PG Music Home Forums PG Music Wishlists Band-in-a-Box Wishlist Bug [Resolved]

Thanks for your reply AudioTrack!

Good first question. I was putting together the commercial and BIAB recordings inside Reaper.
As many know here Reaper is dripping with tons of features. Like BIAB, I don't use Reaper very often either.
When I exported my finished file from Reaper I didn't even realize I was exporting the entire commercial song (muted).
I had isolated the couple of bars that we can hear, onto another track but, but didn't cut out the original whole song.
Thus we got the 7+ minutes of silence.


I understand what you are saying.
I gave Matt a challenge yesterday and I will extend it to you and anyone else who might wish to take it up.

1. Fire up BIAB on your super duper computer system.
2. Punch in the micro chords (E9,F9) (E9,F9) a few bars into the song, using the _JAZVIBE.STY.
3. Play the song.

If you can get the micro chord bar to play smooth triplet eighths I'll be your monkey's uncle.

* Note. This challenge goes out to only those who have a super duper computer system!
If you have a wimpy computer like mine you are ineligible to take part.


I think you are mixing together a few different topic posts I made here.
In one post I was trying to get a style to sound like the band demo they have at their website.
The techie told me that the band demos are not styles and I couldn't use them as such. ie I wouldn't be able to get the same sound in BIAB.

A tech also worked with me in chat on the micro chords, but we didn't get very far with that.

biabman...

ok ill bite..love the fun of trying...lol.
my comments...

need a clarification...

there are a few demos re jazvibe style in stylepicker.
which demo do you want me to use ?...and tempo ??...then ill modify it with triplets....and test.


the problem your experiencing ...and i might get egg on my face as im not a jazzpro...im a rocker... might be how the style was created...maybe pick up notes ?? so your hearing 'bunny hops' instead of straight triplets ??
over the years ive noted some creativity re how the generated tracks are created.
sometimes i have to do subtle editing.

it would be better if you posted the bb sgu somewhere so i and other bb users can test and so we all are working from the same reference song.
gonna be fun.

im just watching euro soccer on fox tv here.

happiness..

om

Thanks again for helping om.
OK I have posted the song with its style. Here is the link.
Micro chord test song

This BIAB song would be an excellent tool to train aspiring jazz pianists wishing to play in the spastic style of Thelonius Monk.

Enjoy your soccer game!

bbman...

dropbox wants me to sign up ...sigh...please use an alternate..so i dont have to go thru the rigmerole.


thanks.

om

Well I like to think I have a "super duper computer system", However, using your file and editing however possible, best I could get was everything except "smooth triplet eighths"

Thanks for trying Dan, I really appreciate it.

Gee I didn't know one needed a Dropbox account to download the file.
I'll see if I can find another site then.

Om,

You don't need to sign up for Dropbox to get the file.
1) Click on "Download" when you first encounter it.
2) Then, when you get to the below sign-in window, click on "Continue with download only" at the bottom of it.

--Noel

Thanks Noel for helping out!

OK, I'm back home today on my reasonably super-duper system.

First, yes, your description of Thelonius Monk is just right to describe the first beat. And that's not a compliment to Monk; I always wondered a bit when I heard his playing. The second beat, I might describe as someone falling down the stairs while playing.

Now, why?

The first thing I see is that you call have been discussing triplets, but the Microchords dialog does not show that. The Chordsheet shows E9,,F9. Note the two commas. This sets up a triplet with the missing middle note.

I didn't yet listen to what you are trying to accomplish, and whether it is supposed to be Swing feel. Give me some time later.

Interestingly, Bar 17 does sound like triplets, but you didn't enter any chords there. I have no idea why that one worked, at least to my ear. Perhaps the program saw the attempted rhythm in bar 16, and although it played that spastically, it "got the idea" to do something similar in bar 17 comping, and got it right. We users can only guess at that one.

Fun little project.

Noel...

thanks i must be getting stupid as i age...

in my defence my wife was dangling in front of me a nice souvlaki dinner...
im a sucker for that...lol

om off to test now...

note bbman...

matt is way better than i at music theory.
i was distracted in music theory class years back by my new lovely music teacher...
yep im a sucker lol.

Thanks again Matt for taking the time on this.

Interesting find. I didn't even notice it.

Allow me to explain. First off, when I'm talking about 'triplets' I'm talking about the potential to play, one, two, or three of the triplet notes per beat. And in ALL the configurations:

one note on first beat
one note on second beat
one note on third beat
two notes (on first and second beat)
two notes (on first and third beat)
two notes (second and third beat)
three notes on first, second and third beats.

In my case, I was hoping for the traditional jazz 'swing eighth notes' to be played by BIAB, where jazzers wouldn't even write anything but eighth notes and the player knows they are to be played as triplet eighths.

You mentioned the E9,,F9 showing in the micro chord dialogue box. At first I was puzzled, but quickly figured it out.
It allows a user to use any of the seven possible configurations I mentioned above.
So in my case, it uses by default the most common (swing eighths). I did not enter the two commas, it put them in itself.


I could give you the entire recording I am working with so you know the feel for I'm aiming for with these micro chords.
But basically the feel is all there in this link I posted earlier, comparing the commercial recording with BIAB's attempt at the triplet chords.

Commercial vs. BIAB micro chords


Yes that was certainly wacky!
I didn't even know there was music in bar 17. I stopped listening before BIAB got that far on playback.
But you are right, isn't that strange? It is playing the triplets correctly in that bar despite there not being any chords entered there!

I think I got it now. In the future, I won't enter any chords or notation in bars where I want micro chords.
I will just think of them and BIAB will work its telepathy magic and bingo, the chords will be there, invisible of course.

bbman.

my comments...

