Tab is drawn upside down from the guitar in your hands.
Look down at your neck: the thick low E is the string nearest your face, at the top.
Now look at any tab: the low E is at the bottom. Every guitarist reads that inversion,
left-handed or right, and almost all of us were told to just get used to it.
Down-Fret turns it the right way up, tab and fretboard together,
without changing a single note.
The browser version is free, needs no account, and opens your own files.
The Windows app is not for sale yet — $15 once when it ships.
Why tab is upside down
There is a reason, and it is not the player. Tab inherited standard notation's one
rule: higher pitch sits higher on the staff. String 1 is the
highest-pitched string, so it goes on top. That is pitch order, not point of view, and
nobody looking at a guitar sees it that way.
Standard tab — pitch order, string 1 on top
Down-Fret — what you see, same notes
Same frets, same strings, same pitches. Only the order they are stacked in changes, so
what you read matches what your hands are doing.
Three views, one dropdown
There are only two flips involved, and they are independent: which string sits on top,
and which way the neck points. Rather than make you reason about that, pick the picture
you want.
Standard tab
Exactly as printed. Useful when you are copying from a book, or working with
someone who reads it the ordinary way.
Your own guitar
Low E on top, neck pointing the way a right-handed player's does. This is the view
nobody offers and everybody already has in front of them.
Left-handed, or someone facing you
The same picture serves both, and that is not a coincidence. The low E is
physically the top string no matter who holds the guitar. Only the neck direction
swaps. So a left-handed player's own view and the view of a right-handed teacher
sitting opposite you are identical.
Every preset keeps the tab and the fretboard showing the same string on top. Two views
of one instrument that disagree are worse than either on its own.
What you get
The tab staff, mirrored
String order reversed on the tab itself — the part you actually read while playing.
Pitch is preserved note for note: it is the same music, not a transposition.
A fretboard that matches
Pointing the way yours points, low E on top, following along as the song plays. It
looks like the neck you are holding, not its reflection.
Real fret spacing
Frets sit where they sit on a real guitar — each one closer than the last by the
twelfth root of two. The shape of a stretch is the thing you read, and on evenly
spaced columns every stretch is a lie.
Your existing files
Opens Guitar Pro files — .gp, .gp3 through
.gp8, .gpx, .gtp — plus MusicXML,
including compressed .mxl. Nothing to convert, nothing to re-tab.
Practice controls
Drag across the score to loop a passage, with a count-in bar before it starts.
Step bar by bar, mute or solo any track, and let the speed trainer add 5% each
time the loop comes round.
The fretboard
Low E on top, drawn to real guitar proportions, pointing whichever way you play.
Playback lights up the notes as they come.
Note the frets crowding together toward the high end, and the 12th-fret marker at
two thirds of the board — exactly where the octave falls on a real neck.
What it will cost
Not for sale yet. When it is: $15 once, with a 14-day trial. If it does not make
reading easier, do not buy it.
$15 once
Not a subscription. Free updates.
Mirrored tab with pitch preserved
Three views, left-handed and right
Fretboard at true guitar fret spacing
Loop a passage with a count-in, and mute or solo any track
Works offline, no account, no activation server
Installs, opens your files from its File menu or by drag and drop, updates itself
Down-Fret is finished enough to use and not yet finished enough to sell. Leave an email
and you will hear once — when it is ready. No list, no newsletter.
One email. Never shared.
Already using Guitar Pro? There is a free piece too.
GP Neck Mirror is a small always-on-top overlay that mirrors Guitar
Pro’s own fretboard panel with the string order reversed, so low E sits on top.
It is free, and it always will be.
It reads, it never writes
Guitar Pro is never patched, injected into, or modified. The overlay rearranges
pixels Guitar Pro has already drawn, so your score and its pitches cannot change.
Note names stay upright
It moves each string’s band whole rather than flipping the picture, so the
note names stay readable instead of coming out upside down.
It follows the panel
Drag the panel, resize it, close and reopen it, restart Guitar Pro — the overlay
finds it again on its own.
Free · Windows · needs Guitar Pro 8. The installer arrives with the first signed release
and will sit right here, one click, nothing to sign up for.
Using TuxGuitar instead?
A plugin adds Tools → Mirror tab for left hand. TuxGuitar already
flips the fretboard; this flips the staff, the part you read while playing, with every
pitch preserved. Free and open source (MIT). Beta: it compiles against the real API and
its transform is tested, but nobody has clicked it inside a running TuxGuitar yet.
Questions
Doesn’t Guitar Pro already have a left-handed setting?
It flips the neck left to right, which is half the job. Its fretboard still draws low
E at the bottom, and there is no setting anywhere for string order — its full English
string table and its settings tree were both checked. That missing half is what the
free overlay puts back, and what Down-Fret does natively.
Does mirroring change the music?
No, and this is the part that is easy to get wrong. String numbers and the tuning are
reversed together so the two cancel: every fret number stays put and every pitch comes
out identical. It is checked note by note on load — 378 notes on the test file, every
pitch unchanged.
Do I need Guitar Pro to use Down-Fret?
No. Down-Fret reads Guitar Pro files and renders them itself. Guitar Pro only
matters for the free overlay, which mirrors that program’s own panel.
I play right-handed. Is this for me?
Yes, and that is the part most people do not expect. The string-order flip has
nothing to do with handedness: low E is the top string on every guitar, so tab is
inverted relative to what you see whichever way you play. Pick Your own
guitar and leave the neck pointing the usual way. The left-handed view is one
preset of three, and it doubles as the view of someone facing you.
Is there a Mac version?
Not yet. Windows first, because that is where it was built and tested. Leave your
email above if a Mac build would matter to you — that is the kind of thing worth
knowing before it gets built.
What happens when the trial ends?
The mirroring features switch off and it stays a working tab viewer. The app never
becomes a hostage, and nothing you opened stops opening.
Down-Fret
