PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows 'Simpler arrangement'.....still a LONG way to go

it's really frustrating....this program could kick serious ass but it just has a few things that render it of no use to me. It's been YEARS that I have been whining about how BB throws notes in the harmony that CHANGE the harmony from what the user specifies. So after I saw the 'simpler arrangement' feature, I bought BB 2012. Guess what? I chose a 'simpler' realtrack, hard rock arp or something, wrote Am and F, and BB played back a ninth on the Am. Grrr. So I had to regenerate the track, and by chance it played back a freaking Am with ONLY the notes of Am. But guess what, soon or later I'd write a chord that I have to 'fix' by regenerating the whole progression, and it will mess up another chord previously writte.

Christ, is it so hard for Pg Music to understand? Not everyone is a jazz player and not everyone cares about playing fancy extended chords where are not wanted.

And STILL no option to play a minor add 2 (different from Am 9 and not the same thing at all ) Come on guys, it's been 25 years since the release of this program. And no 'm add 9' chord.

Also, BB just doesn't understand certain pop and rock harmonic progressions at all, for example a progression as in the song 'No easy way out' (the verse progression) from the Rocky IV soundtrack, I can program it very easily on my Tyros 2, but on BB ? forget it

After 15 minutes of messing around and wasting time trying to come up with creative ways to make BB work for me, I just turned off the darn computer thing and went back to my Tyros 2.

It's really a shame, since the release of Realtracks I always wanted to ditch my hardware and work with BB to write my music on, but it's just a waste of time. Good program, but it doesn't work for me, I am very precise about my harmonic progressions. Anyways, I wrote all this a zillion times before, so what's the use....

I don't want to hear random stuff. I don't want freaking notes that make no sense in my music. I want the darn thing to play back the chords I write without throwing in anything else. The day that I'll be able to do that on BB, I'll probably be old.

Did you try setting the "Song Settings" to the "Force simpler arrangement" option to see if that made a difference?

I can understand your frustration. The problem is that the 'Force Song to Simpler Arrangement' option doesn't seem to override the embellishment at all in my experience (although I'm only using v2011.5)

To do that you have to edit the current style and under the Style menu 'set embellishment for all instruments' to 0.

This should work. If it doesn't then it's usually because ninths and other extensions are part of the notation in the pattern. In this instance you could change the velocity settings to '0' under the Pattern menu targeting a specific midi note, e.g. notes 50, 62 and 74, which would have the effect of zapping any ninths once and for all.

What's needed is a more effective way of doing all this without having to go 'under the bonnet' so to speak. im coming at it from the opposite end of the spectrum where even for jazz its not always a good feature to throw in extensions. Especially as in some cases the notes don't really belong and change the harmony colour completely.

Regards

Alan

This is the deal Avatars. PG gives you all the tools to write all your own styles. You've never mentioned that you wrote custom styles and still have this problem so have you even tried that?. Learn how to write a style and I believe your problem is solved. That's why that ability is there, you can create whatever you want or at least very close to it. Just like on your Tyros btw, you can write custom styles for it too. If you can't or won't do that contact Norton Music, he's got several thousand custom styles. You can email him with your exact specifications and ask him if what you want is possible. I expect it is.

Bob

If I'm not mistaken, the 'Simpler Arrangement' feature only applies to ReatTracks. If chosen, the 'Simpler Arrangement' feature will choose an arrangement from a RT that is indeed 'simpler'. However, not all RTs have simpler arrangements. You need to check the individual RTs to see if they do. If you are using RTs that don't have this feature it won't work.

If I know PGMusic at all they will be adding simpler RTs where ever possible in new releases and, via patches, to older RTs. Make sure you have the most recent RT patch installed.

As mentioned above, for midi it's the embellish feature you need to disable in order to prevent extensions to chords. That and modify or create styles that exclude the unwanted notes.

I have no experience in this but: Is it easy to change unwanted chords using the Notation window and then Freeze the track?

May be a pain but may solve this problem temporarily.
I encounter it also but would like to learn the easiest way to solve it.

I agree all styles should be offered as Simple and Embellished just as PG is now giving us more "Dry" instruments we can color our own way using Amplitube etc.

I thought 'Force Song to Simpler Arrangement' was for MIDI, and if you want the new 'simpler' RealTracks, you have to select them individually.

I think the issue is one of unwanted embellishments to simple chords, not some mysterious chord that biab doesn't recognize.

'Force simpler arrangement' or 'allow/disallow embellishments to chords' has a history of failing to override embellishments already assigned in the pattern editor to the style in use. That's been my experience anyway. You have to set embellishments to 0 for all instruments in the stylemaker to effectively get rid of them.

Regards

Alan

Yes - we have two separate questions going here. The chord spelling is a different topic from the simplifying.

The fly-by help for "force to Simpler arrangement" states that it is for both MIDI styles and for RealTracks that have the simpler versions available (look at the RealTracks picker - one of the columns tells you if a particular RT has that feature).

I can't tell any difference when selecting this option for a Midi track.

Thanks, John and Rachael. Clearly, it's time for me to do more experiments.