Originally Posted By: leonard1962
Can someone explain what that means in musical terms?
"change the arrangement, or vamp while you talk on the mic"
I've never heard that term before, then again I'm not a real musician, I just play one with BIAB.


The arrangement is the order of the tune like verse, verse, chorus or bridge, verse and a tag ending which could be anything. That's the basic road map of a song but an arrangement is much more than that. If you listen to any good classic tune by anybody you'll hear the music doing a specific thing for the intro before the vocal starts, then they will be playing certain specific things behind the vocal, stuff like that. That's the musical side of an arrangement separate from the simple road map.

If you have Biab set up with those things "arranged" the way you want them then go on a gig and the vocalist gets lost and changes the order of things you're screwed. An arrangement that is preset like that only works of you're the vocalist or you've been working together for years and everybody knows exactly what each other is doing.

A vocalist may want me to vamp (basically repeat) or ad lib a simple chord thing while she's talking to the audience about anything. It could be our next gig or it could be an event the club is hosting. That's why if I'm playing an arranger keyboard live I can do anything I want with the song. Oh, changing keys is a big one. Maybe the vocalist has a cold and wants to do some songs in a lower key. If it's all preset then again you're screwed.

Notes is absolutely correct about the limited styles in arrangers and other things and Biab can sound a lot more varied. But even with the Conductor feature you're stuck with your basic arrangement you laid out earlier. I will say this lots of acts in Vegas are singing to prerecorded tracks so there's no chance of vamping or changing anything. To me that's very boring but it's also modern show biz so there's certainly room for both approaches.

All of this btw is caused by ever limited budgets so main room acts in Vegas are no longer full orchestra's they can be two keyboardists sitting in the pit triggering tracks and playing some parts live, what used to be 5 or 7 piece bands with horns turn into a trio with backing tracks or even a solo performer with tracks in other words karaoke. Sad but that's the reality of it. Others like myself hate being restricted to tracks and try to keep as much live spontaneity as possible.

Bob

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