A multitrack Guitar Pro file on your phone

By machado001 · 26 September 2026

Open your tab file with Tabline

Why a tab file has tracks at all

A .gp, .gp5 or .gpx file is not a picture of a tab. It is a structured score, and the unit inside it is the track: one per instrument in the arrangement, each with its own staff, its own tuning and its own sound. That is why a single download of a metal song can contain two rhythm guitars, a lead, a bass and a drum kit, and why the file is usually far more than the part you came for. The five Guitar Pro extensions all work this way.

Each track also carries a General MIDI program number, which is what tells a player what the track should sound like. In the General MIDI 1 sound set, programs 25 to 32 are the guitar family — nylon and steel acoustics, jazz, clean, muted, overdriven and distortion electrics, plus guitar harmonics — and 33 to 40 are the basses. Tabline turns that number into the readable instrument name you see under each track, so “Electric Guitar (clean)” is not a guess about the track, it is the file’s own declaration.

Which track does a player open on?

Something has to be drawn first, and guessing badly means the reader opens a song and finds the drum part. Tabline picks in a fixed order: the first track that is not percussion, has at least six strings and carries a General MIDI guitar program; failing that, the first non-percussion track that has any strings at all, which in practice is the bass; failing that, whatever the file lists first.

After that, your own choice wins. The track you select for a file is remembered with that file, so the next time you open it you land on the part you were working on rather than back on whatever the guessing rules chose. The number of tracks in a file is also printed beside it in the app’s recent list, so you know before opening whether you are dealing with a full band or a solo transcription.

How to switch tracks in a tab file on Android

1. Look at the right-hand key of the transport bar. It is labelled with the name of the track currently on the page, which is also the fastest way to notice you are reading the wrong one.
2. Tap it. The menu lists every track in the file, each with its name and its General MIDI instrument underneath, with the one currently drawn picked out from the rest.
3. Tap the track you want. The page is engraved again for that track, with as many lines of tab as that track has strings.
4. Carry on reading. The metronome toggle sits at the bottom of the same menu, because a phone transport has no room for a key of its own. Switching tracks and the metronome are both free; so are opening a file, reading it and playing it back.

One thing the switch does not do is change the tuning. Each track owns its own, and a bass track in a dropped tuning stays in it — reading the tuning off the file is a separate job from reading the notes.

Can you see every track at once?

Not in Tabline: it engraves one track as a page, and switching is how you move between them. Guitar Pro’s own desktop program does have a multitrack view — its documentation, as of September 2026, reaches it through View → MultiTrack or the F3 key, and its mobile app presents the tracks as a list you tap to switch, with a soundboard for volume, solo and mute.

On a tablet, where there is width for two panes, Tabline shows the whole track table beside the score: every track as a row, with its instrument, a volume fader and mute and solo keys, and the row being engraved marked as shown. That is a full view of the arrangement, but the notation itself is still one track at a time.

Why you hear drums you cannot see

Because every track in the file plays, whichever one is on the page. This is the part that makes a tab file better practice material than a printout: you read your guitar part and the bass and drums keep time underneath you, exactly as the arranger wrote them.

Changing that mix is the practice half of the app. Muting a track, soloing one, and setting each track’s volume are part of the one-time unlock — you pay once, and the mixer lists every track in the score rather than only the one being drawn, because silencing the lead so you can play it yourself is the whole point. Reading the score with the full band behind it costs nothing.

Tracks with no tab: drums, piano and voice

How many strings a track has is simply the length of its own tuning, and plenty of tracks have none. A drum kit is percussion — General MIDI keeps percussion on its own channel with a key map instead of instrument programs — and a piano or a vocal line is written as pitches. There is nothing for a tab staff to stand on in any of them, so Tabline shows those tracks as standard notation and does not offer the tab-only view for them. If you read tab and notation side by side, the two-staff view is the one to stay in for a mixed score.

MusicXML parts are not quite Guitar Pro tracks

MusicXML uses parts rather than tracks, and what a part contains depends on the program that exported it. Guitar Pro and the common tab sites write one instrument per part, which maps cleanly onto the track list you see.

There is one case we know goes wrong, and it is worth stating plainly: when a single MusicXML part declares several instruments and tags its notes with them, the engine Tabline uses mis-imports those notes as percussion. In our own test file, 242 of 245 note-ons in such a part came out as MIDI note 0. The page is drawn correctly and the playback pitches are wrong. It is not fixed, and it is not worked around; if a MusicXML score plays as a low thud where notation shows real pitches, that is this defect. A file written one instrument to a part, which is what Guitar Pro and Songsterr export, does not run into it. More on the format in opening MusicXML and .mxl on Android and in getting a MuseScore score onto your phone.

A practice order that works with a band in the file

Pick the track first. Half the confusion about a tab file — wrong instrument, wrong tuning, frets that make no sense — is a reader looking at a part they did not mean to open. Once you are on the right track, work the passage rather than the song: the slow-it-down-and-loop-it method is what turns a hard bar into a learned one, and it is the same handful of controls either way.

The short version

Tracks are how an arrangement is stored, one per instrument. A phone draws one of them and plays all of them. Learn where the track menu is, check it before you trust the frets in front of you, and a multitrack file stops being a wall of someone else’s instruments.