Fretboard Design

Guitar Power allows you to customise the appearance of its on-screen fretboard using skins. Some example skins are included and you can also create your own using most paint packages.

To select a skin

Select the required skin file (a thumbnail image is shown in the preview window) and the select the OK button.

Guitar Power will remember your preference between sessions.

To create your own skins

A Guitar Power skin is simply a picture file containing a picture of the fretboard. You can easily make your own skins using most of the available paint packages as long as you follow these simple rules:

• Save your skin as a GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) file
• Place your skin in the 'Fretboards' directory within the 'GuitarPower' directory
• Your picture should measure 753 (width) x 183 (height) pixels
• Do not change the position of the frets or the strings
• Create a right-handed fretboard. The left handed one is created automatically as a mirror image so any text will be reversed!

A good place to start is by editing an existing one such as default.gif - it is recommended that you save your skins with different file names so that the existing ones are not overwritten.

Using Paint Shop Pro to create a skin - step-by-step instructions

An easy and effective way to create a Guitar Power skin is to produce a picture and then paste an existing skin on top of it as a transparent selection. This is especially effective when the first picture is a tiled texture such as that you might find as a background of a web page.

This section describes how to accomplish this using Paint Shop Pro 6, a popular Windows graphics package however it should be easy to convert this method to work with other graphics packages.

(All images shown here are reduced to 60% of actual size)

1) Create a new image 753 x 183 pixels in size

2) Open a new image - default.gif

3) Copy the whole image to the clipboard by selecting the menu item 'Edit' then 'Copy'

4) Select the first picture created in stage 1, and set the background colour to a value of Red=255, Green=255, Blue=221 (in hexadecimal #FFFFDD)

5) Paste the contents of the clipboard into the picture as a transparent selection at coordinates (0,0). To do this select the menu item 'Edit' then 'Paste' then 'As transparent selection', move the image about until it is aligned and then click the right mouse button.

6) Save the image into Guitar Power's 'Fretboards' folder as a GIF file.

7) Run Guitar Power and your new skin should be visible in the Fretboard design file browser.