> i agree that with pick_ori='normal' you discard 2/3 of the data but that's what we do with minimum_norm and I'd like this to be same at least if it's called pick_ori='normal'

OK, I get it, so it might be best to keep consistency with the minimum_norm implementation especially since that's what the user would expect from the same API. OK.

I guess I was mostly concerned with a potential inconsistency with literature for somebody coming from reading e.g. Sekihara and expecting a fixed orientation beamformer to behave in a specific way... but then we're not saying in the API that this will be a scalar beamformer, so no reason to expect that. I still think there might be some benefit to the current implementation (i.e. when normal orientation picking is moved after Ck regularization some parts of the normal component could be discarded... although this would only really happen when there is very little activity in that direction)... but we could leave that for a later discussion if we feel there's any point.

So - I'll move the orientation picking from G to W but before noise normalization, just like in the minimum norm implementation. PR coming soon.