Hi Ron,

First, I often tell folks that BiaB is much like picking up a totally new instrument in the sense that although we may be quite adept at playing whatever instrument that we've spent so many man-days practicing and learning how to play, that completely different and new to us instrument is going to take a certain amount of time, practice and familiarization before we are ready for primetime. Just learning which controls to select in order to get a certain job accomplished can indeed represent another new learning curve. The same ruleset applies to this autoaccompaniment software as would apply to that new (to us) instrument, we have to spend the time and practice with this "new instrument" in order to get it to do our bidding. Sometimes that may mean finding out *another* way to accomplish the same result from the one we *think* will do or ought to do the task at hand.

That said, I personally routinely avoid the invoking of repeats with first and second endings when laying out songs in BiaB, saving that feature only for the times when I need to be able to print a chart for other musicians to read (not for BiaB to play).

When I have a small section of a few bars that are repeated like that, rather than invoke the repeats feature I prefer to just copy and paste the preceeding bars as many times as needed to get the same result at playback. There are some rather neat shortcuts for doing that on the Chord Grid, such as the "K" keboard command and the highlight and drag option as well. The Help files inside BiaB can surely be put to good use for finding out about these kind of things, as well as the PGMusic Video Tutorials.

And that, too, has an analogy to the learning of a new instrument, often is the case where we are presented with having to do something on that new instrument that we find to be difficult to execute or perhaps impossible to execute in a given fashion. This does not always mean that we can't pull off the performance, however, by trying to execute that thing in a different fashion or perhaps even just dropping that small part in favor of something else that can be done at the time. Above all, I try not to get hung up in trying to accomplish something with BiaB that becomes problematic like this, instead trying something else like the workaround I mention above, which will sound the same as if the Repeats were used, maybe a slight annoyance at not having repeat signs such as one may find on a Fake Sheet but not a kill to the entire project for me when looking at it from the standpoint of the overall scheme of things.

One last thing, the FAQ page for BiaB is chock full of problem solving bits and tidbits, actually taken from questions frequently asked on this forum. There is a short tutorial section on the use of Repeats in BiaB there, highly recommended. Use "ctrl-f" and type in "repeat" without the quotes to rapidly search the long page for the right entry.

Try to HAVE FUN with the program if you can, for it will shorten the time of the learning curve somewhat, or at least relieve the frustration aspect of the thing.


--Mac

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