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Originally Posted By: Noel96
Trevor,

Did you try it with midi styles, too?

Regards,
Noel


Hi Noel, Good point!

No not yet, but I'll give them a try too ASAP and report back

Best

Trevor


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Quote:
I set an extreme example where 8th notes were played for 2 bars so that the difference was unmistakable.


It seems to me that what you did demonstrated correct behavior, in that it did play the 8th notes for two bars (as indicated by the P2 setting you made), but the chord for bars 3 and 4 is still C/E, so I would expect the bass note to still be an E, until you hit the C chord by itself, at which point there is no bass not qualifier.

Or am I missing something here.


John

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Originally Posted By: jford
Quote:
I set an extreme example where 8th notes were played for 2 bars so that the difference was unmistakable.


It seems to me that what you did demonstrated correct behavior, in that it did play the 8th notes for two bars (as indicated by the P2 setting you made), but the chord for bars 3 and 4 is still C/E, so I would expect the bass note to still be an E, until you hit the C chord by itself, at which point there is no bass not qualifier.

Or am I missing something here.

Hi John
I'm really not sure what to expect. I interpreted the idea of the pedal bass was to stop the user having to type the slash chord on each bar. So I understood a setting of C/E(P2) would play the E variation for 2 bars. BiaB adds all of the text "/E(P2)" to the existing C Chord when the Chord Settings are entered.

It states "Eighth notes on E for 2 bars" - but then doesn't say what happens next.

I originally expected it would play that entire variation of 'Eighth notes on E' for 2 bars and then revert. But it only 'half reverts' it keeps playing E, but not eighth notes.

I'll check the MIDI too, as Noel suggested.

Best

Trevor



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Originally Posted By: Noel96
Trevor,

Did you try it with midi styles, too?

Regards,
Noel

Hi Noel
The behavior was the same with MIDI
I had a plain C chord on bar 1 & 5
I selected Chord Settings
Select Eighth notes on A for 2 bars
The Chord chart showed C/A(P2)
The MIDI data showed 8th notes on A for 2 bars (well, almost 8th notes for 2 bars - it adds a 16th on the last beat), then A notes but on different octaves for the next 2 bars, then a C chord bass line. So the behavior is the same as the real tracks.

John made a good point about the behavior.

But what's missing is that the chord settings window simply don't say what happens next...

The Help wording is vague also:
You can set the bass part to play a pedal bass at any bar for a range of bars. For example, you could set the bass to pedal on a G note, on beats 2 and 4, throughout a chord progression for 4 bars, i.e., C6 | Ebdim | Dm7 |G7. This is useful for intros, interludes, and endings of choruses.

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It seems to me that what happens next should be the same as if you just typed "C/A" after the 2 pedal bass bars. Even though BIAB inserted the "/A" in the chord grid, it's still "C/A" after the first two bars, so that should be the expected behavior. Does it sound the same if you explicitly put in a "C/A" in bar 3?


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Originally Posted By: jford
It seems to me that what happens next should be the same as if you just typed "C/A" after the 2 pedal bass bars. Even though BIAB inserted the "/A" in the chord grid, it's still "C/A" after the first two bars, so that should be the expected behavior. Does it sound the same if you explicitly put in a "C/A" in bar 3?

Well this has opened up a can of worms (!)

The first bar has C/A(P2) using Chord Settings

Nothing on bar 3 retains the A note only for 4 bars

C/A on bar 3 only and nothing on bar 4 works retains the A note for bar 3 and not bar 4.

If the slash chord is supposed to retain the setting until another chord is detected, this has to be unexpected behavior.

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Trevor,

When pedal point is used classically, a note or two remains constant while the harmony changes. With this approach in mind, I set-up BIAB to change chords over a pedal point.

To do that I entered the following chords.



As you can see, I set chord settings on the F chord so that the C bass played for 3 bars. This means that it played while the chords change to Dm and G7. This is similar to how classic musicians would use it.

I set it this way because, from a classical perspective, pedal point is approached by consonance and ended by consonance. In between these ends, dissonance features. Even though it seems that I have a pedal point for only three bars, since the starting chord is C, and the pedal is C, bar 1 is actually the consonant beginning bar. Bars 2, 3, 4 are the dissonant bars and bar 5 returns to consonance. Thus, in the example above, pedal point is really over 5 bars (although to get BIAB to do it, the setting is applied for 3 bars as shown above).

With the above set, all worked well. Although bar 1 played more than the required C bass, it still wasn't too bad.

To see what happens after the three bars, I removed the C chord in bar 5. Below is what resulted (I used a midi style). This seems to reinforce that the pedal point bass is ok because, in bar 5, the bass reverted back to G and the 3-bar setting had ended. I haven't yet tried this with a Realtrack bass.



Hope this adds some extra insight.

Regards,
Noel


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Thanks Noel for your approach, and feedback. This is something I hadn't tried (yet)

Best
Trevor


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My understanding of the pedal bass is to use it in tunes like "This I Dig Of You", the end of "Foggy Day", "The Night Has a Thousand Eyes", etc., not to replace slash chords. Later, Ray


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I have used it once for Hello In There (John Prine). I saw him live and the bass used for it was an upright acoustic bass that was bowed. I found out it could be duplicated well enough with the pedal bass feature. The way it worked for me (with midi synth strings) is that it plays the root of the chord entered as a hold w/o having to specify the root in the dialog box and plays it for the number of bars entered in that dialog box. In other words if I enter C in a bar and set the pedal to 'whole note' I don't have to input C in the set on box, it just plays that. I only put in a different note if needed such as C/E.
It might work the same in some other way but I didn't find another way that worked the way pedal does.

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Hi Barry,

I didn't realise that the setting did that! Cool!

I've just tried it out on a midi style and it worked exactly as you describe. BIAB took the bass note as the root of the input chord. Interestingly, I didn't get (P4) beside the starting chord even though I'd set the bass as whole notes for 4 bars.

Regards,
Noel



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