Hi,

I have a piece of music in A harmonic minor, and would like BIAB to only use the notes from within that scale (A B C D E F G#) for any embellishments.

For example:
When the chord is Am, that BIAB not play the G note (b7) but play the G# (maj7) instead.
Or when the chord is Dm7, that BIAB also not play a G note (11), but play G# (#11) instead.

Is there a way to direct embellishments to use certain notes?

I could obviously write the Am chord as AmMaj7, but that would imply to emphasize the G# note in the chord. Whereas if I mostly want the Am chord sound with just a little bit of G# thrown in as an embellishment, similar to how a pianist would gently colour a chord with the notes of a scale, how could I do that?

For the Dm7#11 chord, I wouldn't how to express that as a slash chord. AmMaj/D would leave out the F note, which is important for the minor feel of the Dm chord.

Alternatively, is there a way to stop embellishments from accidentally playing notes that are not in a chosen scale?

Turning on Natural Arrangements may come close to doing what you hope to achieve. What version of BiaB do you have?

Thanks, I currently use Band-in-a-Box® for Windows Version 2018 (520)

I am not sure whether Natural Arrangements would really cater for that. Disabling it would mean that complex chords would not get re-interpreted I guess. But in my case, I have simple chords, that I want interpreting in a certain way.

Maybe I should test it and look at the midi data to see how it worked.
But with Realtracks, the midi data is not always shown it seems.

The results are a bit hit and miss:
For example, an Am#5 is sometimes played as a normal Am chord with a perfect 5th. If I rename the chord as F/A, BIAB thinks it's ok to embellish with a Bb note.

I don't believe what you are requesting is a feature in BIAB. Just as BIAB will not permit specific chord voicing, it also does not allow the user to restrict the band to a specific scale. Best you can do is what you suggested - select the chords which feature the model note and hope for the best.

If you are using RealTracks then your results will be hit or miss. That is IF the chord you want was recorded then you will get it, BUT if it wasn't then no you will not get it.

The only sure way to get exactly what you want is with MIDI. Put your chords in, find a style that you want, then head to either the piano roll view or the notation view and change what needs to be changed to get exactly what you want. My work flow is to generate a MIDI song in BiaB but then do all of the above work in my DAW.

This is probably what you didn't want to hear. RealTracks are great IF you like what they give you.

PS - an after thought. There is a way to get RTs to work for you but it is a tedious expensive workaround. You must purchase Melodyne Editor, the one that does polyphony, then move the RT wav track into it. (Note that I do this in Studio One Pro after I drag and drop the entire BiaB song into it.) Then you must change the notes that are not correct and save the wav. (In my DAW I just bounce the track, thus saving the corrected wav.) As I said this works but it can take a lot of time depending on how many chords you must find and change.

I hope this helps and good luck.

Thanks guys, yes, working in midi seems to be the most predictable option. Unless some of the realtracks can handle more chord types perhaps.

I might experiment with exporting wavs to DAW and then tweaking the odd notes here and there.

It's puzzling that BIAB doesn't support setting scales for certain bars, as musicians think in scales all the time.

Maybe by creating a muted melody track to define a scale for some bars could work?

BIAB does use the melody to influence harmony.

As for not supporting a scales-based approach, I am guessing it's more that BIAB was developed around the end of the 1980s for jamming on jazz fakebook tunes. As I recall (having played as a pro from the early 1960s) the use of scale-based improv such as Abersold wasn't yet as popular at that point.

This would be a good topic for a post you could make in the Wishlist Forum. I agree, there are now two full generations of jazz players who have grown up thinking primarily in terms of scales. Not that we didn't, but it was a different emphasis.

If you do a drag n drop into Reaper it will snap it to scale or chord.
It will also create a scale or chord snap guide that you can easily see what notes are out.
You can then drag out of Reaper and import back to Biab.

Thanks, the Reaper trick could be quite useful when analysing the midi data.

Regarding the jazz thinking of the 60s etc.

Theoretically, it shouldn't make much of a difference thinking of chords as a series of odd numbers (chord based) or odd and even numbers (scale based):

Whether one thinks of a chord as 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 or as 1 9 3 11 5 13 7, the outcome would be the same, or not?
Perhaps by 'bringing the extensions down' into the scale, they would be more clearly defined, whereas when you played in the 60s they were less defined and more dependent on the soloist.

Which brings me back to BIAB, if I as a soloist want to play x notes, then it would be nice if BIAB could adapt to that (by me choosing it somehow).
Yes, I'll look into adding it to the wishlist.
And I'll experiment a bit more with muted melodies.