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I've found a few reasonably good sounding renditions of traditional hymns and gospel songs that sound great when I render them via BIAB, but for my purposes/use in real life, these need at least an INTRO....and ideally bridges between stanzas.

Anyone have experiences or tips/techniques on how to grab and position 4/8 bar segments of an existing melody/soloist line?

I realize that in theory it could be done manually, but the kinds of MIDIs I'm interested in manipulating have lots of 2nd voices in both treble and bass clefs (piano). I've yet to discover how that (2nd voices that are rhythmically different than the melody) can be done in BIAB.

I have BIAB 2010.5, ProTools 9, Sibelius 6.2 and an XS-8 synthesizer...but would prefer the least complicated/best outcome process which logically appears to be BIAB, but not sure at this point!

TIA
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Sounds like you need a good DAW (Sequencer - Midi Editor) - that is not BIAB, but you do have ProTools which should do any and all of this for you. ProTools too complex? - try Real Band or option 3, try Reaper. All will have there learning curves but once you figure them out you will be off to the races.


BIAB – 2026, Reaper (current), i7-12700F Processor, 32GB DDR4-3200MHz RAM, Motu Audio Express 6x6 - My SoundCloud.

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The final bars of a lot of gospel tunes and hymns can often be used as Intros.

Basic Intro rules for the number of bars to use is defined by the Tempo of the song in most cases. This information may be found by examining the BiaB Intro wizard found under the Edit menu.

RealBand is likely going to be the better program choice for editing those MIDI files.

It might be as simple as copying the last four bars, then rewinding back to the beginning of the file and pasting those four bars at the front while shifting all notes in the song four bars to the right. A little cleanup for things like possible pickup notes or hangers on, and you've got the kind of intro that people can easily figure out what the song is going to be about - and come in singing it with the music.


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Two things.

1. I do intros all the time in BIAB. As Mac sez just use the last few bars. That can be from 2 to 5+ depending upon your preference. Some make up their own intros or buy Norton's. There's a command in the Edit menu to do this. One option is to add bars at the destination. Note that everything, including melody, will be copied.

2. For more complex arranging, I use Real Band. It works very well for cutting and pasting midi parts. Note that there's also a Medley feature in BIAB. I've never used it though. I have done a segue in Real Band. Note that it's much easier to cut and past audio in Real Band.

Hope this helps

Stan


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Dave,

You can copy, cut and paste within Biab. You can also use the .seq button to re-channel any recorded parts (2nd, 3rd, 4th voices) from the melodist track etc. Biab also has a midi harmonizing utility that will also add harmony parts to the existing melody notes.

Takes a little digging on how everything works in Biab, but it can be done from within Biab.

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