Effects and articulations

Guitar and bass articulations carry as much of the performance as the pitches do. alphaTab reads each articulation from the source file and renders it with the notation convention its instrument expects.

Bends and whammy

String bends — the trademark expressive move of blues and rock lead guitar — render as curved arrows above the tab and standard notation, annotated with the target pitch or interval. Whammy-bar dips (the bar-pushed pitch waver on tremolo-arm guitars) draw as a bar-level effect band with the pitch envelope over time.

Vibrato

Vibrato — the finger-driven pitch waver that sustains a note — renders as a wavy line above the affected notes. alphaTab draws a thin line for note vibrato and a thick line for beat-wide "wide" vibrato, so a reader can distinguish a subtle sustain shake from the exaggerated one common on lead solos.

Palm mute and let ring

Palm mute (P.M.) — the muted-percussive strum common in metal riffs, punk, and funk — and let ring (L.R.) — the sustain instruction that keeps preceding notes ringing under new ones — render as bracketed labels above the affected beats, showing exactly where each technique starts and stops.

Taps, slaps, and pops

Bass slap technique drives funk and slap-metal grooves: thumb slaps (S), string pops (P), and left-hand taps (T) render as letter markers above the notes. Two-handed tapping — the shred technique popularised by Van Halen — shares the same T notation.

Dead slap

A dead slap is a percussive strike across all strings with the fretting hand muted, often used on flamenco and funk rhythm guitar. alphaTab draws it as a stack of dead-note heads (x) on every string.

Tremolo picking

Tremolo picking — rapid repetition of a single note, common on surf-rock leads and Iberian classical guitar — renders as slashes through the stem, matching the engraving convention of the standard notation staff.

Slides, hammer-ons, and pull-offs

Slides move the fretting finger to a new position while the note rings; hammer-ons and pull-offs sound a new pitch from the fretting hand alone. alphaTab draws slide-in, slide-out, legato, and shift slides as slanted lines between fret positions, and hammer-ons and pull-offs as curved slurs joining the linked notes.

Labels and slurs on chords (new in 1.9)

alphaTab labels hammer-ons and pull-offs with H and P and legato slides with sl. (available since 1.8.3). A chain such as 5.3{h} 7.3{h} 5.3 gets an H on the way up and a P on the way down. Since 1.9.0 the labels are drawn above the staff as their own annotation row on standard notation, tablature and numbered notation:

• One label per beat for all notes of a chord, centered on the slur segment.
• Different labels on one beat stack, like sl. above H on the last beat of the second bar below.
• A segment that crosses a bar line gets its label centered across the bar line. A segment that crosses a system break is labeled on the first system only.
• Regular slurs carry no labels.

Slurs between chords follow Behind Bars and Guitar Pro. On standard notation all notes on one stem take a single slur outside the chord that joins the outer noteheads; in bars with several voices the slur goes to the stem end of its voice. On tablature each beat gets at most one arc above the upper strings and one below the lower strings.

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\track { defaultSystemsLayout 2 }
\staff {score tabs}
:4 r r 5.3{h} 7.3{h} | 5.3 r r (5.1{h} 5.2{sl}) | (7.1 9.2) r (5.1{h} 3.5{h}) (7.1 5.5) | r.1

The labels belong to the notation elements EffectHammerOnPullOffText and EffectSlideText. Both are visible by default; turn them off through notation.elements as shown in Show it in code. Their font comes from display.resources.elementFonts for the same keys. The labels take part in the effect placement and keep their whole slur segment clear of noteheads and fret numbers.

Trills

Trills — the fast alternation between the written note and the pitch above it, a staple ornament from Baroque violin to modern lead guitar — render with a tr glyph above the notation staff and a wavy line indicating the duration.

Pick strokes

Downstroke (⊓) and upstroke (V) pick-direction markers tell a reader which way to strum each beat, useful for teaching charts where alternate picking or a strict downstroke pattern is the point.

Fade-in and volume swells

Fade-in and volume-swell markers — the volume-pedal or pinkie-wheel swell used on ambient guitar leads — render as text annotations paired with hairpins over the affected beats.

Show it in code

Every articulation above is on by default. To hide one category — for example, palm-mute brackets or hammer-on and slide labels in a printout — flip its notation.elements entry:

import * as alphaTab from '@coderline/alphatab';

const container = getAlphaTabContainer();
const api = new alphaTab.AlphaTabApi(container, {
  core: { file: '/scores/song.gp' },
  notation: {
    elements: new Map([
      [alphaTab.NotationElement.EffectPalmMute, false],
      [alphaTab.NotationElement.EffectLetRing, false],
      [alphaTab.NotationElement.EffectHammerOnPullOffText, false],
      [alphaTab.NotationElement.EffectSlideText, false],
    ]),
  },
});

getAlphaTabContainer() is a placeholder for the platform-specific render target. See the NotationElement enumeration for every togglable category.

Where to look next

• Toggling notation elements off — hide any effect category globally.
• Effect placement — how these annotations are placed against the notation and which settings control their spacing.
• Special notes — the sibling coverage page for harmonics, ghost notes, and tied notes.
• Grace notes, tuplets, and ornaments — trills, mordents, and turns share the ornament territory with articulations here.
• notation.elements — the full element map.
• notation.notationMode — switch between Guitar Pro and SongBook conventions for how these effects are drawn.
• NotationElement — every togglable element key.