Quote:

...I wrote a song with a bridge followed by a chorus (using term traditionally)then a key change to two stanzas, a two line tag and then out.




If you're happy with working with one long chorus fine but maybe you want to create a fakebook type of chart and that's where the 1st/2nd/coda/tag stuff comes in.

Part of the problem is the age old definition of terms. You said you're using the term chorus traditionally. That can still mean different things to different people. Biab uses the term "chorus" in the classical sense, basically the whole song with an intro at the front and an ending at the end. Everything in between is called a chorus. Don't ask me for the detail on that but it has been explained here before and that is a correct usage of the term "chorus". There's plenty of music teachers on this forum who have verified that. Biab does not use the terms verse, chorus, stanza, bridge in the way that most of us pop players use those terms. I agree with some here that it would be better if they did but then we would all be arguing about what is a stanza, no this is a bridge, not that, blah blah. PG has created their way of doing it and that's it.

If you need to do this then think in terms of PG's definition of chorus. You start with an intro but the intro can be as long as you like, it doesn't have to be a common 4 or 8 bar thing, it could be a whole say 50 bar section of your song and the chorus starts on bar 51. Now you count the bars and figure out where you want the end of the chorus to be and you set those bar numbers in the boxes in the middle of the menu line that says beginning chorus and end chorus. The beginning is bar 51 and the ending is whatever. Within that chorus you set up your 1st/2nd/ending leading to a bridge after the 2nd ending and it will repeat back to the beginning of the chorus, (the A section) play that again and then set up a tag or coda where it jumps to the first bar after everything else and again that doesn't have to be a short tag, it can be another 20-30-50 whatever bars then set up the final ending. The final ending could be another eloborate section.

Once you get used to the convention, you can take this tune and put it into that format if you need to but as Matt and others have said, this can get complicated and it is simpler to do the whole thing as one long song (chorus, remember) if you don't need the other stuff.

Bob


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