Picking Fingers: Play It One Way, Print It the Other
Every bassist knows the moment: the take is perfect and the feel is wrong. You tracked it fingerstyle and the song grew teeth overnight, or you cut it with a pick and the mix now wants warmth. The part is right, the attack is not, and nobody re-cuts a perfect take on purpose. Picking Fingers is a free plugin for exactly that moment: it voices a bass signal played one way to sound like it was played the other. Fingers in, pick out — or pick in, fingers out.
Measured, not guessed
This is the part we are proudest of, and deliberately vaguest about. Picking Fingers is not a "roll some treble off and hope" EQ curve. To find out what actually separates a picked note from a fingered one, we measured it — properly, and then well past the point of reason. Multiple bassists. Multiple basses. Multiple pick types, from flappy jazz thins to picks that qualify as building material. Amps, inputs, preamps, takes: the same parts, played both ways, again and again, until the difference stopped being an opinion.
The same parts, played both ways, by more hands than we will admit — until the difference became a filter.
What fell out the far end is a set of precision minimum-phase voicing filters: the real, repeatable difference between the two ways of hitting a string, level-matched through the low end so switching voice changes the character of the note — never the weight under it.
The feel comes with the tone
The frequency curve turned out to be only half the story. Pick treble rings on through the note; fingers put their brightness into the attack thump, then get out of the way. So alongside VOICE there is ATTACK, which applies that measured per-note character, and BITE, which adds a gritty chunk to the front of each note only — sustains stay clean. A ±6 dB TONE tilt (a true bypass at flat) and standard IN/OUT trims round it out. Zero latency, mono or stereo, safe for tracking — play through it and commit on the way in if you are brave.
Free, everywhere
VST3, AU and LV2 on macOS, Windows and Linux, with PACE-signed AAX for Pro Tools in the macOS installer. Free for any use, commercial productions included — no account, no dongle. Grab it on the plugin page, where the download always points at the newest build. If it saves a take, there is a tip jar; if it breaks one, tell us.