So... I came across a song with the following, rather unusual, situation.

4/4 measures filled with constant triplet 8th notes... but:
on the final measure of the riff, there's one additional 8th note (triplet timing).
It's not played faster as a quadruplet in the same measure or anything, it's actually another beat behind the measure.

My question: how do I correctly incorporate this in my time signatures?
It's not 1/8th because it's a triplet timing... so help!?

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Fuck, that's a tricky one. In Guitar Pro I punched in 9 triplet 1/8 notes (i.e. one more than the bar can take) and the bar length indicator says the bar is 4.333. How the fuck you can accommodate 0.333 of a beat into a time sig is beyond me! haha

Have I understood your question correctly? Is it a case of a 4/4 bar with one "extra" triplet 1/8 note, like this?

Maybe the author of the tab simply fucked it up. Do you have a link?

You've understood perfectly. Not an error, I checked the original recording.

I've found the answer in the meantime, but unfortunately, it's not supported by GuitarPro or Powertab.

The solution would be to insert a 1/12 time measure for that one note.

Theoretically, for example: 1/3 is between a 1/2 and a 1/4, so it's a third of the length of a whole note, which equals one triplet quarter note.
Same reasoning for a 1/12, which lies between 1/8 and 1/16.

I hope my midi editing program supports this, or I'll have to compress them to 16th notes after all.

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Ahh, I didn't even consider making a second bar with a different sig to accommodate a single note haha. Then again, my theory knowledge is about the same as my knowledge of Arabic.

Are you using Guitar Pro 5? If so, Guitar Pro 6 might be able to support the time sigs you need.

Good job figuring it out, it certainly taught me something

Have you tried using 6/8 or 9/8 time? This is commonly used when third notes are present.

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I think using x/8 has mostly to do with beat accentuation.

But it's no good in this case: one triplet eight note has a different value than one eight note. So it's never acceptable in a measure based on a power of 2.

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By the way, I've managed to tackle this issue in PT/GP:

I've tabbed a 3/4 measure with three eight-note triplets. That left me with 4 notes.
I've put those in a 2/4 measure, NOT as triplets but as regular eights. So the bars are correct.
Then I simply multiplied the actual BPM for this song with 1.5 for this one measure. Thus the speed of the regular eights equals that of the triplets.

Not very clean but it works.

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