Hi,
I like to practice and make scratch tracks using a full bass note and a damped chuck on guitar … nothing else fancy. Spent a bit of time looking at the various guitar style options and couldn’t see a way to do this, so I resorted to using a Bass and straight Mando chuck part. Am I missing something, or is this style not currently available? If it’s not, wondering if it’d be an easy add. I find such a style is enormously helpful when practicing 2 against 3 or 3 against 4 patterns, and think a Bass / Guitar pairing might sound a bit less hokey.
Thanks.
—b
I believe the “Bass note, dampened strum” pattern is what you’re looking for:
If not, I must be misunderstanding your request so please clarify or give me an example. Thanks!
Yes, that is what I’m looking for. Only thing I’m not thrilled with is that there’s some extra “triplet” stuff thrown in on the strum sometimes, esp right before a chord change. That’s “too fancy.” Here’s the example where I was practicing a simple 3 against 4 rhythm and it got in the way: Strum Machine
If you set “Upstroke Swing” to “Straight” then will hopefully not clash as much — upstrokes will be eighth notes instead of triplets. But also I’m going to be adding the ability to remove those embellishments entirely (or hear more of them if so desired).
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I would be delighted if there was a remove option. Even w/no swing, they’re still there and they are annoying in the wrong context.
In playing around with this stuff, I found another request that might be useful. It’s common in the contra world to go from a jig to a reel in a medley, but there’s no jig boom-damped-chuck guitar style to match what you’ve mentioned, and that I’m now using, in the reel. The transition is jarring, so for now, I’m going back to the bass and mandolin (muted guitar) backup option, as it behaves with the right character for this circumstance.
Aside: If there was a way to keep the global mixing panel open all the time in a side window, it would make it easier for me to experiment in the future. Or maybe there’s easier ways to mess around w muting the various parts in various songs in a medley that I don’t know about. Pointers very welcome.
Thanks!
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I’ve been wondering about these “extra fill-ins” as well. For me most times they are actually really and surprisingly nice! But seems like you can’t always rely on where they will be, and they can clash somewhat with the melody line.
Are they actually sort of random? I played the above with the patterns you advised and it didn’t play both separate but equal b parts the same way and sometimes it changed with the speed setting.as well… Bit hard to pin down though 
I just added the ability to adjust the probability of hearing one of these more-or-less random upstroke fills to the alpha version. More customization options will be added in the future, but at least now there’s an easy way to remove them entirely if so desired… or at least I hope it’s easy – that’s why I’m doing usability testing!
I also hope to make them a bit smarter and more “tasteful” in the future… hard to do with Strum Machine doesn’t know the medley line, but for standard 8/16/32 bar forms, it’s usually easy to guess where the fills should go.
Re: dampened strum for jigs. So would that be a “boom” on beats 1 and 4, and a dampened “chuck” on beats 3 and 6? I haven’t heard that strum pattern being used “in the wild” which is why I never thought to add it, but I suppose I could…
No way to keep the global mixing panel open, but I’ll put that under consideration as well. I think you’re aware that you can change the band for each song in a medley separately, and I think you’re talking about mid-song band changes, which is something I’ll be adding in the future. Correct me if I’m wrong though. 
To answer your question, when the Celtic jig style doesn’t float my boat, here’s what I’ve been using to practice jigs at present. It would be nice to have something similar to this for jig guitar, so that when creating medleys from jigs to reels, I can use guitar only backup for both. While fancier backups can be nice, sometimes simple boom chuck – esp when using SM as a metronome – is valuable, creating more space to hear the melody instrument.
Sorry for my late reaction, covid decided to visit…
The option to control that randomability a bit sounds great to me, though, as I said, a lot of times I actually really like it!
I’ll just wait for it to find its way into beta
