Pluck control
Between drills, your hands can stay on the guitar. Pluck one string and the app presses a button for you. The buttons still work by touch, as always.
What the note badges mean
A button you can press with a pluck carries a note badge, ♪D or ♪E.
- ♪D goes on. Pluck the open 4th string to press Start Drill before a drill, or Next after one.
- ♪E goes again. Pluck the open 6th string to press Drill again after a drill, or Loop again after a loop.
- Before a chord drill, ♪E presses Hear and plays the pair, so you can listen and then start. That badge shows only on headphones or a line-in cable. On speakers the pair’s sound would reach the mic.
Any D or E works, open or fretted, in any octave, so a capo is fine too.
The short wait
A badge doesn’t work the moment a screen appears. The app first waits for 1.5 seconds of quiet, so a note you were still playing doesn’t press anything. While it waits, the badge’s outline draws itself round. When the badge fills in, a pluck will press it.
Any sound starts the wait over, the app’s own sound included. So does coming back to the app after switching away.
Let the note ring
Pluck once and let it ring. The badge’s letter fills up, and when it’s full the button presses and a chime plays. To call it off, mute the string or play another note before the letter is full. The screen then waits for quiet again.
If a pluck starts a drill you didn’t mean to start, tap Stop during the count-in. You’re back on the screen before the drill.
Pause it while you try a pattern
Before a drill you may want to try the pattern on the guitar first. A D in it, left ringing, would start the drill. To stop that, tap the ♪D badge on Start Drill, or the ♪E badge on Hear. Both badges go dim with a line across them, and no pluck presses anything. The buttons still work by touch.
Tap the badge again to turn plucks back on. The outline draws round again, and the badges work once it’s quiet.
The pause lasts until you leave the drill. If you stop a drill during the count-in, you come back still paused. A new drill starts with pluck control on. You can pause only on the screen before a drill, not on the one after.
A screen reader calls the badge “Pause pluck control”, and “Turn pluck control back on” while paused.
Turning it off
In Settings, under Mic & scoring, switch off “Start and repeat drills by plucking a string”. The badges go away and every button works by touch only.
Some mics can’t tell a soft pluck from their own noise. If calibration found that about yours, pluck control starts off, and Settings says why. You can turn it on anyway, but a pluck may be missed or misheard. If you change mics, recalibrate and the app checks again.