I’ve been told by at least three different people online that the MIDI guitar track that I play along to is going to be off and therefore my recorded guitar track will be out of sync with my drum track and everything else.

Is this true?

That shouldn't be true at all. But what I'm wondering about is why you're playing to a MIDI guitar track instead of just a metronome or the drum track.

What I'm thinking is that maybe what you've inputted into Guitar Pro might not be as accurate as it could be in the sense of playing notes with weird duration like for example [eighth note][dot][dot] while in Pro:

a) if you're inputing the notes yourself, maybe its just plain ol' human error on being accurate
b) if you're letting GP tab what you're playing through your interface for you, maybe GP won't be accurate due to how the programmers may have programmed the software to transcribe.

If you have a drum machine, this won’t work as well, but, if you just play all the instruments yourself, track the drums first, then guitar and bass, then vocals, it will sound way better than you think. That is, as long as you have some kind of sense of rhythm. If you don’t, practice with a metronome. Start simple, then get more complex. If you have this down already, then just go for it!

You said that you want to play barbaric black death metal, does it matter if your timing isn’t perfect? No. If you have a band, just practice together enough, and you’ll keep time with each other, unless one member is hammered drunk, or just doesn’t care. Bands track stuff live, all the time, and sound great. You want to play barbaric extreme metal, with an emphasis on fury. The only people, who will nitpick you, are tool/djent fans, and would never listen to your music anyways.

This is, of course, assuming, that you can, at least, keep time with yourself. Try it out.

Yeah no, that's not really a thing. Unless as mentioned your MIDI track isn't very good and has weird timing issues that sound out of sync already, in which case I'm not sure why you would record along to match it.

Yeah this doesn't make any sense unless your guitar pro tab is fucked. Just record to the drum track instead, you'll have a better time.

Thanks everyone for the feedback, but Hexemacht, I must say that your advice in particular was the best for my situation. After reading your post I not only took heed of what you said, but this also prompted me to slow down the tempo of my music and this has been working wonders! My playing is a lot tighter. Often times common sense stuff like this will pose issues for me and I'll end up overthinking it and blame not being able to hear the MIDI play along track, like I did in an older post, as the reason why I am unable to record a song.

As for the metronome thing that you all mentioned...this is something that I have tried to use earnestly on numerous occasions in the past wanting to be and feel like a real musician. But unfortunately, I just can't seem to play anything to a metronome unless its like ridiculously easy slow eighth note based riffs that lock in easily
to the clicks. Basically anything that involves long drawn out notes (like say in drone/doom metal) is near impossible for me to play to a metronome and also anything that involves lots of notes or tremolo picking poses issues as I get "lost" and get confused trying to do what essentially amounts to multitasking as I am simultaneously wrestling with a riff while trying to to make sense of where those countless notes fall in tandem with a clicking sound. Maybe it would be helpful if the metronome built into my Reaper DAW was louder for one and also made a "beep" sound for every "downbeat/beginning of measure" (is this the right term?) click to differentiate it from all the other clicks. For every single metronome I hear the downbeat click barely sounds any different from the rest of the clicks, which really throws me off. A drum track also poses similar issues for me as unless we are talking Nirvana or Green Day here (basically eighth note based midtempo material), I've never been able to make any sense of the chaotic blast beat based drumming of extreme metal or the slow drum beats of doom and I likewise get "lost," confused and "thrown off" when trying to be a real extreme metal musician attempting to play just to the drums. This is all despite the fact that I listen to blast beat based music everyday and that the music I write makes heavy use of blast beats. These issues are why I use a MIDI guitar play along track.

There is one except to this rule though as there are a few songs that I have rehearsed the hell out of during the various brief on and off periods when I was playing music with people in person. These are songs I actually have down well enough to play along to drums, but probably not to metronome. However these are songs that I have a long history with that I wrote years ago so I know them like the back of my hand. I feel like I would need to practice until the end of time to get my newer material up to this same level!

I think the way I write music and my lack of organic experience with playing music with anyone else, either casually or rehearsing with a band, also has made it harder for me to be able to play to drums or metronomes and has probably made my songwriting process awkward as well. Basically I'm mainly a songwriter who comes up with a concept, either thematic based [ex: "what riff is the best musically representation of gods battling for control of the heavens"?] or riff based [ex: "I need a long drawn out atmospheric riff here"], who then messes around on the guitar to try to see if I can come up with something that satisfies the concept in my head. Often times the riff that I have settled upon that I consider to be up to par with the concept in my head will be one that I can barely be able to play or only have a half-capable ability to play. But this doesn't concern me as my first priority has always been songwriting. I will then tab out the riff in Guitar Pro. Often times Guitar Pro itself will influence how the riff turns out. For example, the feature of Guitar Pro that automatically calculates the amount of beats in a measure relative to one's chosen time signature has been immensely influential upon me. There's been so many times where I was playing a riff that I thought up of that was a musically impossibility due to me playing too little or too many notes here or there relative to the even and/or odd numbered time signatures available to chose from. This riff writing process repeats itself for several more riffs until I have a song's worth amount and then using Guitar Pro I rearrange the riffs accordingly and then write drum beats. I then play along to the MIDI playback of my song for practice until I have all the riffs down. So I guess to sum it up, I struggle playing and recording my own material like a real musician because I can't actually play my stuff accurately from the very moment I come up with the riffs and songs. I always need to work myself up to being able to play my riffs accurately using Guitar Pro in a very methodical way as my training wheels/crutch.

Are you trying to shoehorn your riffs into bizarre ass time signatures all the while leaving the tempo at the default 120 bpm? I used to do that because I didn't know better. It might be a case of you not setting that particular song file to the right tempo. I think you might need to better figure out the correct tempo your are playing in and input that to the guitar pro file. It's not easy to do to. But I think because of the way western music has been for centuries we always default to simple 4/4 time in our heads except when we make effort not to. But tempos on the other hand vary WIDELY. I think the most likely thing is you are not inputting the correct tempo. Don't try to shoehorn the riff into weird time signatures or change the riff to make it fit. Most likely you just have the wrong tempo selected.

Definitely not, I know how to place a tempo change marker in the middle of a song (Press F10 command) and I am familiar with the “master” tempo setting that applies to the entire song (this is located on the main tool bar). Keep in mind that the tempo change markers you can place in the middle of the song using F10 command will override the master tempo for all the measures moving forward until you place another tempo change marker in song. The tempo change marker only applies to that moment of the song you place it in and the measures after that. So for example if the master tempo is set to 200 bpm and then at the 5th measure you place a tempo change marker, the first 4 measures will still be following the master tempo.

Most of my songs range between 200-240 bpm and I adjust accordingly where I think the tempo fits the riff or the particular point in the song. So yea I always have the tempos already decided beforehand (usually ranging 200-240 bpm) for each riff. Common time signatures I end up using (meaning that GUitar Pro influences which one I use) are 4/4, 6/4, 3/4, 5/4. For example for me it could be something as simple as just playing 4 quarter notes with a quick little note thing at the end . Guitar Pro will color the measure red indicating that it’s more than 4/4 . Then I’ll just get rid of the excess notes. Then then riff is in 4/4 timing and is fixed.

I don’t try to squeeze 32nd notes into odd time signatures at 120 bpm. I abhor when people do that type of thing (I’m referring to tabs off of Ultimate Guitar website) where like you said they’ll squeeze like a million 32nd notes into measures and have the tempos at like 150 bpm when they should be making the notes 16th notes with song tempo at 200 bpm.