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I just got off the phone with BIAB tech and learned much to my disappointment that BIAB doesn't do voicings.

So I am here asking you folks if there is any work-around for this?

The song is the jazz standard 'Mercy Mercy Mercy'.

Chords in question are:

/(A7) (D/A) /(A7) (D/A) /

The voicing comes out OK for the first A7 but not the second.
Here's what I would like, notes are from top to bottom:
5,3,7--3,1,5--7,5,1--3,1,5

Can anything be done in BIAB to accomplish this?

In RealTracks, maybe not, but read on. In MIDI, yes, of course: copy the track to the Melody or Soloist and change to whatever voicings you want. Or change notes in any other track if you remember to freeze the track.

PG Music Support is correct if they said you cannot alter specific voicings in a RealTrack. The nature of RealTracks as prerecorded audio snippets makes the request impossible, with the exception that you can alter the root using the slash root, as you already know.

However - with RealTracks, you could regenerate the song many times and hope that you hit upon the right voicings, then freeze the track. In RealBand, it is possible to regenerate a section of a song, so this process would take a lot less time.

Finally, worst case, in RealBand or another DAW, you could copy the section with the voicings you like to the place where the voicings are not what you wanted.

Thanks Matt. They are all good suggestions.
In this case because the quality of audio isn't that important, midi might fit the bill.

I'll just have to figure out exactly how to do it, as I haven't messed with it before in BIAB.

I LOVE the MIDI editing in BIAB. So easy. In fact, I use BIAB for data entry of MIDI no matter where the song will wind up: DAW, notation program - whatever.

Good to know that midi editing is easy in BIAB. I used to use a program called noteflight. There is a free and paid version. I used it to enter songs note by note from quality songbooks and then used them as midi backings. I just couldn't justify the annual fee $50 US once I started using real tracks. The free version is fine for what your trying to do and then export it - presumably into BIAB or Realband.

Lambada (great name!), let me elaborate. Entering and editing MIDI in BIAB is so easy that I prefer it to the many music notation programs I have used over the decades (I was even a beta tester for a decade for one of them). This is even to the point that I will often take a MIDI file from a notation program and put it into BIAB, edit it, then take it back out! One time, I converted a song to double time using BIAB's edit menu where you can reduce or expand durations. Try THAT in a notation program. Saved the session.

Could you store patch change information in BIAB easily? Just wondering. ho hum.

You can save song with Patches - File drop-down menu:

We must be using two different versions of BIAB Matt.

Yesterday I figured out how to do some basic midi note inputting (Notation editing mode).

Maybe someone can tell me how to delete a bunch of selected notes?

I tried hitting 'delete' but nothing happened.
I had to resort to deleting one note at a time, which of course was very tedious.

I just had a chat session with a PGMusic tech guy and he said you do these things in Piano Roll mode!

Well, if you're me or like most folks who don't play the piano but read music, editing in Piano Roll mode is the most unintuitive way to edit music!

BIABGuy -

If you are using the staff roll notation editing feature (which shows notes, versus the piano roll which shows bar lines representing the notes), to delete notes, just hold down the delete key and while still holding it down, click on the notes you want to delete.

Don't think you can highlight a bunch of notes and do it that way (like you can in piano roll), but the method above is pretty quick.

Thanks John for that. It certainly is helpful!
I even discovered that I can do the same in Editable Notation Mode.

I hope in future versions they will allow for selecting multiple notes and deleting them in one shot.

Sorry - I guess I just don't write that much I have to delete (grin).

There is the existing menu function Edit, Erase From..To but this only works on entire measures. If you want to be able to erase selected notes, that is a good Wishlist item. I'm heading there to enter it now.

patch change info for external devices?

Thanks Matt!
In my first foray into Notation Editing this was what I tried instinctively, almost right away (Select/Delete).
I hope it won't be too hard to implement.

Funny I was about to post about the same thing. And then I got to thinking I should start a new thread and call it something like "The ultimate notation and printing thread". Sounds a little presumptuous though. However I think my point is a good one. There are so many things that the notation and print functions can do but menus are hidden and the whole process is very confusing.

My mind is on this because I spent several hours yesterday creating and editing the notation of a Biab song. Usually I'm under the gun and need a chart that same day for a band and get jammed up. This time I decided to just do it with no pressure and discovered lots of interesting stuff not the least of which is this delete question. Without elaborating right now here's my list of things to talk about:

Notation:

1. Big difference between starting from scratch and editing a melody part that's already there which is what I was doing.

2. Having to be very exact with mouse placement.

3. Making a tie going from one bar to the next. Like a held note on the "and after 4" in bar 4 carrying forward to the first two beats of bar 5 then...

