This was promoted on my FB news feed. I imagine that it works, and probably works well. Just think what users are missing by not getting BIAB!

Chordpickout

Wow... and to think, for years, we had to do that all by ear.

(sarcasm)

Oh the hours I wasted trying to figure out chords by ear with my guitar or piano.

(more sarcasm)

And all the record albums in ruined scratching the hell out of them by putting the needle down and picking it up again many many times!

{even more sarcasm)


What I think is that BiaB is starting to get a little competition with this and those EZ-key programs. Although these programs are in the embryonic stage they do have a model in BiaB to get ideas from and to possibly advance at a very rapid rate of growth. Things may get interesting in the coming years.

I really look forward to what BB/RB will be in say 5 or 10 more years.

I'm looking at the very first sentence in their descriptor on that page:

(emphasis added)

The human ear, when trained properly to be able to recognize the intervals, does not have to guess, it is fairly infallible.

One would think that the machine coding could be done in such manner that it, too, should be absolutely infallible.

MELODYNE did it.


--Mac

I don't know why, but anybody who needs an app to identify a chord reminds me of a doctor saying "Oh. So THAT'S where the appendix is..."

Careful, Eddie. I got lambasted once for saying anyone should have a basic knowledge of music. Later, Ray

The beauty of being 62 and having no filter left anymore....

Sorry Eddie,

I think that is the gallbladder and if you are going to remove it, you had better take no longer than 3 MINUTES to do so! :>

Later,

Chikkin' Innards plus sleight of hand...

Great one, I almost forgot about those scams in the Philippines.

Did that patient look a little like Eddie or was that just me thinking that. Well the operation was under 3 minutes.

Later,

I'm not so sure I agree with this and the trail of replies.

I can see where this could be pretty handy, if it was faster on the draw than human intuition; like a calculator helps me multiply big numbers faster than I can do it myself. Or even the lattice multiplication method.

Do any of you use the feature built-in to PG products that does basically the same thing?

There's a difference between NEEDING and USING TO ONE'S ADVANTAGE. I would say that this tool should help fulfill the latter, if it works quickly.

I'm with you on this one! And I'll take it one step further and ask why in the world someone who uses software to create their backing tracks would then be critical of someone who uses this tool to detect chords? SMH!

Hardly an apple to apple analogy.

It is hard for me to be objective about the topic because I can tell the chord just by hearing it, but not everybody can do that. A math geek can do higher math in his head to many places. A carpenter can identify wood by the grain. When I hear a chord, I just know what it is.

Well, the kind of music I am generally involved with, and I think I can safely say that Eddie is in the same camp here, does not come out all that pretty when shoved through *any* of these chord identifying schemes, and that is inclusive of PGMusic's ACW.

Walking Bass lines, extensions on chords, anticipated playing styles, or playing behind the beat, all that and more just confuses these chord identifying algos.

I do use the ACW to get the layout from a song quickly when setting up a song in BiaB, but what it sends to the Chord Grid quite often needs to be re-entered manually in order to get what the chords really are.

These things work okay with simple chords, simpler songs and rather simple straight accompaniment, for the most part.

But guys like Eddie and me don't need the machine to ID those simple a chords, we both could likely play along with that kind of song on the first run through we hear it anyway.


--Mac

To Mac and Eddie, unless you both were prodigies, that ability took you years of woodshedding where you had the chords in front of you or someone calling out the chords or telling you the structure as you were playing. Doctors aren't born, they learn over time. If this analogy of the doctor was reasonable then disdain should be cast down upon every fake book touted here as well. Or any chord chart ever used before figuring out the chords by oneself, etc. if it were reliable, which one day this will happen, it will be a great learning tool to develop the ear to identify chords on audition only. There are plenty of university type folks working on automated score generation. An acquaintance of mine, Dr. Gregory Wakefield at U-M (sorry Eddie) usually has at least one PhD candidate working some new angle of this kind of topic in his Computer Science program. Greg is an accomplished singer as well as computer algorithm and DSP wizard.

