The key to understanding the dots, however, is understanding the legacy track names. Currently (and hopefully it will be fixed in the future), the instruments you include/exclude from shots, rests, and holds must be the legacy track names.

From left to right across the top you'll see:

Master - this is not a track name, per se
Bass - indicated by a "b", even if the instrument is something else
Piano - indicated by a "p", even if the instrument is something else (such as organ or rhodes or whatever)
Drums - indicated by a "d", even if the instrument is showing as "TrapSet" or "Bongos"
Guitar - indicated by a "g", even if the instrument showing is "acoustic" or "electric"
Strings - indicated by a "s", even if the instrument showing is "violin" or "orchestra"

In other words, don't use the initial letter of the instrument (otherwise, BIAB would get confused if for example you had two "Guitars", but use the legacy track name to indicated which instruments to exclude from a rest or a shot or a hold.

So, for example, if you have entered:

Cm7...pg

the dots should be read as "Play a Cm7 chord and hold all instruments except the instrument on the piano track and the instrument on the guitar track.

Gsus.d

should be read as "Play a Gsus chord and rest all instruments except the instruments on the drum track. Of course, effectively, this means that a Gsus won't be heard at all, because only the drums are playing (although a live soloist might be playing over the Gsus chord along to the BIAB arrangement, so you keep the chord in for notation purposes).

Bbdim7..bd

should be read as "Play a Bbdim7 chord as a shot (a hit) for all instruments except the instrument on the Bass track and the instrument on the Drum track. That means the instruments on the piano, guitar, and strings track will play the shot, but the bass and drums will play whatever riffs they would have played were the dots not there.

Additionally, you can't use the "dots" for the melody or soloist track, on the five auto-generated tracks.

There are long posts about needing to rename the legacy track names and I won't get into that here, but hopefully this helps folks use this powerful feature of BIAB.

John

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