Guitar Feature — User Manual

This page explains how guitar tracks work in Kiwisonic. All guitar-specific terminology is explained as it appears.

How a real guitar makes sound (the short version)

A guitar has six strings, each tuned to a different pitch. From thickest (lowest pitch) to thinnest (highest pitch) they are: E, A, D, G, B, e — but you do not need to memorise these names.

To play a chord, a guitarist presses several strings against the neck and sweeps a pick (or fingers) across them. That sweep is called a strum. Because the pick travels across six strings one at a time, the notes of a chord arrive slightly spread apart — not all at once. This tiny spread is what gives guitar chords their characteristic "rolling" feel, and it's different from how a chord sounds on a piano or in a synth.

Kiwisonic simulates all of this automatically. You just tell it which chords to play and what the rhythm should feel like.

The two things you edit on a guitar track

**[Image: The arrangement timeline showing a guitar track with two section blocks placed side by side (verse and chorus), with the track header visible on the left showing the track name, instrument name, voicing style selector, and volume.]**

Guitar tracks work differently from melodic tracks. Rather than drawing individual notes on a piano roll, you work with two separate layers:

1. The chord progression — what harmony is playing and when it changes. You place chord symbols (e.g. "D minor for two bars, then G major for two bars") on a timeline. The engine figures out which exact notes each string should play.

2. The rhythm pattern — how those chords are played in time. You define a 16-step grid (one bar of 4/4, at 16th-note resolution) that says which beats and offbeats fire, whether the sweep goes down or up, how hard each hit is, and whether certain hits are short and muted.

Keeping these two layers separate is intentional and useful: you can change the chords without touching the rhythm, and you can audition a completely different feel (e.g. swap from strumming to fingerpicking) without rewriting the chord progression.

How the two layers connect at playback

The rhythm pattern defaults to being shared across the whole track, but individual sections can override it with their own strum pattern. The chord progression is always per section. When the sequencer plays, it walks through the chord events in order. For each chord it applies the active rhythm pattern — either the track-level default or the section's override — and the engine plays the current chord's voicing for each hit.

A concrete example:

Chord progression:   | C major (2 bars)   | G major (1 bar) |
Rhythm pattern:      | ▼ — — ▲ ▼ — — ▲ | (loops)         |
                           ↓                     ↓
Step 1 hits:         C major voicing       G major voicing
Step 4 hits:         C major voicing       G major voicing
... and so on

When the chord changes from C to G, the rhythm carries on without interruption — step 1 of the next bar simply plays G instead of C. The pattern editor is where you shape that rhythm. The chord progression is where you decide what harmony those rhythm hits express.

Choosing a sound style (Voicing Styles)

**[Image: Three side-by-side fretboard views showing the same chord (e.g. A minor) resolved in Open, Barre, and PowerChord styles — dots at visibly different positions on the neck, labelled with the style name below each.]**

Before you hear any sound, Kiwisonic has to decide which notes each string plays for a given chord — not just "play a D minor", but "which D minor? In which position on the neck?" This is called a voicing.

You pick a voicing style per track. There are three:

Open

Uses the most natural, low-position chord shapes for the common keys (C, D, E, G, A and their minors). Falls back to the moveable style for less common roots.

Choose this when you want the track to sound like an acoustic guitar — warm, resonant, and slightly different for each chord because each shape sits in a different position.

Barre

A single moveable shape that works for any chord root by pressing all six strings at the same fret. Every chord has a consistent, full-bodied sound regardless of key.

Choose this when you want an electric rhythm guitar sound that's even and consistent across all keys, or when your song moves through a lot of different chords and you want a uniform texture.

PowerChord

Strips the chord down to just the root note, its fifth (seven semitones up), and the octave — on the three lowest strings only. Major/minor quality is ignored: power chords sound neutral, neither happy nor sad.

**What is a "fifth"?** A fifth is a specific interval — seven semitones above the root. E and B are a fifth apart. The absence of a third (the note that determines major vs minor) is what makes power chords sound raw and ambiguous — which is exactly why they work so well in rock.

Choose this when you want a driving, aggressive rock or electronic sound on the low strings. Works especially well with distorted guitar samples.

Setting up the chord progression

**[Image: The chord editor panel for a section, showing a horizontal timeline with coloured chord blocks placed end-to-end (e.g. Am, F, C, G). Each block is labelled with the chord name and spans a width proportional to its duration. A selected block shows an inspector with root, quality, start tick, and duration fields.]**

Each section of a guitar track holds a GuitarSectionPattern, which contains a ChordPattern — an ordered list of ChordEvents:

ChordEvent(Chord, StartTick, DurationTicks)

Chord carries a root pitch and quality (e.g. D minor, G dominant 7th). You place these events on the timeline at the tick where each chord change happens, and give each one a duration.

