Let's say I've put together a 32-bar piece of music that adheres to the aaba song form. I've set it up to play 3 choruses. But rather than having these little 8-bar "bridge" sections in every chorus, I would like to add a completely separate bridge section to the piece, say, between the 2nd and 3rd choruses. I might even want a style change, but probably not an instrument change, which will make things somewhat tricky, I suspect. This type of song form is very common in popular music, and I'm surprised I'm having such a tough time trying to pull it off.
I've read through the help section on endings -- 1st and 2nd and DS al fines and codas and what have you, but they all stay within the 32 bar framework. I'm wondering if I might, for example, set up a "c" section beyond the song in the gray area and then refer to it from the song and then from it back to the song. I've tried doing this once and wound up with a total mess. However, it seems to me that it just might be possible if I were able to arrange things correctly.
Any suggestions as to how I can do this? The way I'm doing it now is I just use BiaB in a freeform format and input the choruses and bridge section(s) one at a time, then set it up to play just a single, very long chorus. This works fine, although one of the drawbacks to this is I lose the variations that take place when the chorus repeats. And sometimes that's not such a minor detail, for example, when the drums change from side stick to snare and then back. That can be a pretty significant change to the feel of a piece. Now, if the drums are MIDI, I can always go into the track and edit it the way I want. But for RealDrums, it isn't possible. Well, I guess it is if I want to cut and splice. Added work, though, added tedium.
So anyway, it would be cool if I could do this. It would save a lot of space on the display and I wouldn't have to be printing out multiple pages of sheet music -- or at least, not as many.
Thanks for the link, Noel. I've played around with the Song Form Maker some, but never found much use for it.
What the Song Form Maker is doing is essentially automating to a degree what I've been doing manually -- that is, having one long chorus with the various elements laid out as they occur. One defines each section and its position and length, then one arranges the song the way one wants, having the sections occur where one wants. This is identical to what I'm doing manually. Unfortunately, it appears that there is no way for one to get a chorus to repeat (with variations, the way it happens when cycling through the choruses) the way the Song Form Maker sets things up -- same as my manual method.
Michael I finally remembered to check out your Soundcloud page, lots of people here have one and I keep forgetting. It's very nice and well mixed too.
What might work for you is the Conductor. It's not perfect either but it has tons of options. You control it from a PC keyboard. Basically it works with part markers on the chord grid. Set it to either jump immediately or at the next part marker and set the jumps to anywhere.
The thing you're asking for right now is to extend the bridge. You can do that by hitting the key to jump back to the beginning of the bridge at the next part marker. Experiment with that because of course the part markers also create a drum fill but if it fits your song you could have a part marker every 4 bars for example to give you a bit of freedom as to where to jump from but it always jumps back to the beginning of the bridge regardless of what part marker you use for the jump if you set it that way. But, you could also set it to jump to the middle of the bridge or anywhere else by hitting a different key. Lots of possibilities here.
Of course, you still have to manually hit a key and that could be tricky if you're also playing a part live to record. Maybe the Conductor can work using a midi footswitch, dunno never tried that.
Hey Bob, I've never played around with the conductor. It does sound kinda interesting. But real time stuff is not really what I'm after. My primary goal with BiaB is to produce a good, solid basis for a piece of music that I can export to Cakewalk, where I can then fine-tune the various tracks and parameters. So I need to automate stuff as much as possible.
Basically what I'm doing now is I save each RealTrack to its own .wav file and I save the MIDI instruments as a group (of separate tracks, of course). Then I import this into Cakewalk. By having each RealTrack and MIDI instrument assigned to its own track in CW, I'm able to take advantage of a wide variety of DXis and VSTis that I can use to further enhance the project. So the conductor might be fun to use, but I dunno if I'll actually be able to put it to much use since I'm exporting everything.
Oh, and thanks for giving my Soundcloud page a listen. I appreciate your feedback. I've been wondering if my mixing of those tunes was adequate. I feel like I've learned a good deal more since I created those pieces and I have the occasional urge to go back over them and remix them. Some sound a bit too hot now.
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