4. Techniques

Pick direction

Pick direction says whether a note is picked down or up. Write it where the picking matters, for alternate or economy picking, a run of down-strokes on a riff, or a lesson, and it shows in the tab and the score as the usual ⊓ and V.

Pick direction

Available on every platform.

Mark the picking

Select the notes, or put the caret on one, and press Pick Down (D) or Pick Up (U). Pressing the same key again takes the mark off. A note has one direction at a time, so marking it up takes away a down mark, and the other way round.

From the note’s menu (right-click a note), the Pick Direction submenu has None, Down and Up; it sets every selected note at once, as one undo step. It’s there in an Editor pane and the Score, for fretted and keys notes; a drum hit has no pick direction (its hand is its sticking), and on a drum lane D and U don’t mark one.

For fretted notes, the note inspector and the Inspector have a Pick row with the same three choices, None, ⊓ Down and V Up.

The keys work in the Score too, on the notes selected there, while note input is off (in note input, D is a pitch).

How it looks

The Editor writes ⊓ (down) or V (up) just above the note’s fret, with its other marks; Show Articulations hides them all. The Score writes the down-bow and up-bow symbols over the note, as string players read them, and leaves them off a note that’s tied over from the one before.

How it sounds

On Stab Strings, the built-in guitar sound, an up-stroke is a touch lighter and brighter, and a chord picked up sounds from the highest string down.

Where you haven’t marked the picking, Stab Strings plays it for you as alternate picking: down on the eighths, up on the sixteenths between them, so a riff of eighths is all down-strokes. A hammer-on, pull-off or legato slide isn’t picked at all. Other sounds play notes the same whichever way they’re marked.

Pick direction doesn’t spread a chord out; for that, use a strum.

From files

Guitar Pro files bring their pick strokes in as these marks, and Guitar Pro export writes them back. MusicXML export writes them as down-bow and up-bow marks, and Stab reads those back as pick direction.