The rhythm pattern loops over each chord for its full duration, then the next chord begins. If a chord lasts four bars and the rhythm pattern is one bar long, the pattern plays four times over that chord before moving on.

For extended chords (Maj7, Dominant 7th, Minor 7th, Half-Diminished), the Open voicing style approximates with the plain triad when no hand-coded shape exists. The result still sounds correct for most purposes.

Designing the rhythm pattern

**[Image: The pattern editor showing an annotated example (e.g. Rockabilly preset) with callout labels pointing to each row: "Direction row — click to cycle Down/Up/None", "Velocity row — drag to set loudness per step", "Mute row — click to toggle palm-mute", "Preset strip". Beat boundary lines clearly visible.]**

The rhythm pattern is a 16-step grid (one bar of 4/4). Each step can fire or stay silent. Steps that fire play the current chord's voicing through the chosen style.

What each step controls

Direction — which way the pick sweeps:

• Down sweeps from the lowest string to the highest. This is the most common strum; it sounds fuller and heavier because the bass strings hit first.
• Up sweeps from the highest string to the lowest. This sounds lighter and is typically used on the offbeats ("and" counts) to create forward momentum.
• None means this step is silent — a rest.

Velocity — how hard the strings are hit (0–1). Use higher values on the downbeats and lower values on the offbeats to give the pattern a natural accent feel rather than a robotic uniform level.

String group — which strings participate. You don't always want all six strings in every hit. For example, an up strum on an offbeat typically only catches the high strings, not the bass. The available groups are:

Strum technique — controls how the strings are struck on each step:

Use Open for most hits, Palm Mute for a tight chugging feel, Mute for pure percussion, Scratch for dramatic accents, and Slap for the percussive thumb-against-body hit common at the end of strum patterns.

Slap support depends on the instrument. SFZ guitars with a slap sample play it directly; SFZ guitars without one fall back to a hard palm-mute. VST guitars use the plugin's slap articulation if the catalog has it mapped (see "VST guitars: articulation mappings" below). The bundled KiwiSynth guitars don't have slap samples and play it as a hard palm-mute.

Sustain mode — separate from the technique, each step can be set to "Hold":

Hold is orthogonal to the technique, so a muted-Hold is a real combination — a chord that's struck muted and then allowed to ring. Use Hold for the last chord of a phrase you want to breathe before the next section.

Strum speed — how quickly the pick sweeps across the strings on each step:

• 0.0 = instant snap (all strings at the same time, tight and precise)
• 0.5 = normal strum (the default — a natural, even sweep)
• 1.0 = slow rake (strings clearly roll one by one, dramatic arpeggio feel)

The sweep spread

A real strum is not instantaneous. Each string sounds a few ticks after the previous one as the pick crosses it. The Strum Fan-Out setting at track level (default: 6 ticks) controls the base spread. Each step's strum speed then scales this base — 0.5 gives the base value, lower is tighter, higher is wider.

Velocity also tapers slightly across the sweep (each successive string is a little quieter), which matches the natural loss of pick energy.

Built-in rhythm presets

**[Image: Four pattern editor views stacked or side by side — one for each non-blank preset — showing the distinct shapes of each pattern in the Direction and Velocity rows. Label each with its preset name.]**

Five ready-made patterns let you get started quickly. Load one from the preset strip at the bottom of the pattern editor, then customise from there.

Rockabilly Boom-Chicka

A classic country and rockabilly feel. Beat 1 and beat 3 land with a heavy full strum on all strings (the "boom"). Beat 2 and beat 4 answer with a lighter up-sweep on just the high strings (the "chicka"). This creates a bouncy two-feel typical of vintage country and swing. Good starting point for folk, country, or any style where you want a light, rhythmic groove instead of a heavy chord wall.

Folk Fingerpick

Instead of a strum, individual strings are plucked. The lowest string fires on the main beats (acting like a bass line from the left hand on piano), while the middle and high strings fire in the gaps between beats (acting like melody or harmony from the right hand). Use this for acoustic ballads, singer-songwriter tracks, or any place you want a gentle, intimate guitar texture.

