PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Beginners Forum A few noob questions on BIAB.

Maybe I'm missing something here, something I just don't understand that could be really cool.

Here's how oh don't know 99.5% of users enter chords.

The first set of instructions is for two chords per bar.

1. Put your cursor in the first half of Bar 1.
2. Type in the chord eg C7. Hit enter.
3. Type in the chord in the second half of the bar. Hit enter.
4. Rinse and repeat.

Now for 4 chords per bar.

1. Put your cursor in the first half of Bar 1.
2. Type in your chord eg C7 BUT also hit comma.
3 Type in your second chord (beat 2) of the bar. Hit enter.
4 Type in the third chord and hit comma.
5. Type in the fourth chord and hit enter.

Now you guys are also talking about chord types, right? Have you looked up the keyboard shortcuts for that? eg the letter J for a Maj7? Or for a sharp (#) no need to hit the shift key for 3, you just hit 3 and Biab knows it's a sharp.

This is as brain dead easy as it gets. It sounds to me like all this is about reinventing the wheel. There are little conventions you have to learn like if you want a G raised 9 chord you can't type in G#9 you have to type in G7#9. Is that so difficult to figure out?

A thing to remember is Biab is based on midi, all midi as far as notation, entering chords and chord names are concerned. Biab also follows standard musical convention. You can have a basic simple chord (to you) called several different names and they all can be technically correct. Like a C13 also being Gm9. Why? Because the arrangement could have a passing G for the bass note for one beat so from a midi point of view that chord changes to the Gm9 even though "everybody knows" it's still a C13. You can take all the relatively basic chords like 7ths, flat or sharp 5's flat or sharp 9's etc and by throwing in a different bass note change them to all kinds of very weird looking chord names.

Big band charts are notorious for that because the horns can have have tons of accidentals and a total nerdy and picky music transcriber can write out something like Em7b5#11 A7b13 to a Dm whatever to a G whatever when all it really is is a basic Em A, Dm G in the key of C turnaround. A good player will ignore all that kind of stuff and just play the correct chord.

I have some downloaded Biab songs where someone wrote out all those extended chords and probably expected Biab to somehow play all that crap. This is one reason for the Jazz Down the chords function and now the "simple arrangement" functions. Or, if you want to experiment let Biab do the Jazz Up the chords and it can give you some interesting (or not) chords.

This brings up another point. Biab is NOT designed to play exactly what you want it to play based on specific chord extensions you put in. It doesn't work that way. Look at the advertising. It talks about Biab being an INTELLIGENT musical program. It is SUPPOSED to take what you give it and interpret it somewhat like real musicians would do in a band.

When good players like Matt or Herb talk about Biab being a great songwriting tool it's because they're playing all the important and essential parts of their original songs. Biab does not create that stuff for you. It gives you some great sounding backing or bed tracks to back you up to allow you the player to do your thing.

Bob