Hi All,

I was wondering if it was possible to playback a song in the middle eastern scale. This is a key feature for me.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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.>>>>>Hi All, I was wondering if it was possible to playback a song in the middle eastern scale.>>>>>

BiaB has a style that might work. Open the styles window and find the style called "ZZETHNIC." Click on "Load Style Demo" near the top right. A song will play. If this sounds like the "Middle Eastern Scale" you are asking about, great. If not we need to look into whether the sound you are thinking about comes from the major-minor system, modal patterns, or microtones.

First of all, BiaB can play back melodies in all kinds of scales. You can enter any notes you want in the melody track and those notes can belong to any scale you want.

Chords are a different story. BiaB conforms to the traditional Western conception of major and minor modes. Many "Middle Eastern" songs fit into these modes just fine. Other Eastern songs don't follow the Western modal patterns, but you can still enter any chord you want and it will sound OK. Some styles can do a pretty believable job with major and pentatonic harmonies using the "X2" and the "X5" chord spellings that BiaB can do.

Other "Middle Eastern" scales use what Western musicians call microtones. These are notes that come in at different frequencies from those upon which Western scales are built. BiaB is neither here nor there when it comes to microtones. Actually, BiaB doesn't care about tuning at all. The information it puts out are numbers. Each number can trigger a note from your sound source. If your sequencer sends numbers "60, 62, 63" to my synthesizer it will sound like the "do-re-mi" sequence familiar in the West. If you send the same numbers to a synthesizer that assigns different pitches to these same numbers, you will get the different pitches that that synthesizer knows about. Roland and others make synths that will deliver what we would call non-standard pitches or microtones.

So it would help, for a start, if you could specify exactly which "middle eastern" scale you want to work in.

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I think this thread would get more responses if it were moved to the main "Band-in-a-Box" forum.
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Thanks much for the information. Yes, I am planning to use a persian sacle ( with microtones) in BiaB. I also posted this on Band-In-A-Box forum. Would be great if you could reply there.