Eurodance Power-Chord 8ths

All eight 8th-note positions hit equally, on the low strings only, with a slight accent on beats 1 and 3. Combine with the PowerChord voicing style. The constant forward pulse works well as the rhythmic backbone of dance tracks, synth-rock, or any high-energy section.

Simple Four-on-Floor

One full strum on each of the four beats — nothing more. Use this as a quick starting point, as a reference when testing a new chord progression, or anywhere you want the guitar to stay out of the way rhythmically.

Blank

All 16 steps silent. Use this when you want to build a pattern from scratch.

Per-section strum override

By default, every section uses the track-level rhythm pattern. But sometimes a verse needs a quiet fingerpick while the chorus needs a driving strum — on the same track.

Each section can set a strum pattern override that replaces the track-level pattern for that section only. When the sequencer enters a section with an override, it plays that section's strum pattern instead of the track default. Sections without an override continue using the track-level pattern.

This means you no longer need to create a second guitar track just to get a different rhythm in the chorus.

Wah (auto-wah)

The wah is a per-track effect modeled after a classic envelope-driven wah pedal — a bandpass filter whose centre frequency sweeps up and down. Kiwisonic's wah is free-running: as long as it's enabled, the filter keeps moving regardless of which notes you play, the same way a player rocking a wah pedal keeps the filter moving even on rests.

Settings

The wah card on the guitar track has four controls:

Always-on vs. trigger-driven

The wah has two modes, set by the Wah Triggers chips next to the effect card:

• No chips selected (always-on) — the wah is permanently in the chain at the preset's mix level. This is the closest to leaving a real wah pedal turned on.
• One or more chips selected (trigger-driven) — the wet mix automatically dips in and out at strum-step boundaries, so the wah only colours the kinds of hits you choose. The wet mix lerps between fully wet on matching steps and fully dry on others. Because the mix smoothing is short, this sounds like the player engaging the pedal mid-bar.

The chips:

You can combine chips. "Open + Held" gives a quacky open strum and a long sustained chord, but lets the muted chops sit dry.

Limits

The LFO phase is free-running — it doesn't reset when the wah engages on a Hold step. At slow rates this sounds natural; at very high rates the held-note timbre is whatever phase the sweep happened to be in. If you need a predictable wah swell on every Hold, tighten up the rate or turn off triggering and use always-on.

User-drawn automation overrides triggers

If you draw an automation lane on the wah's Mix parameter (see automation.md), the trigger chips are ignored for that section and your curve takes over. Use this when you want the wah to sweep on a custom rhythm that doesn't line up with the strum chips — e.g. a long breath sweep across a 4-bar verse.

Fills

A section can have an optional fill — a short alternate pattern that plays on a specific bar within the section. Fills are useful for adding a transition or accent at the end of a section (e.g. a quick strum flurry on the last bar before the chorus).

The fill replaces the normal groove for that one bar, then the section either ends or the groove resumes.

Using the pattern editor

The pattern editor edits the track's rhythm pattern — the shared layer that controls when and how chords are struck. Whatever chords you've placed in the chord progression will be played using whatever rhythm you set here. Changing the rhythm affects all sections that don't have a per-section strum override.

The editor is a 4-row control. From top to bottom:

┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Direction row  ▼  ▼  —  ▲  ▼  …   │  ← which direction each step fires
├─────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Velocity row   ██ ██    █  ██  …   │  ← how hard each step hits
├─────────────────────────────────────┤
│  Technique row  O  O  PM M  O   …  │  ← strum technique per step (Open/PalmMute/Mute/Scratch)
├─────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Rockabilly │ Folk Pick │ Eurodance … │  ← preset buttons
└─────────────────────────────────────┘

To add or remove a hit: click anywhere in the Direction row. Each click cycles the step through Down → Up → None → Down. A step on None is silent.

To adjust how loud a hit is: drag in the Velocity row. Drag upward to make a step louder; drag downward to make it softer. Only steps that are already on (not None) show a bar.

To change the strum technique: click the cell in the Technique row below the step. Each click cycles through Open → Palm Mute → Mute → Scratch → Slap → Open. The technique applies to that step only — the direction and velocity you set still apply on top of it.

To start from a preset: click one of the named buttons in the bottom strip. This replaces the entire current pattern. You can then modify individual steps on top of the preset.

Vertical lines mark every 4th step (quarter-note beat boundary), helping you see where the downbeats fall.

