Strumming
Six strings under your thumb
On a pad with a touchpad, the touchpad Touchpad is the strings. Six of them, running vertically, low string at the bottom - the way a guitar hangs when it's facing you. Swipe up and the strum runs low to high; swipe down and it runs high to low.
The armed chord is laid across the six strings in a close, guitar-shaped voicing: the root's register low, the colour above it. Strumming plays the chord the wheel armed - arming chooses what, strumming chooses how.
How it reads your hand
- A swipe strums. Every string your finger crosses plays, in the order it's crossed. Fast swipes don't skip strings.
- A tap plucks. Land on one string and that string alone sounds.
- Speed is loudness. A slow drag whispers, a flick speaks at full voice. The Dynamics setting shapes how much your speed counts.
- Lifting is free. Lifting your finger never stops a note, and putting it back down somewhere else starts fresh - it never plays the strings in between.
What a strum doesn't do
Strumming starts notes; it doesn't own them afterwards. How they ring, fade and stop is the instrument's one set of rules, shared by every way of playing - and a finger moving across the strings instead of along them isn't a strum at all, but shaping.
No touchpad on your pad? The strum stick is the same strings on the right stick, on every controller.