There's no one definitive way to do pickup notes so your question is a bit hard to answer. But I don't think the pickup notes have to precede bar one. It's possible to change the number of bars for one measure, mute instruments leaving one instrument playing the pickup notes and some styles and instruments seem to automatically start a song with pickup notes. Lot's of choices to accomplish the task.

Charlie


BIAB Ultra Pak+ 2024:RB 2024, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.