Guitar editor

A guitar track is not a piano roll. You write chord symbols and a strumming rhythm, and the engine works out which notes each string plays and how the pick sweeps across them.

Why a guitar needs its own editor

A guitar has six strings, each tuned to a different pitch. To play a chord, a player presses several strings against the neck and sweeps a pick across them. That sweep is a strum, and because the pick crosses the strings one at a time, the notes of a chord arrive slightly spread out rather than together. That spread is what gives guitar chords their rolling feel, and it is why a guitar chord does not sound like the same chord on a piano.

All of that is simulated for you. You say which chords to play and what the rhythm should feel like.

The two things you edit

The chord progression is what harmony plays and when it changes. You place chord symbols on a timeline, and the engine decides which notes each string plays.

The rhythm pattern is how those chords are played in time. It is a sixteen-step grid, one bar, saying which steps fire, whether the sweep goes down or up, how hard each hit is, and which hits are muted.

Keeping them separate is the point: you can change the chords without touching the rhythm, and swap a strum for a fingerpick without rewriting the progression.

The section timeline

The section sits on one bar ruler, with everything that changes bar by bar stacked under it.

The lanes share one ruler, so a bar's strum always sits directly under the chord playing over it.

Bars keep a readable width rather than being squeezed to fit. A section longer than the panel scrolls sideways: the wheel scrolls, and holding Ctrl while scrolling zooms. On a very long section, where bars get too small to aim at, a click moves the play position instead of editing, so you cannot change a bar you could not see.

Chord length in the toolbar is how long a chord you place lasts. Change it with the + and - keys. A chord is always exactly that long: the space after it stays empty rather than the chord stretching to fill the section.

Below the lanes, Every bar plays is the strum for the whole section. Click a bar in the strumming lane to give that bar its own instead, double-click it to edit its steps one by one, and right-click it to drop it back to the section default.

The rhythm pattern belongs to the track by default, and any section can override it with its own. The chord progression is always per section. During playback the sequencer walks the chords in order and applies the active rhythm, playing the current chord's voicing on each hit. When the chord changes, the rhythm carries on without a break.

Voicing styles

Before anything sounds, the engine has to decide which notes each string plays for a chord: not just "a D minor" but which D minor, in which position on the neck. That is the voicing, and you pick a style per track.

Open uses the natural low-position shapes for the common keys and falls back to the moveable style for less common roots. Choose it when you want the track to sound like an acoustic guitar: warm, resonant, and slightly different for each chord, because each shape sits somewhere else on the neck.

Barre uses one moveable shape that works for any root, pressing all six strings at the same fret. Every chord gets the same full-bodied sound whatever the key. Choose it for an electric rhythm sound, or when a song moves through many chords and you want one texture across all of them.

PowerChord strips the chord to the root, its fifth and the octave, on the three lowest strings only. Major and minor quality is ignored, which is what makes power chords sound neither happy nor sad. Choose it for driving rock or electronic parts on the low strings, especially with a distorted instrument.

A fifth here is the interval seven semitones above the root. Leaving out the third, the note that decides major or minor, is exactly what makes a power chord sound raw and ambiguous.

The chord progression

Each section holds its own list of chord changes. You place a chord at the point where the change happens, and it lasts for the chord length set in the toolbar.

The rhythm pattern loops over each chord for its whole length, then the next chord begins. A chord lasting four bars with a one-bar rhythm gets that rhythm four times before it moves on.

For extended chords, the Open style falls back to the plain triad where no hand-built shape exists. The result still reads correctly in a mix.

The rhythm pattern

Sixteen steps, one bar. Each step either fires or stays silent, and a step that fires plays the current chord's voicing.

Direction is which way the pick sweeps. Down goes from the lowest string to the highest and sounds fuller and heavier, because the bass strings arrive first; it is the common strum. Up goes the other way, sounds lighter, and usually lands on the offbeats to push the rhythm forward. None means the step is silent.

Velocity is how hard the strings are hit. Louder on the downbeats and softer on the offbeats is what gives a pattern a natural accent instead of a uniform one.

String group is which strings take part, because you do not always want all six.

Strum technique is how the strings are struck.

Use Open for most hits, Palm Mute for a tight chug, Mute for pure percussion, Scratch for a dramatic accent, and Slap for the thumb hit that ends many acoustic patterns.

Slap depends on the instrument. Sampled guitars with a slap sample play it, and those without one fall back to a hard palm mute. VST guitars use the plugin's slap articulation when the catalog has it mapped, described below. The bundled guitars have no slap sample and play a hard palm mute.

Sustain mode is separate from technique. A step set to Hold ignores the rest of the bar's steps and rings through the chord change. Because it is separate, a muted hold is a real combination: a chord struck muted and then allowed to ring. Use it on the last chord of a phrase you want to breathe.

Strum speed is how quickly the pick crosses the strings on that step. At its lowest, every string sounds at once, tight and precise. In the middle it is a natural sweep. At its highest the strings roll one by one, close to an arpeggio.

The sweep

A real strum is not instantaneous, and each string sounds slightly after the one before it as the pick crosses. The track-level strum fan-out sets the base spread and each step's strum speed scales it. Velocity also tapers a little across the sweep, matching the pick losing energy as it travels.

Rhythm presets

Five ready-made patterns sit in the preset strip at the bottom of the pattern editor. Loading one replaces the whole pattern, and you adjust from there.

Rockabilly Boom-Chicka is the country and rockabilly two-feel: a heavy full strum on beats 1 and 3, answered by a lighter up-sweep on the high strings on beats 2 and 4. Good for folk, country, and anything that wants a light groove instead of a wall of chords.

