo in BPM. Notes can be marked with hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, bends, or dead notes, while columns support whole, half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth note values. The editor displays standard notation alongside the tab and plays the tab with sound. You can paste a six-line ASCII tab to continue editing, then download ASCII text or MIDI, or print a PDF containing notation and tablature. It works in modern browsers on Mac, Windows, Linux, and phones without installation. The page says tabs remain in the browser rather than being uploaded. Users enter the notes themselves; the tool does not generate them with AI. It does not export Guitar Pro files.