4. Trying to scroll from the end of the window at bar 4 for example to bar 5 if there's a held note there.

5. How copy and paste works in the notation window.

Next is the difference between using the notation function for edits and the piano roll window. First, to answer the question above, the term "piano roll" has nothing to do with playing a keyboard, it's simply a cute descriptor based on how the midi notes look on the screen. It resembles an early 1900's player piano paper roll that was one the earliest type of musical recordings.

It's true for large cut, paste and deletes this is the better place to do it not notation. Also, another thing I didn't "discover" right away is holding down the shift key and clicking on the piano roll icon. That turns it into a dockable window that allows you to drag the edges to make it big enough to work with. If you don't do that it's locked into the space used for the chord grid which is where I was and it's very difficult to do edits in that small space. I think the floating window should be the default and it should automatically open to say two thirds of the screen size, forget about having to hold down the shift key.

The next part of my thinking about a new thread is the related print functions and I think I'll stop here but I've found some interesting things there too.

What do you guys think, should I start a new thread strictly for notation and printing topics only and maybe ask Peter to pin it?

Bob

Well not quite.
That graphic you see in 'piano roll' looks a heck of a lot more like a piano than staff paper!
And if you aren't all that familiar with the notes on a piano, then reading notes on that screen can be a real pain!



I'm OK with either way, probably a new thread would be better.

BiaB, I think you didn't understand Bob's reply
The graphic in Piano Roll is not meant to look like Staff paper, and it's not meant to look like a piano either.

It's meant to look like a Pianola Paper Roll , like bob mentioned "a player piano paper roll that was one the earliest type of musical recordings"

At the left is a vertical piano keyboard, that shows the notes in the piano-roll view

VT I understood what Bob meant perfectly.

Whether the piano roll used by BIAB is meant to look like staff paper or not is not the question.

The FACT is that the piano roll used in BIAB looks a heck of a lot more like a piano than staff paper, intended or not.

And the only way someone is going to be able to edit in that mode is if they know the notes of the piano!

BIABguy, yes you're correct. The notation mode uses the staff view while the piano roll uses a keyboard view. If you're more familiar with staff than a piano keyboard you can do what you want in notation it's just that some things are easier in the piano roll but it's not exclusive, the notation will do what you want.

If you can learn what the 12 notes look like on a keyboard, things might be easier because the piano roll is a very nice edit window.

To switch gears a little bit, in this thread I'm trying to keep this subject strictly Biab but actually all this is much easier in Real Band. For example in my detailed example above if I had opened that tune in RB I could have entered just one verse and one bridge then in the Bars window I can re-arrange the whole song if I wanted to. You can also highlight the midi events right in RB's track view and copy and paste all you want, very easy. Can't do that in Biab. But since so many people only use Biab and never seem to even look at RB I decided after all these years to try this strictly in Biab just so I can answer questions about it.

Usually I would answer questions of this type by saying forget Biab, move it to RB but that's not really answering the questions. So, I did it in Biab but it wasn't easy. I could have had this whole thing done in 30 minutes in RB instead of the couple of hours futzing in Biab.

Bob

I did get off topic from your original question. Lets talk about Mercy, Mercy. I've done that tune since it was a hit. This is a perfect example of how Biab is not good for creating exact covers of one particular tune. It's an auto-accompaniment program designed to create backing tracks for you to play or sing with. The term "backing tracks" means just that, it does not create exact parts taken from one song. However...

Biab has many cool things but they require some musical knowledge from you. One is Acidized loops. Lots of popular songs have repeating phrases. Those are perfect for loops. Check out the Using Loops video.

Another thing was mentioned above, creating your own midi part and then freezing the track. That's how you would do that piano rhythm in Mercy for example and that specific bass part too. If you can't play the part yourself and you can't read the piano notes that would be difficult but all's not lost. You can probably find a midi file of that tune somewhere on internet and use that. I do that that all the time but in RB not Biab.

In RB you simply open the midi file, you see all the parts right in front of you with all the tracks right there. Mute what you don't need and keep the parts you do. You can then add Real Instruments where they fit.

Another thing. Again, using RB you can really cheat and use an actual audio recording of the song and sample parts of it to create a loop. Say you find a 2 or 4 bar section of a nice rhythmic vamp that is what you're looking for. Cut that 4 bars from the audio track, paste it into it's own separate track and build the song from that. There are many ways to do this.

Of course what we all want is for Biab to be able to read our minds, understand that we want a killer cover of whatever tune it is and produce it perfectly. Alas, there's all kinds of technical issues (not to mention legal issues) involved with that...

Bob