There seems to be small anomaly here with the way BB treats the instruction in the 'Song Settings' window.

Take the case of a typical 32 bar tune in Bb that has the last note of the melody and the root chord occurring on bar 30. I would normally check two boxes:

'Generate 2 bar Ending for this song'
'Start the ending 2 bars early'

This has the effect in the last chorus of jumping from bar 30 to bars 33 and 34, which are marked 'end'

I would expect the chord selected for this 'end' at 33 to be Bb. But my BB selects the chord from bar 30 which normally is not the root chord - often it is a ‘V’ chord, such as F9. This creates a very discordant ending. So for years I have been manually putting in a ‘I’ chord.

Surely BB should pick the correct finishing chord and tell me what chords it is using for the two bar ending, if they are any more complicated than just the root chord?

BTW, I am using 2008.5. I have 2009 but have not installed it yet due to some hardware changes I am making.

Gees, maybe my method of asking questions is too complicated. Let me put it another way:

If I generate a '2 bar ending, start the ending 2 bars early', what chords should BB use for the ending?

I thnk the answer would be, "whatever chords you type in."

And i think that you are confusing the standard 2 bar ending command as being the same as the command to end 2 bars early. It isn't.

Can't figure why you wouldn't simply just set the number of choruses to two bars less, but still, if you want to do it that way, how much extra work is it to type in two bars of chords? Likely you only have to type one chord in the first bar anyway.


--Mac

I don't think I am confusing the two instructions. I am ticking both. I want BB to construct a two bar ending and I want that ending to start two bars early. And that is indeed what BB does. Except that nowadays it often picks up the wrong chord and then the ending sounds very peculiar. Yes, it is easy to overtype the chords and that is what I have been doing, but I am pretty sure it is only recently that BB has been selecting the wrong chord for the ending.

Also Mac, are you saying that all the two bar endings are based on a single chord? They sometimes sound a bit more complex than that.

I am also familiar with the alternative instruction of Tag Exists?

I should explain that I can't think of any occasion when I would wish to add a two bar ending onto a 32 bar sequence. The ending always occurs within the 32 bar sequence in all the jazz bands that I play with – unless there is a 4-bar or longer tag. Thus, if you don’t start 2 bars early you tend to run into the turnaround.

I confess that I greatly prefer the use of the TAG ending for replacing the turnaround at the end of a 32 bar with an ending.

Because I can get my feeble brain around it and make it work.



--Mac