To further clarify this, BIAB allows for what it calls "holds, shots, and rests". You can make these changes via the chord settings popup window, however the end result is the shorthand you see.

Holds
If you enter a chord followed by 3 dots, that chord will be held until the next chord on the chord grid. How long each instrument holds depends on the instrument. For example, a piano will start to fade out almost immediately, because that's it's nature. An organ keeps playing. The drums will hit the first beat of the chord and then rest until the next chord.

Shots
If you enter a chord followed by 2 dots, that chord will hit the chord and then rest.

Rests
If you enter a chord followed by 1 dot, all instruments will rest (as in won't play anything).

Once you have that down, then you can modify holds, shots, and rests by specifying instruments to except.

This gets a little confusing with BIAB 2015, since now you see the actual instrument names across the top, but to do holds, shots, and rests, you need to know the legacy names of those tracks and the first letter for each. In order, those names are:

B[*****] track <--- this is supposed to say "bass", but when I try to highlight just the "B", the editor then flags the letters after the "b" as a bad word and substitutes the asterisks.

Drum track

Piano track

Guitar track

Strings track

So, if you wanted to play a G7 chord and have all the instruments hold except the Drums, you would enter:

G7...d <-- this means all instruments will hold, except the drums will keep playing normally

If you want all the instruments to rest except the bass and guitar tracks (which could have instruments other than bass or guitar assigned to them, but our purposes the bass is the first track and the guitar is the fourth track), you would enter.

G7.bg <-- this means that only the guitar and bass tracks will play

There's a lot of power there for making your arrangements sound more musical.

Once you master the above, then look at the "Edit, Copy Rests" menu item to make it easier to apply these kinds of changes throughout your song.

Hope this helps.

Last edited by jford; 12/09/14 01:18 PM.
John

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