I am working on something that I want the music to come in on bar 9. I enter nothing in the chord chart for measures 1 thru 8. When I generate I get the default chord for those 8 bars.

I can just erase it, right?

Wrong. When I did that, the chord chart changed. So I put those empty bars back in and now I have 8 EXTRA blank bars in my chord chart. Yet the music is still playing from bar 9. And it is one measure off to boot. Like when the black bar is on bar 10 it is playing bar 12.

I saved it all to wav files and as an MP3 but now I can't generate any new parts because the chord chart is way off and it will generate in correlation to what the chord chart says.

Do I have to start over by entering data into the chord chart AGAIN? This will make the 5th time. All to do a 3:34 long song. 84 bars.

I can't quite tell where you are now, but what I would have done is enter C. as the first chord. It would give me measures of silence until bar 9.

I now know that for next time!! Thank you Matt.

I ended up going into the song and saving as wav files, then opening a blank song, i imported those wav files in and at least U saved the song. Sadly the chord chart is gone but if need be I will recreate it. Typing in ALL that text again...

There are measures in there like F#maj7/d then F#maj7/A and so forth. Lots of verbose chord notation because of what I want the bass line to do. It actually sounds pretty good already, and I haven't done any manual playing yet. Just Real Band and real Tracks.

This is a collaborative effort with a few people, relating back to that post I made asking if we had any Jazzmasters here. Several people have responded and they were the ones I would have asked anyway! There's a 16 bar section for a guitar solo and a 16 bar section for a sax solo. Hopefully by the time it is ready to go out for collabs Mr. Norton will have some time to look at it.

This one is the most fun of the 3 I have in progress at the moment.

I just re-read the post title. I didn't realize we were talking RealBand here. Given that, I have no clue. I think the chord and single dot will work, though.

Yeah Matt I have never even launched BIAB. I don't want to spend time learning all over.

Maybe just highlight from bar 9 to the end and then use Generate so RB only generates that section (?). Or use the From-Thru settings to set 9-1-0 thru whatever the end of the song is.

Or am I missing something. That's normally what I'd do.

Or even Cut the Generated tracks after the fact at 1 thru 8 in the Tracks View (not Chords) and make sure Leave Gap is checked. If Close Gap is checked it would lose those measures.

As far as starting over; can you open a backup?
File-Open Special-Open backup file

Look in C:\Realband\RBBackup and see if you have it saved before it got ruined.
disclaimer - How and where you set up the backups can be system specific and set in Prefs.

Eddie a couple things. When you originally said the first chord generated automatically and you erased it exactly how did you erase it? You can keep the bar and just erase the data which shouldn't mess up the rest of the chord grid but if you erased (deleted) the bar that could mess things up.

I would have generated the song from bar 1 and when it's done go to the Bars window and insert 8 empty bars at the beginning thus moving the start of the music to bar 9. I'm at the office right now so I can't test this but inserting bars should also adjust the chord grid. After that if you want to make changes or generate new tracks or whatever arm the next empty track and have at it. Since you've inserted 8 bars now you would highlight the new track from bar 9 to the end. BTW that Bars window is very cool for rearranging a song. You can easily move whole sections around or copy verse one and insert the copy later in the song.

Personally I never change a generated track while a project is still active but you can do that per Rharv's directions. I just keep adding new tracks and mute/unmute to hear what the different tracks sound like together. Example, say I'm thinking I would like a different guitar part at bar 28 for 8 bars. I'm not going to highlight those bars on the existing guitar track, I'll arm a new track and generate the whole track not just those 8 bars. Why? Because even if it's the same RT I could get different phrases spread out along the whole song. I might hear something I like at bar 28 or maybe I go hmmm, that new track really fits at bar 53 or whatever. We've got 48 tracks to play with so why bother changing an existing one? It's just as fast to generate a new one.

Bob

I did that Harv and it created 8 new measures 1 thru 8. And there is no way to revert from that because if I do it erases the music that starts at 9. I worked around it but I spent a while day on this. Fortunately I have nothing else to do.

I never use delete bars or the cut command. I always select and erase with the delete key. What I think I did, and it has gone back and forth so many times I don't remember, I believe I regenerated a couple of tracks and when I did that it added more blank bars where I had no chords entered.

I was able to fix it and actually the song is now almost done. (I have to play some live sax on it) and then the guys who want to take a run at the solo sections can have it.

Actually if you want to listen and replace the piano line, have at it. My timing was a tiny bit sloppy but honestly it's as good as I am going to get it. If so I will send it out to you when it's ready. The lead line is a guitar and a sax playing in unison.

This song is very close to a piece I wrote in college for jazz band when I was a junior. And junior year was a busy time for me because I had to decide if I was going to vote for Abraham Lincoln or John Breckenridge.