PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Audio Chord Wizard ????

Is it something I'm doing wrong or is the Chord Wizard not very accurate with it's
Chord translations ? I mean the song files (mp3s) that I've put into the Chord Wizard haven't
been translated correctly. Most of the time not even close.

Hi bomberomusician,

I find the ACW does a pretty good job. You've got to keep in mind, though, that it's trying to interpret audio data.

Could you please give us a step-by-step guide as to how you use ACW? That way we can follow your steps exactly and see what might be causing the problem.

Some thoughts that occur to me are: Do you set bar 1 and then use f8 to line-up a few bars while the song is playing? Also, do you have the key set?

Regards,
Noel

Noel,

What I'm going to do is a screen capture of me working in ACW.
Then you can see exactly what I'm doing from beginning to end.
I will begin the video now. When i am finish I will upload it to me
youtube channel.

Thanks for the prompt reply!

Thank you. That's a terrific idea!

Here is the screen capture of me fooling around in The Audio Wizard.

Thanks for all of the help!

Audio Chord Wizard Questions

The New Real Book Volume 2.

I've never seen that song in Band in a Box format, I might have 10k songs.

Due to the jazzed up nature of the song I doubt you end up with a good result. Sometimes the arrangement is too sparse and the notes never end up making a chord.

At times that song sounds like Don't get around much anymore..and if you use that as an example it's often played just the melody for the opening bars. The a couple of crunch chords then just melody again. Put that over drums, no bass or backup instruments and there is nothing for the software to use to build a chord.

In my estimation the ACW works best with simple music. Three chord country with a straight up band all instruments playing and it's pretty good.

The other thing it's bad at is variable tempo. The tempo has to be the same bpm all the way through.

As far as I've been able to find the ACW is as good or better than anything on the market, but it can't make miracles. Maybe as computers get more powerful some backwards assumptions can be made and applied later. Heck some songs don't get to the tonic until the Gin is gone.

On that note, time for a few pills and the proverbial alfalfa and grass products will pound my ear, or I'll hit the what the hey. Or hay.

Good luck, keep plugging.

And some chords will be right, others may have a pattern that you can discern. After a while if you have enough interval training, and you get the tonic you can putter along and fix the chord grid up. On the other hand Notes Norton sells that fake book I mentioned above, he has put the chords into Band in a Box format without the melody (that's not legal), and if you get the book it has the melody and chords, and you mess about finding styles / RealTracks and voila.

I remember thinking, gee it only took me 5 hours. When I worked it was 70 bucks an hour. I could buy the backing tracks the book and a kid to cut my lawn or shovel my snow for less. I found out too that the snow melts every year and I can save time and effort and let the sun deal with it someday, unless I can't get out the door...sigh.

Hi Bomberomusician,

Your video was a great tool. It was very clear to see what you and BIAB were doing. Thank you so much for taking the time to assemble this.

I hear bar 1 starting at around 1:3 (onscreen time) but I'm not sure that I'm correct. Try clearing your present bar 1 and resetting bar 1 to 1:3 there and see what happens. Then, as the song plays, periodically tab F8 to line-up the beat 1s of each bar.

When I use the ACW, I always have my left hand tapping out each beat on the left leg. In this case it was tapping the bass line. Then at the beginning of each bar (beat 1) I tap F8 with my right hand to set the bars. I usually do this for the first 3 or 4 bars and then once about every 5 or so bars.

Because of the nature and tempo of this music, I found it quite difficult to hear the 4 beats clearly. It also seems to have confused the ACW because I note that the ACW has interpreted the song as having a tempo of 132 when it seems more like 210'ish to me (I suspect that this is also part of the problem).

It might be worth setting Bar 1 to 1:3 and the tempo to 210 and see if that helps with the chords.

Can I suggest that before you try using ACW with this particular song, see if you can get hold of something slower that has more clearly defined beats (say, "Paper Moon", "Moon River", "Amazing Grace", "In The Mood") and use this to practice ACW techniques. You'll only need to spend 10 mins on a simple song to fully get the hang of how ACW works.

Also, don't worry if you set bar 1 later in the music. ACW only needs a reference point to isolate the correct beats. With this in mind, it might be worth setting Bar 1 (beat 1) a little further into the music (say, what's presently around bar 4 or 5).

When I return to BIAB, I simply choose "Exit" and then "Close" on the dialogue box that pops up. I don't initially "Kill" the audio because I like to keep it on hand in case I need to go back into ACW. I do mute the audio, though, so that it doesn't interfere with the BIAB accompaniment I select. I also don't worry about setting the key or the tempo of the transferred chords because I can do these directly in BIAB.

Regarding the tempo map, this is the tempo alignment that was set using F8. Since I am only ever interested in chord progressions, I never worry about sending this map to BIAB. I like to keep things as simple as possible.

If you have a look at the style indicator window, you'll see that there is a black cross present. This indicates that the style is not active. To enable a style, click on the style window and choose "enable style".

