PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows mMaj7 chords (audio)

The "Fix sour notes / fix tuning" feature should not be confused with song generation features. The main reason we are talking about it is that you accidentally had it turned on as a track setting for one of your tracks. This feature processes the audio wave data that has already been generated. It uses extremely sophisticated algorithms to modify the data, and is able to adjust the tuning of individual notes in a polyphonic track. This is a very difficult task which is why it is not perfect and there can be artifacts. It is best used, as I think I mentioned earlier, when you target specific sections of your track rather than using it is a 'global' track setting.

Natural Arrangements is a Band-in-a-Box setting that can affect the phrases that are used when generating RealTracks. This is a global setting (in Options | Preferences | Arrange) or a song-specific setting (in Song Settings). The default is ON, since out of the box, and when using typical chords for the style you are working with, overall the RealTracks tracks generated will tend to sound most realistic - i.e. faithful to what a real pro musician would play when reading the chord chart. Also there will tend to be more variety, since there is more material to draw from. There used to be a flash message notifying you when you first generated your song, how many of the chords were re-interpreted based on this setting, however there were some people who didn't like the flash message and requested that we remove it.

If you have a LOT of chords in your song that have specific extensions, and you want Band-in-a-Box to always play those specific notes in your chord, you should turn N.A. OFF. Some prefer this set globally. MIDI tracks (that is tracks made using the StyleMaker, not MIDI SuperTracks) do not have this feature, but they work much differently than RT's. With MIDI you can throw in any note into a chord, but it's not going to be as realistic (not matter what your synth is), since it's just the computer playing samples of various note pitches and not a musician playing the music on their instrument in that style.

If you have a FEW chords in your song that you want played with specific extensions, then that's where you can get into some of the tweaks that we've been talking about. There are several different approaches, which is because there are lots of different things that Band-in-a-Box can do. Let's say you have one bar you want to "fix". Some of the things mentioned in this thread are

- You could regenerate a specific bar with N.A. turned off. (easiest) (Requires you to freeze your tracks)
- Similar to above, but you could generate a second track with N.A. turned off and then use Bar Settings to mute/un-mute bars as needed.
- You could use Playable RealTracks to insert specific MIDI notes in your track. The MIDI notes are played using samples that are supposed to match the RealTracks as closely as possible. You can use this to add some specific notes to a chord.
- You could use the Audio Edit window on your track and Fix Tuning (song chords mode) at that bar (requires the track to be frozen or converted to an audio track)

There are probably lots of other things you can do as well. Probably as many as there are people reading this forum.