This could potentially be accomplished with just one piece of software, Tabit. If you’ve ever heard of or used Guitar Pro or Power Tab, then you already have an idea of what Tabit does because it’s practically the same thing, it’s a tablature editor. The difference is Tabit is no where near as complicated, it very small and not as cluttered as Guitar Pro or Power Tab. I also found a free GPL one called Tux Guitar, but unfortunately it mimics Guitar Pro and Power tab and is just as complicated as them. What sucks is Tabit doesn’t work on Mac (I think it works on GNU/Linux with wine) so you’ll have to learn to use Tux Guitar instead. The other problem with Tabit is that it’s not free, it cost $19 and the author of the program hasn’t updated it in a few years (at the time of this writing the the version is 2.03 and the copyright at the bottom of the website says 2007). It also pretty much looks like he’s abandoned the software and is just sitting back and either milking it for all it’s worth now, or just doesn’t care about it anymore. The website does offer a 30 day free trial of the software though, but once that’s up you can’t use it anymore unless you download it from a torrent site or something, however this would probably not be legal and I can’t advise that you anything illegal. But if you just wanted to browse a torrent site to see if you could find it for educational purposes you would go to isohunt.com and do a search for Tabit.
Anyway I’m going to assume you’re using the 30 day trial version, if you haven’t downloaded it yet go to www.tabit.net and download and install it.
When you open Tabit your screen will look like the photo below, if it doesn’t then quit playing solitaire and open up Tabit 
Using Tabit is pretty simple and it’s pointless for me to explain it in detail here since you can find anything you want to know in the help menu. What I will tell you though is that you use the key pad to type in the notes and if you wanna add more tracks just go to ‘Song’ and select ‘Add Track’ from there you can add another guitar, bass, drums, piano, banjo, etc track. Just play around with it and you’ll have it figured out in no time.
Now the reason I said Tabit can pretty much be used solely as your rough draft recording is because you just create the tracks you want and Tabit will play it back exactly as if you had recorded it…well almost. Tabit uses MIDI to play back the notes so it sounds kinda shitty, especially the guitar, it sounds more like a piano, but the bass and drums almost sound real. Even so, this is pretty much what a rough draft recording is anyway. With Tabit you can refine your ideas until it sounds like you want it to, then when you’re done you can go to File > Export MIDI and import it into your multitrack recording software and recorded better sounding guitars.
So for example here’s a song I made in Tabit and will be using as my example in the rest of these tutorials, and if you don’t wanna export it to MIDI yourself for whatever reason (the most likely reason being you installed Tabit started reading this article forgot about it then came back to it after 30 days and now your version of Tabit is expired) you can download the MIDI file here.
Alright that’s it for now, in the next article I’ll show you how to import the MIDI file into a Multitrack Digital Audio Workstation to use as a template to record better sounding guitars/bass so your band mates wont look at you funny when you try and play back the weird sounding Tabit file.
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