Re-fret
The same note can be played in several places on a guitar. Re-fret chooses a string and a fret for each note you select, so the passage sits under one hand. The pitches don’t change, only where they’re played.
Re-fret: where notes are played
Available on every platform.
Re-fret a passage
- Select the notes: a few, a bar, or the whole song with Select All (⌘A)Select All (Ctrl+A)Select All (Ctrl+A (⌘A on a Mac)).
- Choose Re-fret (⌘R)Re-fret (Ctrl+R)Re-fret (Ctrl+R (⌘R on a Mac)). It’s in the Edit menu or the note’s menu.
Re-fret works on the selection only. Notes you haven’t selected stay where they are, so you can re-fret one awkward run and keep the fingering you chose elsewhere. To re-fret a whole track, select everything in it first.
The whole change is one undo step, named “Re-fret” in the Edit menu, so you can compare and go back with Undo (⌘Z)Undo (Ctrl+Z)Undo (Ctrl+Z (⌘Z on a Mac)).
How it chooses
Re-fret looks at the passage as a player would, from the first note to the last:
- Chords (notes starting together) take one string each.
- The hand’s stretch within a chord and its movement between chords are kept small. A finger reaching one fret past the hand’s four is preferred to moving the hand.
- Lower positions are preferred, more so above the 7th fret, and so are open strings.
It uses the track’s own tuning and capo, and stays within the frets the track can play. Frets are counted from the capo, as they’re written in the tab. Grace notes move with the note they belong to.
Several tracks at once
A selection can hold notes from several tracks. Each track is re-fretted on its own, with its own tuning, and the whole lot is still one undo step. Drum tracks are left alone: a drum lane’s “fret” is a technique, not a place on a neck.
When it can’t
If a pitch is out of the instrument’s range, or a chord has more notes than the track has strings, nothing changes. Transpose the notes, or move them to a track that can hold them, and try again.
Notes out of reach
Dragging a note to another string keeps its pitch, so its fret can end up below 0 or past the last fret. Such a fret shows in red, and a pill after the track’s tag (its name, M and S, over the start of its lane) says how many there are, “2 out”. Click the pill to select them all, then re-fret them.