Reading the fretboard view

**[Image: Two fretboard views side by side. Left: static view with all dots at full brightness showing an open Am voicing. Right: during playback mid-strum, with strings lighting up one-by-one from bottom to top at varying brightness levels to show the decay gradient. One string shows an × for a muted string.]**

The fretboard view shows a simplified guitar neck. You don't need to understand guitar neck positions — it's mainly useful for checking that the voicing the engine chose makes sense, and for seeing the strum animation during playback.

The neck runs horizontally. The six string lines cross it left-to-right, with the lowest-pitched string at the bottom and the highest at the top. The short thick bar on the left is the nut (the point where the strings begin). The thin vertical lines are frets — each one raises the pitch by one semitone, like moving one key to the right on a piano.

When playback is stopped: the first chord's voicing is shown at full brightness. Each dot shows which fret is pressed on that string (or an open circle if the string is played without pressing).

During playback: dots light up when the corresponding string is struck and fade over about one beat, giving a visual representation of the chord ringing out. You can see the sweep happen — strings light up one after another rather than all at once.

GuitarProfile — when you need note-by-note control

GuitarProfile is a second way to get a guitar sound. Instead of working with chord symbols, you draw individual notes into a standard piano-roll pattern and assign GuitarProfile as the track's articulation. The profile takes those notes and runs them through the same guitar physics: it assigns each note to a string, spreads the chord across time like a real strum, and optionally applies palm mute.

Use this when:

• You want to write a specific guitar melody or riff note-by-note rather than in broad chord strokes.
• You have an existing melodic pattern that you want to "re-voice" through guitar physics.
• You need precise control over individual notes that chord symbols can't express.

The main option to be aware of is MaxFretSpan (default: 4). A guitarist can only stretch their fingers across a limited number of frets at once — about four. If your chord spans more than that, notes that are too far apart to reach are silently dropped. If you hear fewer notes than expected, this is usually why: spread the notes across a narrower pitch range.

The two built-in tunings are Standard (the most common guitar tuning) and Drop D (the lowest string is tuned down one whole step, giving a deeper bass sound and easier low chords). You can also define custom tunings.

Typical workflow: building guitar parts for a song

This walkthrough takes you from a freshly created guitar track through a complete verse–chorus arrangement. It assumes you have already added a guitar track and assigned an instrument (SFZ or VST3) to it.

Step 1 — Choose a voicing style

**[Image: The guitar track header / inspector panel with the voicing style dropdown open, showing Open selected. The other two options (Barre, PowerChord) visible in the dropdown list.]**

The voicing style is set once for the whole track. Pick one before you do anything else, because it colours every chord in every section:

• Acoustic / folk / country → Open
• Electric rhythm / all keys → Barre
• Rock / metal / dance → PowerChord

You can change it later and all sections update immediately, so don't stress over this — it is easy to revisit.

Step 2 — Set up the rhythm pattern

**[Image: The pattern editor with the "Simple Four-on-Floor" preset loaded — four evenly spaced green down-arrow cells in the Direction row, four equal-height velocity bars. The Preset strip is visible at the bottom with "4-on-Floor" highlighted.]**

The rhythm pattern is also track-level: one pattern drives every section. Start with a preset that is close to the feel you want, then adjust.

1. Open the pattern editor for the track.
2. Click a preset in the bottom strip that matches the genre or feel.
3. Listen to the default rhythm against a few chords (you can add placeholder chords in the next step and come back here).
4. Fine-tune individual steps:
   • Direction row — click to toggle which steps fire and whether they sweep down or up. A common approach: downstrokes on the downbeats, upstrokes on the "and" (offbeat) counts.
   • Velocity row — drag the bars so beat 1 is the loudest, with softer hits on the offbeats. This gives the rhythm a natural pulse instead of a mechanical grid feel.
   • Technique row — add palm-muted or muted steps for percussive texture, or scratch for aggressive accents. For example, a palm-muted 16th note before a downbeat creates a push feel.

**Tip:** If verse and chorus need *different* rhythms (e.g. sparse fingerpicking in the verse, full strumming in the chorus), set a **per-section strum override** on the chorus section. This keeps everything on one track. Alternatively, you can still create two separate guitar tracks if you want different instruments or voicing styles for each section.

Step 3 — Build the verse chord progression

**[Image: The chord editor for a verse section showing the Am–F–C–G–Am example from the text. Each chord block a different width reflecting its duration; the half-bar C and G blocks are visibly narrower than the full-bar Am and F blocks.]**

Each song section gets its own pattern placed on the timeline. For the verse:

1. Create a new GuitarSectionPattern for the verse.
2. Open its chord editor and add one ChordEvent per chord change:
   • Set the chord symbol (root + quality, e.g. A minor).
   • Set the start tick (where the chord change happens in the bar).
   • Set the duration in ticks (how long it lasts before the next chord).
3. Place the section pattern on the guitar track's timeline at the point where the verse begins.

