My wife wants to play her guitar in real time and create tablature of some of her original compositions.
Being a novice at this I do not know how to set things up.
Can it be done without a midi pickup being fitted to the guitar?
Cubase on it’s own cannot do polyphonic pitch detection and conversion to MIDI, you would need additional software for that, like Celemony Melodyne (expensive) or Jam Origin MIDI Guitar (cheaper and dedicated to guitars). Regardless what you use, the result won’t be perfect and probably require additional editing. Then you have MIDI data and would need something to convert that to tab.
I actually don’t know whether Cubase can do tablature at lll…Never checked 
. But regardless whether it can or whether you need something else, the conversion from MIDI to tablature won’t be perfect either and would probably require additional work (I did that with MuseScore once for bass guitar. No fun)
Maybe someone else has better ideas…
Yeah it can display Notes on Tablature in the Score Editor. But then if you used something like Melodyne (which you could do using their trial) there will still be things you’d need to sort out in the editor. For example - is that A Note on the open 5th string, or on the 6th string at the 5th fret? MIDI Guitars put each string on their own MIDI Channel to manage the same pitches being on different strings. But converting from Audio to MIDI in Cubase or Melodyne is going to put everything on the same Channel. Maybe Jam Origin mentioned above handles that - worth a look…?
I cannot imagine how Jam Origin could solve that, it can detect the pitches, but deciding on which string the pitch is is probably next to impossible to do perfectly, there are of course typical playing patterns, but playing an open string like in your example is sometimes an artistic choice, not a logical one.
Also, the last time i checked Jam Origin, which granted was the first version, you really had to adapt your playing for the pitch detection to work somewhat properly. That may have improved, dunno.
The Score Editor does let you move Notes on a Tab to a different string, and it’s easy enough - a right+click on the Note if I recall correctly. If you end up needing a lot of corrections that’s gonna be a bunch of busy work. But if the alternative is hand entering the Notes from scratch using an editor it could still be easier.
Seems like its kind of an edge case where it is possible with limitations but potentially creates more work than it’s worth. Only way to know for sure is to do a test Project. If there is polyphonic playing involved I’d really recommend using the demo of Melodyne which allows unrestricted use for the demo period.
I tried it out a couple of years ago after reading raving reviews and testimonies. Tried it with a few different electric guitars, but could not get it to track well enough. I don’t know how others have had such success with the program.
@fred1909 I’m afraid there is no quick and easy way of doing this. As others above mentioned, there are tools that can aid in the process but there will be corrective editing needed. Things would get even more complicated if the tempo of the performance is somewhat loose or there are tempo changes in the piece.
It looks like using her acoustic guitar is going to be (at the very least) quite difficult.
If she plays a Godin XTSA using the midi output through a synthesizer, can that signal then be linked via midi output / through route to the computer and directly into Cubase and subsequently converted into tab?
I purchased a Steinberg UR22C last year but have not had success there either. (Probably a justification of the saying “All the gear - No idea!”
I am really grateful to all those who have engaged with this as I am way out of my depth here.