PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist Allow 6/8 and 12/8 and cut time to be Recognized.

>> And is it possible to add half/double time to RealDrums?

Yes, possible and planned.


btw, we get the reverse request in bluegrass. We do the bluegrass styles as cut-time (Ev16, tempo 140), but the players want to see it in Ev8 (tempo 280). So we made half-time version of some bluegrass styles (there's no drums, so no issue there)

Oh, cool! Thank you!

I listened to LaPopJazzSambaEv16. It definitely works at a tempo of 100, using the piano and bass samba 190 tracks at double-time.

I could not find another such drum track with the filter. My next suggestion would be to get Danny Gottlieb to record a jazz samba track at tempo quarter=100 that does not have as heavy shots on beat two and three-and as the LAPopJazzSamba drums. More like straight eighths. ps I've worked with Danny, and his cymbal playing is the best I ever heard.

Yes, I remember those reverse bluegrass requests. After studying the problem from the other side, I understand them better now. Thank you for all your efforts to accommodate us.

Yes, Danny is a great player, and it would be great to ask him to record some more for us.

))) Here's one: http://mattfinley.com/promos/cuttime.pdf

Yes. To be clear, that's notated in 4/4 (not 2/2) and it is the same notation that you would get from Band-in-a-Box, which calls cut-time Ev16. I only mention that because the original poster said this...

"I have a ton of songs I would like to create but because they are in 2/2, I can't write them"

Anyway, the solution for the original poster is to pick from any of the 1,300 cut time ev16 styles, and write the music in 4/4 as is the convention.

Yes, you could say this song is notated in 4/4 as long as you count it at a tempo of 200 bpm. Just don't try to tap your foot in 4 at that speed.

>> Yes, you could say this song is notated in 4/4 as long as you count it at a tempo of 200 bpm. Just don't try to tap your foot in 4 at that speed.

Yes, you're right. I would enter that song in at tempo=200, and choose the existing Samba ev8 190 style. The notation and playback would work, and as you mentioned, musicians would be tapping foot at 100. I expect the same issue happens when playing fast jazz swing Sw8 (Donna lee, tempo 300, tap foot at 150)

I have often used BIAB to double or halve the length of the song, as appropriate, before exporting the MIDI into a notation program. It's a great feature when an adjustment like this is needed.

I feel so ignorant when I listen to you guys discuss this topic. I don't have enough time left, so I guess ignorance is bliss .....

It's just a question of which way we learned some of this theory. Like BIAB, music often offers more than one way to do things.

It's not about the style, it's about the feel, and the tempo. I may not always want have fast 4/4 to make it fell like a 2/2 groove, I may want to habe half note equal 85BPM or 100BPM.

I find time signatures nebulous at best.

Double meter and triple meter is how I break them down.

A 2/2 song can really be a fast 4/4 song. A waltz can be written in 3/4 or even 6/8 or rarely 12/8.

Listening to a song that has a repeating pattern of 7, can you tell without looking at the music if it is in 7/4 or alternating measures of 3/4 and 4/4 or something else?

Listening to a song can you tell if it's in cut time or common time?

Some say bass line, if the bass plays on 1 and 3 it must be cut. But what about those mm=220-330 bop songs with walking bass throughout that are written in cut?

So it must be speed. But then I've played lots of standards with walking bass at moderate tempos written in cut time.

I've played songs that have definite swing feel that could have been written in 12/4 time but were written in 4/4 with even eighth notes that should be played as if they were dotted eighth + eight note triplets.

So I tend to think of each numbered area in the BiaB matrix as a cell.

That cell could be a 4/4 measure, two 2/4 or 2/2 measures, one 2/2 measure depending on the style or even half a 2/4 measure, again depending on the style.

Same goes if you F5 3 beats to the cell. It could be a 3/4 measure, half a 6/8 measure or one beat of a 12/8 measure, again depending on the style.

For 5/4 time I often make a cell of 3 beats for half the measure and the next cell of 2 beats for the rest (or 2 plus 3 depending on how the tune is subdivided).

Thinking of the cells as either a measure or a part of a measure with either 2, 3 or 4 beats in it (determined by F5) and as building blocks instead of complete measures unleashes the creativity to do wonderful things in Band-in-a-Box.

