PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Songwriting The Nuts and Bolts of It All: How do I....?

Hey guys!! It's finally starting to work for me!!! Thank you! Woooohoooo!!!! Thank you for all your help!!!

The more I get something resembling a real song, the more technical questions I have, so I thought I would ask them in one thread and that way be able to find the answers again more easily as I work my way through things. Gratefully asking y'all for your opinions and advice again!

Occasionally someone posts about finding a specific style or song, and the Sea Shanty thread was a completely unexpected major help to me. Amazingly, I found the right style for my "rock song" when I typed in the name of one of the suggested styles! So thank you--I can't find the thread now now, was it VideoTrack or maybe MusicStudent who listed the styles? Anyway, thank you! "Rolling" in the style picker filter brought up "Dramatic Pop with Thump" and who knew that my rock song was actually drama pop?? Now my MIDI guitar part sounds right! ....although I am thinking that probably no real guitar player would ever turn the reverb all the way up and just leave it there for the whole song with no variation at all. But it got rid of that flat tinny sound from the MIDI!

So. Mario answered my biggest question today, "why won't the chord settings work?!" which believe me, had me hollering some less than nice words many times over the past few weeks. Seems that a frozen track will respond to bar settings but not chord settings. Made some major editing progress today, now that I know that!

I can see it would be really good to know where the shots and holds go before one finds the best generation and freezes it, and yes, I had to unfreeze and regenerate repeatedly today to get my song closer to finished. I'm thinking oldmuso answered that one for me in a different thread, suggested to someone that they use a simple piano track to get the song established before they went to the final style, so I'll try that on the next one.

I've decided to take Jim's advice pretty seriously and really learn BIAB before I buy anything new. It's hard for me to know what might be a bug and what's just operator error without knowing the program better.

And for pete's sake, 1.) where on earth did my Track View go? Am I remembering RB and thinking it's BIAB? Because there is no command or button I can find which shows me the tracks (waveforms?) anywhere.

I also need to know please, 2.) how does a person make a note longer in editable notation? I meant to change a quarter note to two eighth notes and missed, accidently clicked the 16th note line instead. It doesn't sound good enough to leave it but nothing I try makes it back into a quarter note. It's really heartening to know I can change my guitar part but less heartening if I can't fix my mistakes. I deleted the dotted eighth but I can't seem to edit the 16th to make it back into a quarter note (all thanks be for that reverb making the note sustain, lol).

3.) The =POPPLTS.STY says it has piano and drums, and the drum track is green, but there's nothing there--nothing at all! I click solo on the drums and don't even hear crickets chirping--nuthin. Is this a fluke, or the way it's supposed to be, or a bug? Am I supposed to find a RD track and insert it somehow? (BIAB 2021, Build 833, everything but the new PAK 11). I don't necessarily need drums but I do need to know if it's normal for tracks to be missing from a style!

4.) Since bar settings doesn't work on my Utility tracks, do I need to go to RB in order to mute the bridge on my MIDI bass part? I don't want to delete those bars because it's not a final decision--I might hate it!--but I can't figure out how else to deal with it. I've tried muting the MIDI altogether and turning the RT Bass back on and I think I like it for the bridge--like it more if I can figure out how to get pick up notes--but I don't want to do anything irreversible.

5.) How do I get a RT instrument to start playing on beat 3 or 4? Do I do that in chord settings? So far that's not working, even though I remembered to unfreeze the track and regenerate it.

6.) Shots--same chord for two bars, how do I get the instruments to come back in before the chord changes? I've tried just writing in the chord again in the second bar, but it doesn't work. (Again, I remembered to unfreeze and regenerate.)

7.) If I like the sound a lot and can't figure out what to mute, but I want a bigger build up at the end, should I consider adding instruments? I already have drums, a drum loop, a synth pad, a piano, a guitar and two basses. I still have to record vocals and two background vocals. How do you find instruments that match the style? In this case it's _DRMAPOP.STY

8.) Is there a way to "double" one of the tracks from the existing style? What do I do to make this happen? Where do I search?

Thank you thank you thank you for any answers you might be able to give me! I really appreciate that y'all haven't given up on me. Sooner or later there's going to be an actual song to listen to.