Folk Fingerpick plucks individual strings instead of strumming. The lowest string falls on the main beats like a left-hand bass, while the middle and high strings fill the gaps. Use it for ballads and intimate acoustic parts.

Eurodance Power-Chord 8ths hits all eight eighth-note positions on the low strings, accented on beats 1 and 3. Pair it with the PowerChord voicing. The constant pulse works as the backbone of dance and synth-rock.

Simple Four-on-Floor is one full strum per beat and nothing else. Use it to test a new progression, or when the guitar should stay out of the way.

Blank is sixteen silent steps, for building from scratch.

Using the pattern editor

The editor has three rows and a preset strip. The direction row sets which steps fire and which way they sweep, the velocity row sets how hard, and the technique row sets how the strings are struck.

Click in the direction row to cycle a step through down, up and silent. Drag in the velocity row to set the level, and only steps that are on show a bar. Click a cell in the technique row to cycle through the techniques. Direction and velocity still apply on top of whichever technique you pick.

Vertical lines mark every fourth step, so the downbeats are easy to find.

Changing the pattern here affects every section without an override.

Per-section and per-bar rhythm overrides

Sometimes the verse wants a quiet fingerpick and the chorus wants a driving strum, on the same track. Any section can carry its own strum pattern, which replaces the track-level one while that section plays. Sections without one carry on using the track default. A single bar can override the section in the same way, from the strumming lane.

That is why a second guitar track is rarely the answer to a rhythm change.

Fills

A section can have a fill: a short alternate pattern that plays on one bar, usually the last, for a transition into what comes next. The fill replaces the groove for that bar, and then the groove resumes or the section ends.

The wah

The wah is a per-track effect modelled on a classic envelope-driven pedal, a bandpass filter whose centre frequency sweeps up and down. It is free-running: while it is on, the filter keeps moving whether or not you are playing, the way a player rocking a pedal keeps it moving through the rests.

Enable switches it on. Preset picks a character, Boomerang, Funky, Subtle or Cry Baby, each setting the rate, depth and mix. Rate is how fast the filter sweeps, from slow vowel-like movement up to a fast tremolo wah. Depth is how wide the sweep is, from a slight colour to dramatic vowel swings. Mix balances it against the dry signal.

Always on, or triggered

The Wah Triggers chips next to the effect card decide when the wah acts.

With no chips selected the wah is permanently in the chain at the preset's mix, which is the closest to leaving a real pedal switched on. With one or more selected, the wet mix dips in and out at strum-step boundaries, so the wah only colours the hits you choose. The mix moves quickly enough that it sounds like a player engaging the pedal mid-bar.

The chips are Open for open strums, Muted for palm mute, mute and scratch together, Held for any step set to hold whatever its technique, and Slap for slap strums. They combine: Open and Held gives a quacky open strum and a long sustained chord while the muted chops stay dry.

The sweep does not reset when the wah engages on a held step. At slow rates that sounds natural; at fast rates the held note gets whatever part of the sweep happened to be passing. For a predictable swell on every hold, slow the rate down or leave the wah always on.

Drawing an automation lane on the wah's mix for a section makes the chips stand aside for that section, and your curve takes over. That is how you get a long sweep across a whole verse that has nothing to do with the strum pattern.

The fretboard view

The fretboard view shows a simplified neck. You do not need to read guitar positions to use it: it is there to check that the voicing makes sense and to watch the strum during playback.

The neck runs horizontally, with the lowest-pitched string at the bottom. The thick bar at the left is the nut, where the strings begin, and the thin vertical lines are frets, each raising the pitch by one semitone.

Stopped, it shows the first chord's voicing at full brightness, with a dot on each pressed fret. Playing, the dots light as their string is struck and fade over about a beat, so you see the sweep travel rather than the chord appearing at once.

Note-by-note guitar parts

There is a second way to get a guitar sound. Instead of chord symbols, draw individual notes into a normal piano-roll pattern and set the track's articulation to the guitar profile. Those notes then run through the same physics: each is assigned to a string, chords spread across time like a real strum, and palm muting applies as set.

Use it when you want a specific riff or melody note by note, when you have a melodic pattern you want re-voiced through guitar physics, or when you need control that chord symbols cannot express.

The setting to know about is the maximum fret span. A player can only stretch across about four frets at once, so notes too far apart to reach are dropped. If you hear fewer notes than you wrote, that is usually why: bring them into a narrower pitch range.

Two tunings are built in, standard and drop D, and you can define your own.

VST guitars and articulations

With a VST guitar, the track settings above still apply, but the plugin decides how it switches between sustain, palm mute, slap and slide. Plugins do that in different ways: some listen for dedicated MIDI notes, some for a control-change message, and a few for program changes.

The mapping is filled in from the shared catalog whenever one exists for your plugin, and for instrument packs, for the specific instrument loaded inside it. Normally there is nothing to do.

If the catalog has no entry for your plugin, or the mapping is wrong, open the instrument button menu on the track and choose Keyswitch Mappings for a plugin that switches on MIDI notes. Enable each articulation and pick the note its manual lists.

For plugins that switch on control-change or program-change messages, the dialog does not apply. Those are configured with a file in the articulation maps folder under your local application data, and copying a similar catalog entry as a template is the quickest way to start.

Mappings for instrument packs are per instrument rather than per plugin. When you switch presets inside the plugin, the loaded instrument is queried and the matching mapping is picked. Plugins that hide their program name from the host fall back to the plugin's default mapping.

Getting the most from it

To build a guitar part from scratch, see writing a guitar part.