A typical 4-bar verse in 4/4 at 480 PPQ (one bar = 1920 ticks) might look like:

Am  — start: 0,    duration: 1920   (bar 1)
F   — start: 1920, duration: 1920   (bar 2)
C   — start: 3840, duration: 960    (first half of bar 3)
G   — start: 4800, duration: 960    (second half of bar 3)
Am  — start: 5760, duration: 1920   (bar 4)

The rhythm pattern you set in step 2 loops over each of these chords automatically. You don't need to repeat it — just add the chord changes.

Step 4 — Build the chorus chord progression

Repeat step 3 for the chorus. Create a new GuitarSectionPattern, add its chord events, and place it at the chorus position on the timeline.

By default the chorus uses the same rhythm pattern as the verse. If the chorus naturally calls for a more driving feel, you have two options:

• Per-section override — set a strum pattern override on the chorus section with denser hits and higher velocities. This only affects the chorus; the verse keeps the track-level pattern.
• Track-level change — edit the track-level pattern for a denser rhythm. This affects all sections that don't have an override.

Step 5 — Preview with the fretboard view

**[Image: The full guitar section editor during playback — the chord strip at the top showing the playhead moving through chord blocks, the pattern editor in the middle, and the fretboard view at the bottom with strings lit up mid-strum. All three panels visible together to show how they relate at runtime.]**

Hit play and watch the fretboard view. It shows which strings are active and how brightly they are resonating. This helps you spot problems:

• A string that never lights up may be muted (×) because the voicing style couldn't place that chord note on an available string. Try switching voicing style or adjusting the chord.
• If chords sound thin, check whether the string group mask on some steps is excluding too many strings (e.g. High strings only on every hit will sound bright but thin).
• If the chord doesn't sound like the right inversion or register, try switching between Open and Barre voicing styles to see which position sounds better in your mix.

Step 6 — Repeat for bridge, pre-chorus, outro

Each section is an independent GuitarSectionPattern with its own chord list. You can have as many sections as the song needs. Place them on the timeline to form the arrangement.

If a section is a repeated variation of another (e.g. the second verse has the same chords as the first), you can clone the section pattern and modify just the chord events that differ rather than starting from scratch.

Common adjustments after the first listen

Reference: key settings at a glance

VST guitars: articulation mappings

When you assign a VST guitar to a track, the track-level settings above still apply (voicing, strum speed, technique, hold) — but the plugin itself decides how to switch articulations (sustain vs. palm mute vs. slap vs. slide). Plugins vary in how they do this:

• Keyswitch-based (Ample Sound, many Kontakt libraries) — the plugin listens for dedicated MIDI notes to switch articulation.
• CC-based (Spitfire Session Guitarist, NI Session Guitarist) — the plugin listens for a specific CC number + value.
• Program-change (rare) — the plugin listens for program-change messages.

Kiwisonic auto-populates the mapping from the shared catalog whenever one is available for your plugin (and, for instrument packs like Kontakt or Session Guitarist, for the specific instrument loaded inside the plugin). You don't normally need to touch anything.

When you need to configure it yourself

If the catalog doesn't have your plugin, or the shipped mapping is wrong:

1. Keyswitch-based plugins: open the instrument button menu on the track → "Keyswitch Mappings" → enable each articulation and pick the right MIDI note. The plugin's manual lists which notes switch each articulation.
2. CC-based or program-change plugins: the dialog above is keyswitch-only. Drop a JSON file into %LocalAppData%/Kiwisonic/articulation-maps/. The file format is documented in docs/catalog/articulation-maps.md — the simplest way to start is to copy a similar catalog entry as a template and edit it.

The articulation rows in the keyswitch dialog are driven by the Articulation enum in the sequencer, so new articulations added in future releases automatically get their own row — no app update needed.

Instrument packs (Kontakt, Session Guitarist, etc.)

Mappings for these plugins are per-instrument, not per-plugin. When you switch presets inside the plugin (say, from "Strummed Acoustic" to "Electric Mint" inside Session Guitarist), Kiwisonic asks the plugin which instrument is loaded and picks the matching mapping from the catalog. Plugins that hide their program name from the host (Kontakt and a few others) fall back to the plugin-level default mapping.