I need BIAB to play the instruments I can't play. I do not need any help to do transcriptions and have been doing them for hire for forty-five years. However, I use the Audio Chord Wizard because it is a helpful tool that can sometimes make the process easier, especially a tempo map. Why not use the tool, if it saves time?

When I started playing guitar there were no tabs, Audio Chord Wizard, Internet or anything like that. Back then the only way to get the chords was to either buy the music or pick the chords off of the record or radio. Since sheet music was expensive back then, at least to me, I had to pick the chords off the radio/record then buy the Hit Parade magazine for the lyrics.

I still practice that technique but I also use the ACW. Like Matt said it is a tool so why not use it.

I went a step further. I learned to pick out chords by ear like many of the rest of you, but I saved money on the magazines (which I didn't know existed--Hit Parade, you say?) by recording albums and radio broadcasts onto an old Wollensak reel-to-reel deck and transcribed the lyrics by 'rocking the reels.'

I had my share of "mondegreens" at first, but I began to learn how to coax meaning out of context (not always easy with lyrics heavily influenced by the drug culture). Not only did I save money, it helped me later in foreign-language study and in my present career as a medical transcriptionist.

Now that I mention it, transcription is also being heavily augmented by its own version of the ACW: speech recognition (SR) software. My parent company, Nuance Communications, who is behind the SR technology in iPhones and elsewhere, touts it as being a big cost-saver to physicians and hospitals.

Let me tell you from my experience on the back end, it doesn't work nearly as well as they would like clients to believe. Most of the time we would do just as well from raw voice recordings, but it gives transcription companies a chance to pay its workers, who are highly skilled medical language specialists, half of what they would without the software. Sucks to be us.

R.

I couldn't pick out a song to save my life -- I just don't have the natural ear to do it. I guess I should just give up music.

Plenty of room for everyone and all their different musical skills.

Um, no.

If ALL aspects are taught congruently from the beginning, the process is relatively invisible to the student.

Times have changed things, there are more and more great music teachers out there who have adopted that method, but there are still those who do things that I think should be illegal, such as those teaching piano out of those well known picture books that teach nothing but reading the dots and playing same.

In my case, for some reason I started out playing more by ear than by the charts that the piano teachers placed in front of me. It was "easier" and thus I pulled all kind of tricks as a young kid to get the teacher to play next week's lesson for me, etc. - rather than actually attempt to read the music.

At some point, I got caught at this by a certain sharp teacher, and, of course, there was a bit of an unpleasant confrontation in which the teacher prevailed and I was thus forced to have to learn to read what was on the page.

From that experience, it just seemed a natural to me to try to learn to play the "cool" songs that I heard on the radio and television and on recordings, when there were no charts of such readily available to the kid.

Sometimes I would "find" chord structures that I had no idea how to name at the time, but the ears told me that I'd found the right notes in whatever that song at the time was.

I think it all really depends upon the teaching and learning methods that someone is exposed to in their early musical training more than any other one thing. And time and the empirical results from my own adopted teaching methods and teaching young people myself in private music lessons bears that out.

We've all likely encountered those folks who can sight read and play what's on the chart seemingly rather effortlessly, but cannot play even the simplest I - IV - V progression or song by ear. Many of them balk at having to even try. In my opinion, that is a travesty that condemns a certain teaching method that only teaches the one aspect of the thing, creating "pianists" who are really, IMO, "sight reading robots". Never understanding the underlying and rather simple relationships between the Western Tempered Scale Musics and what someone else has written on a page for them.

I'm wuite certain that the original composers of those notes written on the page could not have come up with the compositions without being able to use the marvelous and infallible abilities of the human ear coupled with the gray matter in between, or, as we call it mostly, "playing by EAR".

A few years later in my piano lessons, coupled of course with the Trumpet lessons, I found out that what I had been doing naturally all along, trying to figure out what others had played on records and such, had a name: "Transcribing".

And, on the other side of that same coin, I've known, worked and played with some rather stellar performers who had managed to use the human ear to teach them to play just about anything they wanted to play, but had managed to stay right where I started at, these kind of musicians are those who cannot read even the simplest of music charts, yet can play seemingly anything by ear.

