In BIAB it's very much a style dependent thing. If there's rootless voicings in the style patterns you'll hear 'em.

A lot of the time though even the modern jazz styles will throw in a lot of riffs with roots and fifths even as it adds an occasional ninth as an embellishment.

The reason is likely that the 5th has to be present in the voicing if the program is going to be able to change that to a #5 or b5 if the pattern is also going to play over chords with those tensions.

What BIAB needs is a more flexible approach to chord voicing that allows the user to delete piano roots and fifths from the generated playback and/or add a ninth or 13th in its place. This should be extended to allow any unwanted chord member to be treated in the same way.

Of course you can get round it by editing the individual patterns but life is too short for all that!.

The other way is to use your knowledge of upper-structure chords to come up with appropriate substitutions to achieve the sound you want.
Say I wanted a plain Cmaj to have a piano voicing the notes A D and E. I could enter the chord as Asus/C. That would give me the root in the bass part. If i wanted the 5th I could write the chord as A7sus/C.

You have to be careful sometimes with this as you find sometimes that BIAB adds embellishments to your substitute chord on the basis of assumed diatonic chord functions which don't apply in this instance. Again a little foresight is required in turning off embellishments altogether in the instrument style editor before generating. From now on you are in charge of which added notes get played!



HTH

Alan


Last edited by alan S.; 10/17/14 07:14 AM.