PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows Creating chord progression based on a melody?

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I use Finale (notation software) to write scores. To test this feature in Biab, I opened a session in Finale, created a piano track (non transposing instrument), and wrote a simple melody. I picked the Gm key. It was only one track. No double notes, no harmony...just one voice. When I imported that melody in Biab, I saw exactly the same notation. It was not transposed. I tried different styles, different settings..etc, but still it would spit out more wrong chords...Again, it's not a problem, may be this feature will be enhanced in the near future. At this point, I don't think if I'll consider suggesting Biab, for people who strictly need auto harmonization and such...

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You're talking a single note line, right? No bass note, no harmony? How in the world could any person much less a computer program come up with meaningful chords based on that? I guarantee you if you gave that line to me, Mac, my friend who literally escaped the communists and is a graduate of the Warsaw Conservatory, another friend who's out of Berkelee and lets say a killer bluegrass player and anybody else you might want to add would come up with wildly different chords if all we had to work with is a single note line and a key sig. If we're all blues players we might come up with different blues tunes but if everybody is from different musical backgrounds we're going to be all over the place.
Seriously, think about it for a minute. A single note in the key of Gm? I know you can pick a style and you are thinking that Biab should at least pick some chords that follow the form of that style. Are we to assume no accidentals or is the line strictly out of the Gm scale? If there's an E note somewhere in bar 5 is that supposed to be a Gm6, Bb-5, Am or a quick passing note over a Cm? That E note could be out of a Gbm7 too. You could easily have those chords in lots of tunes in Gm because there's no way to know if the single note in the melody is an accidental passing tone or a root. How many basic 3 chord rock and roll or country tunes have all kinds of accidentals in the melody? Tons. If the melody of a basic country song has a very common augmented fifth happening, usually the chord is still written as a simple major triad, maybe a dom 7th but a computer program is going to try to put the #5 in there every time but how can it know it's a #5 without the bass? Now what about a moving bass line? Maybe that part of the song could have the passing #5 in the melody and a third in the bass, what's the program supposed to do with that note then?
Experienced players can certainly come up with more or less interesting chords from an original single note line and key signature but man, would they be anything like what you think they should or could be? Who knows.

Bob

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