I am thankful that the music teachers and musicians that influenced me at an early age somehow managed to pound it into my rather thick and stubborn little skull that a well-rounded musician should work on BOTH the reading AND the ear at the same time . Again, my experiences in private instruction bear that out, as the person who is adept at only one of the two sides of this coin often has a generally difficult time adding the one to the other after years of only doing it one way. The first step in such endeavor has often been getting past the human nature of the thing, those who can only read music in order to play a piano piece, or those who can only play by ear, doesn't matter which, have developed a rather stubborn defensive argument against having to back up and deal with it. Attitude. Once you get past that hurdle, most all of them manage to blossom, though. There have been some who have chosen to simply quit, though. And that's a shame.


--Mac

Prodigy? That is relative, but I did start lessons 2 months short of age 5. However, the story of what got me into lessons is telling.

My cousin John, 10 years older and now sadly deceased (I miss you very much big cousin) was a ragtime piano fanatic. When he was nearing 15, and I was nearing 5, he was practicing on their old upright and I was in the room watching. He was my hero and I watched everything he did. For some reason, 57 years later, I remember that he was playing Hard Hearted Hanna. When he finished, he went up to his room. I sat down at the piano and started to play what he was playing. My mother and aunt came to the room and I heard my mother ask "Didn't John just go upstairs? Who is playing?" And my aunt said "well, there's only 4 of us here..." He came running downstairs and asked me "How did you learn how to do that?", to which I replied "Watching you." And I will never forget the look he got on his face when he said "You learned how to play piano by WATCHING me? Aunt Mil, get him into lessons RIGHT NOW!"

And I started lessons 2 weeks later.

I can still hear something (nothing as complicated as Dream Theater) and walk to the piano and play a close approximation of it. It's called "ear", and yes, not everybody has it. But at some point, people need to learn how to recognize. It really isn't any more difficult than your ability to know a song by hearing the intro to it IF you have any playing skills at all.

This is a great example of why I laughingly tell people that Real Band has ruined me for playing. I can't play parts better than the software, so I leave the computer generated parts in. However, I CAN play. The extension of that is people who have NO playing skills at all using Real Band to create music. They have to have SOME compositional skills and a rudimentary knowledge to create chord progressions, but that does not equal "ear". It's like perfect pitch. You have it or you don't. The next level down is relative pitch, where if you have a pitch in your head you can tell what the note is relative to that pitch. (A phone dial tone is an F. If you listen to that pitch, you can go from there.)

If you can play, you have to have SOME ear. If you want to identify a chord, play some notes on your piano or guitar until you hit it. You can't miss it more than 11 times.

My experience has been that Absolute Pitch may not be the panacea that those who don't have the ability may think it to be.

Relative Pitch, on the other hand, is what musicians and composers ahould strive to develop in full.

The reason I say that is because you will not always encounter a musical event that is tuned to A-440 - and that can be a detriment for the Absolute Pitch person, to put it mildly.

The US telephone dial tone consists of two tones at the same time, one is indeed an F, but the other tone is an A above the F.

A Major 3rd in key of F, but savvy guitarists can use the dial tone to tune their A string to 440.


--Mac

I remember an anecdotal story written into a biography of Woldgang Amadeus Mozart that may apply here.

Not sure if it actually happened or not, but it does indeed have that certain Ring of Truth to it.

Apparently Mozart's father caught a very young Amadeus seated in front of dad's piano and plunking away at the keys.

Not surprising there, since this is something that just about any child will do after witnessing an older person playing the piano.

But Mozart's dad said to the toddler something along the lines of, "What are you doing at my piano?"

And Wolfgang replied, "I'm trying to find the notes that LIKE each other!"

By George, I think he must have FOUND them.

Indeed.


--Mac

Mac and Eddie, just so you know, I'm in your camp. I can pretty much figure out stuff, but it was only after a few years of the 'Fingerpower' and other Schaum lessons, AND an astute 2nd piano teacher that could hear/see that I leaned toward 'playing by ear' that she taught me chord THEORY and why what I liked to hear, sounded the way that it did. At that time, it was playing the Journey hits to make the girls swoon that I was drawn to. Jonathan Cain wrote some pretty nice keyboard parts back in the day that would make the girls come and sit next to you on the piano bench!

