What a capo does to the fret numbers in a Guitar Pro file

By machado001 · 17 October 2026

Open your tab file with Tabline

This guide is about a capo recorded inside a tab file — .gp, .gp5, .gpx or MusicXML — rather than the one in your gig bag. If the file is not open yet, start with how to open a Guitar Pro file on Android.

Are tab fret numbers counted from the capo or the nut?

In a Guitar Pro file, from the capo. That is not a style choice in the file format: the capo fret is stored once, apart from the notes, and every note’s pitch is then worked out as its written fret plus the capo plus whatever that string is tuned to. Write a 3 on the second string with a capo at the second fret and the file means “third fret above the capo”, which is the fifth fret of the guitar.

Printed and hand-typed tab follows the same habit most of the time. The capo becomes the new nut, so a Capo V marking at the top of a sheet means the fifth fret is now 0 and everything is counted from there; a note fretted at a second-fret capo is written as an open string. Guides to reading tab were consistent on that point when we checked them in October 2026.

It is a convention, though, not a law, and the place it breaks down is the partial capo — more on that below. If a sheet gives you no capo marking at all and the shapes only make sense a few frets up, you are probably looking at absolute fret numbers from someone who counted from the nut.

Where the capo lives in a Guitar Pro file

Beside the tuning, on the track, in all three generations of the format. A .gp3, .gp4 or .gp5 file keeps it as a plain integer in the track’s header, right after the instrument’s channel settings. A .gpx or .gp file — the Guitar Pro 6, 7 and 8 formats, which are archives holding XML — writes it as a CapoFret property, and it can sit on the whole track or on one staff of it. MusicXML has its own slot for it, a <capo> element inside the staff details that also carry the string tuning.

So the capo travels with the file, and it is per track. A score with a capo’d acoustic and an uncapo’d electric is perfectly ordinary, which is one more reason to check which track you are actually looking at before you conclude anything.

In Guitar Pro itself the setting sits with the track’s tuning — its own documentation, as of October 2026, reaches the capo and partial capo from the Tuning section of the Track Inspector, and says both can be in use at once.

What the capo does to the pitch you hear

It raises it, by one semitone per fret, on every note of that track. The arithmetic a player runs for each note is written fret + capo + open-string pitch, so a capo at the second fret is worth two semitones everywhere, open strings included. That is exactly what a real capo does, and it is why a capo’d file sounds a tone or two above where the fret numbers would put it on a bare neck.

Standard notation tells the truth about this and tab cannot. The notation staff is drawn from the pitch each note actually sounds, so adding a capo moves every notehead up the staff while the fret numbers underneath stay where they were. If you only ever read the lower staff you will never see the capo at all, which is the strongest practical argument for reading tab and notation together.

One wrinkle worth knowing before you count lines: guitar notation is conventionally written an octave above where the instrument sounds, and a tab file carries that offset: in a .gp3 to .gp5 file any track on a guitar patch gets it automatically, and the newer XML formats write it out as a property of their own. The notation staff is therefore a true picture of the music, shifted up an octave as a whole. The capo is not part of that offset — it is in the pitch itself.

How to see the capo on a phone

Tabline renders the score with alphaTab, which prints the capo above the music when the file carries one: a short Capo. fret 2 line over the first bar. It belongs to the standard notation staff, so you will see it in the Notation + tab view the app opens in, and it disappears along with that staff if you switch to Tab only. A file with no capo prints nothing, which is the quiet case — absence of the line means the field is zero.

The other way is to listen to the pitch names. Tabline’s fretboard puts a dot at the written fret and labels it with the note that is sounding, so a capo at the second fret shows an open sixth string sitting at the nut and named F#2, not E2. The fretboard is part of the one-time unlock; opening the file, reading it and playing it back are free.

Both of those read the file. Neither of them, and nothing else in the app, changes it: Tabline is a player, so it will not add a capo, move one, or take one off. If the capo in the file is wrong, the fix belongs in whatever wrote the file.

Partial capos: the case software gets wrong

A partial capo covers some strings of a fret and leaves the rest open, and it is where the tidy rule above falls apart. Players who publish partial-capo music have argued for years about whether to count from the capo or the nut, and the reason they give is that the software does not handle it — so some of that music is written with absolute frets on purpose.

Tab players inherit the problem. alphaTab, the engine Tabline reads scores with, takes the full capo fret out of a Guitar Pro file and has no handling for the partial-capo properties beside it, so a partial capo is not applied to the pitches you hear at all. On a file like that the playback will not match what the instrument would do, whichever way the transcriber counted; read the tab as a fingering map and trust your own ears over the sound.

Does MusicXML carry the capo too?

It can, and it is read. The capo sits in the same block of staff details that carries the string tuning, so it travels with a part that was exported as tablature. A part exported as pitches alone has no strings, no frets and no capo — see opening MusicXML and .mxl files on Android for what survives an export and what does not.

The short version

The capo is a field, not a note. It is counted into the pitch and out of the fret numbers, so the tab stays readable as fingering while the sound moves up the neck. Check the line above the first bar, check which track you are on, and check what tuning the file is in — between them, those three facts explain nearly every tab that looks right and sounds wrong.