Originally Posted By: jazzmammal
I have never used xml, how exactly does that work in Biab? Have you already created a new song including the style then import the xml file or does the importing itself create a new song project and then you select the style? The reason for this question is my point earlier that styles many times determine how the chords are handled. Also, in my earlier reply I touched on the differences between the chords in a midi style vs an RT or hybrid style. Musickluver, are you talking midi styles or RT styles here?

My standard process is to enter the notes of my song first into MuseScore. Then I figure out all the chords and enter them into MuseScore. After that, I export an XML file that contains all the notes and the chords so that I can test the sound of the chord progression with the melody in BiaB. Normally, I try to select an appropriate style first, but sometimes I forget and just use what's already left in BiaB from a previous song. There have been a few times that I didn't have BiaB open already, so I end up starting with the default that shows up when I open the program, which will be the style that I had used with the last song I had worked on. This can be problematic, however, when the song I want to open has a 4/4 time signature and the current or previously used style is a 3/4 time signature or vice versa. (This has also happened a few times when BiaB was already open but had a style with the wrong time signature already selected.) When this happens, and I don't catch it, BiaB will replace the current style with the default jazz style with a 4/4 time signature. (I don't think BiaB does this if a 4/4 style is already selected and I open a song that has a 3/4 time signature because of its ability to drop the fourth beat in each measure.) That's what happened when I opened my most recent test song file. But I didn't notice this until after I read your post. So, I thought that this may have been why the three sus chords were replaced with standard A chords and decided to re-open my first test song file with a pre-selected style that has the proper time signature (4/4). To keep things simple, I selected the _CMPFMDS.STY style, which is a medium strumming folk acoustic guitar style. While this style has the potential for five tracks. four of those tracks are midi tracks, and the fifth is a RT acoustic guitar (~405).

So, when I re-opened my first test song file with this style already selected, all of my Asus chords (I had one Asus chord and one Asus2 chord in the intro, and I had one Asus2 chord in the middle of the first verse) and Add2 chords (I also had one Aadd2 chord in the intro) were replaced with standard A chords, which is very similar to what had happened with my previous test song file when BiaB switched to the default jazz style when I opened the XML file because of the time signature mismatch. This is the first time I've ever seen this happen because I never used the Asus, Asus2, or Aadd2 chords in my songs before. In fact, this didn't even happen the first time I had opened the same test song file, which I had reported in one of my previous posts. Instead, these three chords in my intro were mapped to an Asus, A2, and A chord respectively. IOW, only the Aadd2 chord was mapped to a standard A chord previously. But the fact that BiaB did very similar chord mapping this time with two different styles (one a complex jazz style and the other a simple folk style) suggests to me that there actually may be a problem with the chord mapping algorithm that doesn't pertain to the "voicings" that you mentioned in your next two paragraphs, which is another perspective that I was not aware of, so I'll respond to that next.

Quote:
Fundamentally if you want exact chord voicings then you need to write midi notation for that, it won't do anything for RT's because you get whatever voicing that was recorded in the studio so that's midi only. When you talk about your Add 2 chord, for every note in it you can have a different inversion (voicing) and if you add a slash bass note then you could have 5 or 6 appropriate voicings.

When you get into the weeds of specific chord names and voicings you really need to understand the theory behind that. Basically you think outside the box, think about what am I trying to do harmonically and find a way to get Biab to do it because as I said earlier as an AI music software, it tends to want to do things it's way. This is the whole rationale behind the program and it's name Band-in-a-Box. You get to have a virtual band of great musicians, give them the song structure and "basic chords" and they can come up with several different versions of your song for you. It's not designed to perfectly execute what you tell it to do.

Bob

I'm not sure what you mean by your suggestion for me to "write midi notation" if I "want exact chord voicings," but if you're referring to the notes in my XML file, they always come through into BiaB as a midi track. So, I don't understand why BiaB would map an Asus chord to an A chord when the note in the middle of my song's first verse that is associated with that chord is a B note, which is the note that is used to replace the C# note in the A chord to create the Asus chord. (I'm referring here, of course, to the Asus2 chord and not the Asus4 chord.) Now, my intro doesn't have any notes in it, so I also don't understand why BiaB would map a series of three modified A chords (Asus, Asus2, and Aadd2) to standard A chords, especially when these three chords were preceded by an A2 chord, which automatically gets mapped to an Aadd2 chord. I know there are lots of songs that have an alternating series of standard D and modified D chords (D2, D6, D7, D9, etc.) occurring at certain places in their overall chord progression, so I don't see why the same thing can't be done with standard A and modified A chords (as in my test song file), and I don't understand why BiaB would map all three of the modified A chords in this short series to standard A chords. Though I could be wrong about this because of my limited experience with BiaB, your "voicings" explanation doesn't seem to fit the picture very well in this particular case.

Tom Levan (pronounced La-VAN)
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