PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Chord Spelling

That would be a great addition, make sure you visit the Wishlist forum and post the request there.

As of now, there is one way that may do that, which is to use a MIDI guitar input and the Chord Recognition Wizard for Chord Entry, but that Wizard uses the bottom note entered to define the chord, which often is not played as the bottom note, which can result in some wrong chord identifications. I've used it, but good use also requires the knowledge of chord theory in order to be able to correct the mis-identified chord when necessary, ie knowing what the true bass note should be. There are a few other probs as well, for not all possible chords are recognized by BB, and that tends to go double for the kind of chords one can come up with on an acoustic guitar, for example. Those suspensions, for example.



If they can solve the aforementioned probs, I should think that adding this as a feature would be possible.



That is what we often do anyway, and not just on the guitar. Pianists and Organists will also intentionally not play every note of a given dense chord as well. This opens up the harmony and avoids the rather dense sound that playing all notes and extensions can bring to the process. Especially when said dense chord is played as a "closed" chord.

Good jazz guitarists often truncate chords down to the bare essentials when comping. For example, when playing the rather common and not-so-dense dominant 7th chord, rather than include all notes in the spelling, 1,3,5,b7 in whatever order, the consummated guitar chordist might elect to only play the most "important" notes of the chord, such as the Tritone, the 3 and the b7 only. If playing unaccompanied without a bass player, we might add the root note 1 to teh 3 and b7. In jazz we almost never attempt to play the 5, which makes the chord sound much too full because it takes advantage of a rule of physics that rock guitarists love, the 5 chord or "power chord" -- playing the root with the 5th invokes a "ghost" note exactly one octave lower than the root note at one half the amplitude due to the way the frequencies beat and reinforce. In old classical organ parlance, this was called the "resultant" and was often used to make a pipe organ sound like it had bass ranks of pipes that were twice as long as it really possessed. We today, of course, call the same phenomenon the Power Chord. Use that 5th sparingly when playing genres that don't feature Power Chords.



No laughter here, for that is how we all start out with the thing, if we keep delving into the study of music and chord theory, if we push ourselves to "map" the neck such that someday we have the ability to instantly know every single fret and its note name, if we practice until our brain cells quickly know the shapes and relationships between strings and the intervals those shapes make until the thing starts to happen quickly, like "macros" - we get closer to the mark.

The only thing that can be said to be wrong about using any "crutch" is the refusal to ever try taking a few steps without using the crutch, and repeating that daily until the strength builds to the point where we can walk without that crutch at all.

The fastest way I know to add to our musical arsenal via practice, mental exercises, performance and all the other things that go into it is to make sure that whatever we are trying to accomplish is approached in an efficient a manner as possible, while at the same time making sure that our methodology is always one of Having Fun with it as we go. Never turn practice into a drudge session, if that is detected, I think it is far better to put the thing down, go do something else for a bit and then return to the thing with freshness of mind and body. And keep it FUN.


--Mac