Writing Heavy Music with flat.io, Guitar Pro, and Ableton

I’ve been jamming with another guitar player here in Fresno who’s chasing a bigger idea of what heavy can be. Here’s the exact chain we write in — and why it keeps surprising us.

Heavy isn’t a genre. It’s a feeling.

I’ve been meeting up with another guitar player here in Fresno. I won’t put his name out without asking him first, but the short version is he’s trying to stretch what “heavy” even means. Not louder, not faster. Bigger. We’ve jammed a handful of times now and it keeps pulling me somewhere I don’t usually go on my own, and that’s the whole reason I said yes to it.

Write it in notation, express it in the DAW

The workflow is the part I keep telling people about, because it’s simple and it just works. He writes on flat.io — clean, browser-based notation. I take what he writes and transcribe it into Guitar Pro. Sounds like a redundant step. It isn’t. Guitar Pro exports straight into Ableton, so by the time I open the session the whole arrangement is already sitting there, ready to build on. Nothing re-entered by hand.

There’s a real principle under that, and it’s the thing I’d hand any writer: separate the composition from the production. You commit the actual notes in notation — the part that has to be right — and then you do all your expressing in the DAW, where nothing is permanent. flat.io and Guitar Pro are where the song gets written down. Ableton is where it gets to become itself.

The part where a song stops caring about its genre

And that’s where it gets fun. Once it’s in Ableton you’re mixing, mastering, layering, and that’s where you really get to push on the sounds you like. You’re deep in some heavy thing and then it’s like, man, I really want banjo strings right here. Something completely out of the ordinary. You find the spot for it and it just works. A violin under a breakdown. A piano where a synth should’ve been.

Do that a few times and the whole idea of genre starts to feel like a costume. Timbre — the actual color of a sound, the thing that makes a banjo a banjo and a cranked guitar a cranked guitar — decides how a part hits way more than whatever shelf you filed the song under. Strip the labels off and it’s the same thing under every subgenre we argue about: sound and vibration, with a little distortion on top. That’s it. That’s the whole thing, and once you feel it you can’t un-feel it.

It got me writing my own riffs again

The best part is what it’s doing to me. Working like this, watching somebody else chase an idea and having a real pipeline to catch it in, has me writing down my own riffs again. Not covers. Mine. I’m a long way into playing guitar and there’s still a version of it that feels brand new, and honestly that’s the reason I keep one within reach. I’m looking forward to writing a lot more with him.

FAQ

Why transcribe from flat.io into Guitar Pro instead of just using one?

flat.io is where my collaborator writes. Guitar Pro is the clean bridge into Ableton — it exports the arrangement so I’m building on the real parts instead of re-typing them. Right tool for each leg of the trip.

Why write in notation before touching the DAW at all?

It splits the two jobs. Notation locks the composition, the notes that have to be correct. The DAW is for expression — tone, layers, the out-of-genre parts. Keep them apart and neither one bleeds into the other.

More from the woodshed → the rig I record on, finding any scale in any tuning, and everything I can play, by band.

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Jesse Moraga · Guitarist · Fresno, CA
Updated 2026-07-10