Hope this helps!
Noel

Great video presentation work there, brudda.


The ACW works best with songs that:

*Have a straightforward accompaniment that includes full chords for almost every bar. The songs that use single note lines followed by shots such as in this Horace Silver tune can throw the Chord Wizard off the beaten path rather easily. It tries, but there may not be enough actual info there for it to identify the real base chord of measures like that.

*With songs that have a simplerk chord structure. Many jazz tune performances may be a tad too much for the ACW, which does work with the Pop, Folk, Country etc. genres - and even then with simple enough arrangements - but the Jazz genre, most especially, due to the use of chord extensions, walking bass lines, sparse arranging in parts where a full chord is implied rather than actually played note-for-note and as in this instance, the musicians playing "behind the beat" as is important to the jazz idiom can make for a chart like the one that you got here.

*Also consider that, by the time a player has developed to the point where jazz, modern jazz, bebop, abstract truth, etc. tunes are the goal, the ear should have developed past the deciphering of the chord structures for the simpler songs in life and so the ACW is not needed to do a complete chording identification. Not a copout, just tellin' it like it is given the present state of the algorithms involved. Some day we may just be pleasantly surprised with improvements to the thing that are bullet proof in that regard, meanwhile, "it am what it am".

All that said, I have found that for songs like this one, the ACW can make our song layout situation a bit more automated as at least it can get the right number of bars for a song and transfer that to the Chord Grid for us, saving that little bit of time, but then we will have to enter the correct chords via human intervention by highlighting each chord and typing in the right chordnames.

Purchase of fakebooks that have the chord transcriptions already done for you is a great way to get on with this kind of thing as you can then copy the chords from the fakebook directly into the bars already laid out by the ACW. The Realbook series of fakebooks for jazz is no longer an "under the counter" purchasing situation as a major publisher, (Hal Leonard IIRC) has purchased legal publishing rights for the RealBook series and you can now get them from various places such as Amazon dot com, etc. One can also purchase realbook charts as .pdf files on disk as well these days. Highly recommended for anyone working in the jazz covertune area.

Another way one might find correct chords for a jazz song without money expenditure is to use the web search engine of choice and see if someone hasn't already webpublished the chords for your tune somewhere. These can vary in quality, so you have to just wade through any you find and see if they are in the same key, follow the recording or not, etc. as some may be simplified, some may be just plain wrong yet others may be dead on correct.

Then there are the BiaB users around the web where you might find that someone has already created a BB file of that performance. These can represent a good starting point for cleanup and correction if nothing else, again a timesaver.

Finally there is the bottom line tried and true good old fashioned way of gettin' them thar chords: Transcribe, transcribe, transcribe, or, as my brother and I used to call it back in the day, "puttin' the needle back" - referring to how many times we may have had to sit there replaying one bar or part of one bar, instrument at the ready, until we successfully identified that chord and could move on to the next chord. Don't sell this drill short, as it may start out slow and seem to be agonizing, but it is one of those drills that increase your ability to hear the chords over time, meaning that the last song you transcribe will not take as long as the first one and on top of that, the ear training this method provides is simply invaluable for the aspiring improvisational musician.

Hope this helps you out and:

Straightahead,


--Mac

Sorry, I can't help you here, but....


Ecaroh (Horace spelt backwards)

You sure picked a dozzie to challenge the ACW.

"..a song that defied convention and gravity, ... The song packs an eclectic punch, shifting restlessly between major and minor keys and employing several brooding rhythms that build with drama and mystery. There's the mildly Latin introduction, which halts abruptly and springs into swing before resolving in funk. The song's urgent motifs never seem to repeat, and yet they do, in variation"

My hat is off to you for taking this one on. Although, personnally I don't think BIAB is really up to it, but best of luck.

Loved the video - specially that great accent , we need to do more of that kind of stuff ( a picture is work a 1000 workds).

Last time I caught Horace live was 58...like hearing Monk, you have to try keep your ears "tuned" for those "impressionists" chord selections...it take years!! The poor ACW!!

Let's throw Monk at it...It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got That Swing!
"His Chordal Tastes are SUBLIME, BUT ACW can't pick out the chords "in time"! Swing it, baby!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVP3lIoDjKk&NR=1

As far as help, and especially if you "know" tunes...or sing them, that great collection of tunes in the programs for Apple Apps, called iRealBook for the basic "jazzed" up chord strutures. You might like this clever series of "standards" accompanyment for more "basic" chord layouts...that is, if you've got an apple ipodtouch, ipad or iphone to use. I've ignored ACW for these
same problems, considering the genre I'm involved in.

Thanks for all of the replies guys. I forgot to mention that this tune is
Wes Montgomery's Arrangement of Horace's Ecaroh. I have used alot of automated
transcribing tools ( for curiosity because I figure out everything by ear ) and was just seeing if BIAB's Transcribing was better or worse than the others that I have fooled around with. They are all the same. They do fairly well for simple music but poorly for more complex music like jazz.

Again thanks for your advice.