PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist Jazz lovers! Support this: Biab reads chords, but can only play 7 chords, please educate biab

Thx a lot, fellow travelers,

Jim -once again- raises an important question: why don’t you make (Real) User tracks?

That is the key question.
In MIDI, the “algorithm” does some of the work for you. In Realtracks, this does not work.

In BIAB you can make styles by making a MIDI song where you have 2 bar-, 1 bar, half a bar, 1-beat chords. If your MIDI file is long enough, say 32 bars and 3 choruses without any copying and pasting, it works. This way you get more than 15 variations for each “case”: 2 bar chord, 1 bar, half a bar... (Most factory styles are not so elaborate and stick with 5 variations, but still...)
Even this “simple” workflow takes me on average 30 hours for only bass and drums and a little piano. One style. Being fed up with hearing the same lines in different styles, as PGMUSIC does, I never use a line twice and that makes it more fun to play along with.

Biab, Yamaha and Roland then have an algorithm that translates chord and scale tones to all possible chords. Yamaha and Roland are scale based, Korg has a really sophisticated algorithm that is scale and chord based. Biab is scale or chord based, but the algorithm only knows a few chords.
A good algorithm should know about 26 different possible chords: 7 modes of Major, Harmonic minor, Melodic minor, 1 mode of wholetone, 2 modes of diminished, 2 modes of Augmented. Roland, Yamaha and Korg do a great job at this, but don’t have a good song based software with lead sheets like BIAB. BIAB is both ahead (song, sheet, melody) and behind (harmony...)

In User Tracks you would, to have a good variety and modern harmony, have to record 32 bars, 3 choruses for every chord type (to make it intresting, you could make songs that overlap, of course...). That is 96 bars times 26 chords... quick math for a 120 bpm style: 10 hours of playing! For each instrument! For each style! And that’s if you played perfectly on each take. And not taking the time to correct velocity bumps, adjusting microphones and all...

That is why all jazz Realstyles share the same sixteen bass parts, piano parts, drum parts. And get boring after some time. Cause you select a different style, but, in reality, you get the same drums or bass...

Algorithms do the work for you. Realtracks don’t have that possibility.
In the future, with stuff like Melodyne, it will be possible to use the same procedure in audio as in MIDI and sound good. It is already possible, but sounds quirky. At this time, harmony-wise, realtracks are at a dead end. Even at the rate of the minimum wage,

I think MIDI is a good alternative with all the great libraries out there. If only PGMUSIC stepped up their algorithm.

I feel sure I understand exactly what you are trying to say here.

I think that RealTracks simply substitute exotic chords it does not know with 'similar' chords that it does know.

Please correct me if that assumption is incorrect.

You got it absolutely right. And, hey, who can blame them since they have much too much chords on their list? Even Wayne Shorter would wonder how to play some of these chords, and he is way out there, harmonically, stacking triads on top of other triads, like Dave Liebman explains.

On the one hand, they should simplify it, there are only 16 or so important chords, even in modern jazz. Really, who uses the third mode of harmonic minor, save for Richie Beirach or Hancock? Harmonic.minor, if you have the first sixth and fifth mode, that will do. But, we need melodic minor, augmented, wholetone and diminished and diminished dominant...

On the other, since they managed to get the piano part right for most chords (sadly not for phrygian or susb9 chords, widely used in modern jazz since Miles’ sketches of Spain), they should work on the bass part. Have you heard the altered chord clashing with the bass? It’s horrendous.

Same goes with the MIDI styles: skip a lot of chords or link them to the chord-scale so they share the same scale tones... and get the parts play the modern chords right like lydian(augmented or not), phrygian and altered. Levine and Berklee teached us how to play good music, if Yamaha and Roland can do the right harmonic thing, PGMUSIC should know how.

On a side note... Oliver Gannon, the OG in PGMUSIC, (I’m so hilarious...) plays old fashioned jazz, but in an intricate modern way, like Ed Bickert, Ron Escheté or Jim Hall. If you check his guitar comping disk, a lot of the really great substitutions he uses are just that: phrygian, altered, diminished, augmented. The things he does to the old 251? Wow. Miles Black, same thing, very advanced player. Why can’t these guys advise the tech guys on a better algorithm? Renee Rosnes...
Slap those IT-guys and girls over the head with some modern harmony until they get it.

For the sake of keeping a great discussion going, lets let our mind wander and think things through a little bit.

First, the majority of PG Music's RealTracks don't have audio material for all twelve key signatures. How do I know this? Because RealTracks that do have audio in all twelve key signatures are identified in their RealTracks label. My guess is the number of key signatures used to create the audio in a specific RealTrack will vary depending on the audio content as well as the tempo range the RealTrack is expected to support. I would think most RealTracks average audio content in four to five key signatures. The rest of the key signatures are handled by software transposition or pitch shifting.

How big a tempo range does a RealTrack cover? Again it depends on a RealTracks audio content. Generally speaking slow tempos have smaller tempo ranges than fast tempos.

Since UserTracks were introduced in 2014 PG Music has switched the time and pitch shifting software either once and possibly twice. Each software switch dramatically improves rendering sound quality.

Forum member Seeker proved creating audio content for some UserTracks can be automated. Seeker used midi and high quality sound libraries to create wonderful sounding UserTracks. Once he got his system in place Seeker cranked out more than 500 UserTracks over a two year time span.

Dzjang, you seem to know modern Jazz. My guess is you know what key signatures are most often used, what time signatures are popular and the tempos of many modern Jazz songs. What instruments do PG Music RealTracks lack? What tempos and time signatures are under represented?

As you can tell I'm thinking midi and sound libraries can be used to create missing link UserTracks. You may have to use a combination of programs or tools to create the midi tracks that include all the chords you desire but once you have the midi tracks they can be used again and again and again to create all the UserTracks you desire.

One last point. A UserTrack is made of the contents inside a folder. A PG Music song file and audio file combine into one file pair by sharing a label. The label can be anything, it doesn't matter, as long as the song file and audio file label is the same. You can have a file pair called "a.sgu" and "a.wav" if you want. The UserTrack folder can have one file pair or 1,000 file pairs, it doesn't matter as long as each file pair has a unique name. Band-in-a-Box and RealBand uses the sgu file to determine what the paired audio file contains. That means UserTracks content can grow over time. It doesn't have to all be done at once. Create one, release it and let customer feedback determine what's missing.