Trust me, when I figured out how to play "Open Arms" on my own, and that first girl sat down on the bench beside me - I was in and wanted to learn more on how to read the chord charts and play from the heart, not memory.

Chord charts then became a tool, but not a substitute - because very often whomever provided the chart didn't do such a great job, and all of the passing notes and transitions simply weren't there in either the chord diagram nor the written out parts.

So, I didn't learn this from a classics/standards standpoint, but out of pure personal interest to advance my cause with those of the fairer sex.

I can't pick out the more complicated jazz forms by ear, but the sus4, add2, maj7, min7, augmented forms, chords over roots, I can do a pretty good job with them by ear. But I'm not opposed to short-cutting it either if it's faster than my estimating and pecking.

I think we probably agree on this, but I was just pointing out that Eddie's analogy was a little harsh and critical of something that's central to the wonders of PG products in general - their unique gift to the music software world of not needing to know how to play every instrument, or do proper arrangements by hand. They are shortcuts, and not always perfect - but a great springboard.

-Scott

Scott, I do not believe I was harsh at all, but the old IMHO applies.

As one last comment and then I will leave this thread, let me ask this.

In February, when everybody has their W2 forms, you go out and you buy Turbo Tax. People come to you and you do their taxes. Every return is correct, accurate, passes IRS muster....

Does that make you a tax accountant?

I'll answer for you. No. You are a software user. Being a tax accountant requires you knowing WHY the numbers come out like they do.

You can crank out a tune with BIAB, but until you know WHY the key of A has 3 sharps (the whole step. whole step, half step... thing) you are not a musician. You are a software user.

I know I sound condescending and haughty about this, but after 57 years and a BA, I take offense when people who have not paid dues crash my musicians party.

Eddie, I don't know if you will read this, but I see you actually making my point, as well as Mac admitting to using the ACW.

You might not see it that way, which I'm o.k. with you not seeing it that way. But there's a reason you use RB/BIAB, there's a reason Mac even bothers with the ACW, and I see that there's market for an app which helps to suss out what chords might be in a song; not unlike the ACW.

I'm not making any claims on whether this defines whether someone is a musician or not to use or not use this thing as a tool.

I am saying that it can be a shortcut, an adjunct, a tool in the belt, a helper, a time saver, etc.

I'm not saying it's a replacement for hard work.

I'm not saying it's a replacement for some God-given innate ability.

etc.

It's a tool. I will not call anyone names for using it.

Got to love the bias in that word usage, ole buddy.

"Admitting"

I think you should reread exactly what I said about my use of the ACW and what I use it for. Song Layout, typically ignoring the chords it reports, which, in the kind of music recordings I typically have to transcribe in order to learn, are always bizarre and wrong chords from the ACW.

In my case, the ACW simply saves me from having to count bars, figure out the song form, length, etc. And that is indeed a shortcut. I also like having the Audio File import right with everything so that I can use it from within BB, going from bar to bar and manually entering the correct chords.

So I did not "admit" to using the ACW at all for the purpose this thread is about, identifying chords.

I don't use it for that.

If it worked better for the kind of songs I do, I likely would, though.


--Mac

Know also that in about 3 years with RB I have never done a cover tune, so there has not been a reason or need for me to identify a chord. They are all my songs and I know what they are because I entered the chord chart myself. That may be germaine here....

Uncle!

I grew up wearing holes in the records trying to work out the chords. Then, when the internet came along I discovered "other peoples transcriptions" and that saved some time and effort. Now I use acw in conjunction with a very cheap tool called "chords" that will recognised the basic chords for you while the song is playing in Winamp. I also use this tool when playing live and some bright spark says "can you play American pie" and I have the backing track on my computer. I think this tool only cost about $15 but I find it incredibly useful.

http://youtu.be/rWzDRgnxvi4

Start at about 59 seconds.....

Just my way to punctuate my thoughts.