PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows BIAB2019 - Struggles Muting/Unmuting The Solo Track

Thanks for your suggestions. I had worked this out. Since the form is long and one chorus was so many measures where I thought I had the soloist recorded it seemed like I was fooling myself. At least whatever issues I had cleared up after I both manually generated the solo and then edited the bar properties to mute/unmute.

I did find out the trick to measure numbering. Where repeated choruses of a measure start on the first shown measure of the first chorus. I didn't really get this at first (I thought measure 1 of chorus #1 -- but if you have an intro of 4 bars then the first measure of chorus #1 is actually 5).

Although non-linear songs are tricky, I had already figured it out. If I wanted the solo to start after playing the head which took up all of chorus #1 but I wanted some overlap - lets say starting at the last measure of the head (one measure early from chorus #2) then what I did was told the soloist to manually generate a solo starting at chorus #1 measure 68 (last measure of 1st 64 measure chorus with 4 bar intro) then solo for 65 measures which would cover through the last beat of chorus #2.

The combination of manually telling where to put solo data and using the bar edit to mute or fade or unmute seemed to work out fine. I did get the guitarist to fade out in the last measure of the intro and then come back after I played the head once and stop playing after a few rides leaving room for my own solo.

That said - as you suggested, it would have been a lot easier to deal with measures if the whole song was linear. It would have also helped another song where I found out one chorus has an extra 8 bars compared to the rest. I solved this by using different endings but it was difficult to construct the right change vs. just inserting 8 measures then cutting/pasting to fill in those chords and calling it a day. So I'll carry your suggestion into my next project now that I'm finally digging more deeply into a tool I've had on the shelf for so long.

As far as audio edit - I had explored that (before) to see if it would play any role into visualizing the muting/unmuting that the bar edit was doing. And after your suggestion I've taken another look at it. I just can't see how it would help editing the soloist track. It seems like audio edit is for the audio track which I have not used. So if I look at audio edit I see flat lines at "~" which is silence. I guess maybe what you're getting at is that I could somehow take my soloist track and print audio (mute all but the soloist) then import this into the audio track and then use the audio editor to pseudo-conduct the soloist. At least this would provide the visualization I didn't see in the other method - but it's a lot of steps and prone to running into the other issue I have where my BIAB install directory is used for temp files of audio manipulations. And this is gets slow. Although there are workarounds for some of this - it's more overhead even than managing the non-linear song form which I've finally thought-to-have figured out.

I will be upgrading to a new version since there are features particularly in the granularity of pushes/etc in newer versions that I value. So probably next year-ish I'll have overall a sharper tool to utilize that may (or may not) remedy some of the perceived clunkiness of some features.

I'm really digging being able to construct a show of backing tracks for a 1-person performance. The ability to add some good-enough-for-the-gig solos adds great variety to add another layer of variety. This is always what I saw using BIAB for and I'm finally doing it.

Right now I've got the entire show "in the can" except after reviewing the hour+ of music I assembled to an mp3 I noticed a few endings aren't right. A few where the last chord is wrong and a few where I should probably tag and do something different. So that will be my final polish if I get around to it before charting up what I need to in order to come in at the right spots. And chart up a few tunes I'm not familiar with. Endless fun - really. Such a privilege to be a musician.