Something I'd like to see that would greatly aid practicing, both for learning to improvise, and for those of us that play a fiddle/violin/viola, to practice our intonation:
Suppose you type in a chord progression in BIAB, say one chord per bar. You pick a key and style, and set probably a slow tempo (for practicing), and then it would be cool if BIAB could be put into a mode where it loops on the first bar, and keeps looping on that bar until you press a pre-determined button on a midi-controller, (the midi-controller would most likely be connected to a footswitch -- I'm building such a controller for myself, for example), and then BIAB would move to the next bar and loop on that. It could go round and round to all the bars in the song this way, ultimately looping back to the beginning bar ad nauseum.
Why this would be useful: Say you are learning pentatonic scales for a song in the key of G, and have say a I-vi-VI-V progression (or whatever) loaded in. The first bar would play a G chord with whatever backing tracks you chose. You could then play around with the G pentatonic scale against that "G chord" context, which let's you train your ears and fingers to how the notes you are playing would sound with a full band behind you. And then when you want to move on, you press the aforementioned button, and BIAB would move on the Em chord in the next bar, and you can practice its pentatonic scale to your hearts content, press the footswitch again, and now you are on to the C chord, etc.
Currently I practice by using BIAB with chord progressions that loop many, many times. But I can't control when the next chord comes, so I usually have to slow the tempo way, way, down as a compromise. Being able to manually switch chords would be extremely useful.
I just realized this is really in the wrong forum, but to reply to your suggestion Jim, yes, I know about the loop feature, but it doesn't do what I'm suggesting. I want to be able to loop the same bar over and over, and then via a midi command, move to the next bar and loop over that. If such a midi command was generated say by a foot switch controller, then I could practice scales, harmony, whatever over at each bar over and over until I feel like moving to the next bar, without taking my hands off my instrument.
In the above, "bar" could perhaps also be generalized to a "phrase", but being able to loop at each bar would be enough.
So, as I understand what you're saying your request has two parts.
Part one is midi transport control. I believe that can be accomplished using the Conductor feature. The Conductor button is located on the Transport Bar of the classic view, or under the Window sub menu, or by using the keystrokes Control and the Tilde symbol (~) or Ctrl+~ for short. I don't use the Conductor feature so I don't feel comfortable advising how to use it. However the Conductor window has a Help button and the feature is described in the 2021 user manual starting at page 119.
Part two is looping. This continues to concern me a little bit. I would think always advancing a set number of bars wouldn't work well as the difficulty level of each set of bars would change. So sometimes you might want to advance two bars, sometimes four and so on. The Conductor can handle this too but there may not be enough sections.
... Currently I practice by using BIAB with chord progressions that loop many, many times. But I can't control when the next chord comes, so I usually have to slow the tempo way, way, down as a compromise. Being able to manually switch chords would be extremely useful.
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