I have no problems with cut time in BiaB, I either find the right style so a cell is one 2/2 measure, or I can F5 it to 2 beats, or I can find a style where a cell is two 2/2 measures. There is an amazing amount of flexibility there.

I've done 36 fake disks from popular music books that have from 100 to over 800 songs in each book. That's a lot of songs. And I've never found a cut time song that cannot be represented in Band-in-a-Box.

It's a very flexible program if you simply treat it that way. And in a way, I know a lot of the reason the way it is today is because of the limited resources of DOS and Windows 3.1 and backwards compatibility, but I find that the flexibility of using cells instead of measures actually lets me do more than if the program supported time signatures instead.

Insights and incites by Notes

I think the issue here is that the Notation only supports the display of a limited number of time signatures, and not 6/8, 12/8, 2/2 etc.

I think two things mentioned will help greatly. Allowing RealDrums to be half or double-time, and allowing the screen display of 12/8. If we're fortunate that will carry over to notation.

I never considered BiaB as a full fledged notation editor, but simply as the world's best auto-accompaniment app with a notation window for convenience.

I feel that if you need good notation, use a dedicated notation app. I have an old copy of Encore that serves my minimal needs (head charts). It will do multiple repeats/endings, codas, and a number of notation symbols.

Notes

Reasonable points, but I don't see why Notation should have unnecessary musical limitations.

Again, I have some songs written where I need cut time because the sheet music is written in cut time, not 4/4. I mainly get ny chords from leadsheets because I like knowing where the chord is placed in the song, and I play the melody,

)) Again, I have some songs written where I need cut time because the sheet music is written in cut time, not 4/4. I mainly get ny chords from leadsheets because I like knowing where the chord is placed in the song, and I play the melody,

I would like to see one of these lead sheets.

Matt posted one here http://mattfinley.com/promos/cuttime.pdf

Does yours look like that? Because if it does, what I see is something that is notated as fast 8th notes for melody and chords. Tempo=180 for quarter note. No different than if it was a fast bossa or a fast swing tune. So you would choose a Samba 180 tempo style and every thing would play and notate exactly as you want it. I get that you would be tapping your foot twice per bar, but since you want the music to be written like it was played like fast 4/4 I cannot see what the issue is. To me the style that would perfectly in BiaB is the Ev 180 samba style, because the notation matches.

If we started playing that song that Matt posted at successively slower tempos. And people were tapping their foot on half notes at first. And we kept slowing down, there would come a time where people start tapping their foot on quarter notes, when that happens, would someone say "stop, I can't read the music any more. Could you please give me a new leadsheet, written identically, but without the halfnote=80 marking at the top?"

Perhaps if you post a link to what you're referring to with these cut time songs that don't match either a ev16 tempo of 90 samba style, or a ev8 180 tempo samba style, I could understand this. Here's an sample of one of our tempo =180 samba styles, notated as desired in 8ths notes, like Matts example. http://64.40.109.32/audio/rt94/_BNGS190_Render.m4a

This really does seem to come down to the sound you get versus the notation you see. Certainly swing (tripletized) 4/4 can sound exactly like 12/8, but the notation can get messy (technically, in 4/4, you need to put a triplet bracket over every group of 3 8th notes, whereas in 12/8 you don't). That aids in readability. Similarly for 6/8.

And if you need to to 6/8 or 12/8 in fast 3/4 time (to allow changing chords at other than the beat divisions), then you have to be able to have drums that don't sound like a race car motor revving high.

So, as Matt pointed out, having the ability to reduce the drum speed would really help out here, it would be great if you could just specify what the notation should look like and display it accordingly. It shouldn't matter what's entered into the chord grid, but if I could hit a check box that says "display this as 6/8 or 9/8 or 12/8", then the rest is just simple math to translate the notation display.

That way, I could notate a 6/8 or 12/8 song that changes chords potentially every 8th note using a "waltz" style in 3/4 at a 180 speed, but have the drums play as if the entire 3/4 bar were a single beat (and would play much slower than 180). But the notation would display depending upon whichever checkbox I selected for the time signature.

Unless I'm missing something here and I hope that made sense.

That's exactly the way I understand it, John. We can hope these are implemented soon.

+1

And exactly why old swing songs were written with straight eighth notes but played with a swing feel.

Which is also why I use a separate notation editor when I want to make a chart.

Of course that's me, and we all have different needs and desires.

Notes

Here is a video of a famous steel pan tune that I play.