Good to see you're having fun and growing at the same time. I see in your profile you've upgraded to 2021. There's been a great tool enhancement you may want to explore from this year's release that will work well with maintaining less busy arrangements yet allow for greater style variations.

MultiStyles are triggered by Part Markers and Part Markers can be placed on any bar on a Chord Chart. A Part Marker has more functions and uses than just triggering MultiStyles but one function that's beneficial to MultiStyles is each Part Marker has 2 sub-styles and up to 24 different Part Markers can be added to a Chord Chart project.

The simple act of assigning Part Markers throughout a Chord Chart and assigning different styles to some of the Part Markers can efficiently and dramatically add dozens of variations to the Chord Chart and create complex solos, instrument changes, rhythm variations, add and subtract instruments and much more expanding the arrangement in a more musical and dynamic song.

There are hundreds of MultiStyles that have been created by PG Music and they're easy to find in the StylePicker. In the Filter Box - insert the '+' sign and the MultiStyles will populate the results. My version has more than 900. They can be modified the same as any style, replacing one instrument for another, replacing a Midi track with a RealTrack and so on.

PG Music staff have also created hundreds of styles that are similar selections of instruments but may only differ in the soloist instrument. In other words, one style has an electric guitar, another a fiddle, another a mandolin and finally a last style with a Pedal Steel Guitar. The StylePicker makes it easy to find these similar styles from the Chord Chart page by right clicking the small drop down arrow of the style and filter for familiar styles. _BLUGRSF AND _BLUGRSM are two similar styles that demonstrate this technique where everything is the same with the style, the tempo, feel and all instruments except the soloist changes between a fiddle and mandolin triggered by assigned Part Markers.

This is a better method to program a soloist than using Bar Settings and F5 to mute/return normal function between two tracks. First, it only uses one track rather than two or more. Second, this method influences the audio selections made by the BIAB algorithm because it interprets and reacts to these instrument changes in the same manner as it does for other Chord Chart commands like rests, holds, shots, and chord changes and this results in very smooth transitions, intro's and ending's or cross fades.

It's a very powerful and versatile tool that may work well for you in your workflow.

Charlie


BIAB 2025:RB 2025, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.