1...this has nothing go do with a pc at this point as it uses miniscule pc resources.
oodles of tracks would of course consume lots of resources.
and if you had midi tracks in bb driving resource hungry orchestra libraries plugins...whole different story.
best bet on your celeron is...if doing large projects...monitor pc resource useage via win task manager.
fyi ive seen people lulled into a false sense of security until one more track or plugin brings the whole house of cards down.
let me stress im not trying to be insulting...ive just seen too many probs in the past with lower end processors.
for example in your daw running lots of imported tracks generated from bb and a bunch of resource heavy plugins dfifferent story.
ie per my desert island story upthread.

2...did you want swing ??

3...ok i didnt have any technical hiccups or stumbles here...
its more related to the arrangement of the chords...
am i correct on the e9 chord you want 'da da da'...and followed by f9...
'da da da' again....ie 2 triplet sets ?? e9 followed by f9 ??
ie e9/e9/e9//f9/f9/f9. in one bar ??...// being seperator.

4...frankly ...and matt is way more expert than i...i write songs by feel.
im bad at theory....but one comment i feel is appropo is i think it might be the way the vibes rt works...ie in some ways this is non rigid freeform jazz ?? and thus tracks are not so rigid ??

5...i feel given your triplet need maybe if you want stricter triplets you might use a piano roll or midi kbd to enter the triplets and then quantise. in this case the midi track would drive a plugin set to vibes.
because in this case...the vibes track when i erased the bb audio track bb didnt ask md to keep the midi track...ie there didnt seem to be an associated mici track..i would try a midi supertrack and see if you can get a better triplets result. because try as i might i couldnt get the strict da da da ie e9 followed by da da da ie f9.
i think its just the way the style works....and a stricter triplet midi track might work better.

now i...lol...await matt to tell me im wrong and out to lunch as he is a guru at this stuff compared to i.
i ducked out of theory class often cos i was dating at the time...
i cant say more on these forums lmao.

now im off t o have another go at your song ...BUT...useing a midi supertrack this time to replace the vibes...

happiness.

om. 🇨🇦🇨🇦. 🇬🇧🇬🇧

happiness.

om

Thanks for confirming what I thought muso.


Yes, definitely, triplet 'swing eighths'.


No you don't understand what I am after.
As I explained to Matt, if there was a melody, as jazzers we would simply write a string of eighth notes and nothing more. All jazzers know they are to be played as 'swing eighths' (triplet feel).
The chords that you see on beats 1 and 2 are meant to be played in a triplet feel.
There are only two chords on each beat, not the three you wrote above.
So BIAB please play these two micro chords as triplet feel!


I have no idea how the vibe tracks work as opposed to any other real track. I do know that Peter's brother Oliver is a jazz musician (maybe Peter is too?) and so they are always conscious of jazz application with their coding.


While midi/midi keyboard etc.might end up giving me the triplet feel I am after you need to know where I am coming from.
First of all, this is not a make or break BIAB song. I could even LEAVE out the triplet chords and it would be OK!
Second, I am more after the principle now, how BIAB works (or doesn't work). If BIAB adds a feature, it should work, out of the box.
Plain and simple.

Boy, I wish I could tell you what's under the hood!

Sorry - I did not mean to imply you entered the two commas. What that all means is that you can enter Microchords in BIAB two ways: you can do it in that dialog box, as you did, or, if you are up for a real challenge, key them in. The educational aspect of that dialog box is that it does show you what the graphical interface will translate into a code you could have typed in. That's how I spotted that it wasn't coded as a triplet. Make sense? That pattern makes a pulse in your measures like this: Note Rest Note Note Rest Note etc. Say those six things evenly in time.

bbman...

re triplets...

ok mate diagram ONE BAR for me so we are on same page ...in a 4/4 as shown by your style choice...
ie the triplets in relation to beats.
btw my example was two triplets to a bar...if im wrong tell me what you want so i can test.

do you want first triplet to start on beat 1 and second triplet to start on beat 3 ?? or something else.

i will CONFIRM ONE THING...i just loaded a piano midi supertrack and by futzing with piano roll editing got better triplets than useing the vibes rt. in this case i tested 2 sets of triplets per bar.

if ive misunderstood your triplets need...
please diagram out what you want triplet wise in one bar.in relation to beats.

overall i feel certain youll get closer to what you want by useing an rt with also underlying midi info which you can change rather than the vibes in the style which doesnt seem to include underlying midi.
hope i make sense. let me emphasise in summary that imho you will need to roll your own triplets via a piano roll or event list or a midi kbd.
ie so you control the outcome.

thats all i got mate...but i would like to do another test once you diagram which beats the triplets fsll on in one bar....cos its not clear to me what you want.

cheers....lotsa fun...lol

om

ps...matt...re note rest note repeated ...this is what i just tested in piano roll with a midi supertrack. its very accurate and more user controllable ??

Right.
I did at first think you meant I had entered two commas instead of one.
But not the way you were thinking.

I started this whole exercise focusing on the main chord entry page. When I first discovered these micro chords (just a week or two ago) I was entering them on the chord page. That's why I kept writing (E9,F9) here, exactly what I was typing in the bars.
It was only later that I learned about the nitty gritty dialogue box. But in the end it didn't help out at all.

So when you started talking about the two commas, I first thought you meant I had entered (E9,,F9) on the chord page.

The main takeaway for me at this point in time, was the discovery by you, that inside bar 17 were the magical triplets I was searching for.
This proves that BIAB IS capable of playing them!

And the best part is that BIAB is capable of playing them on my old, useless, slow, under-powered ancient computer system.

Now we just need to discover HOW to key this in so it will play them WHENEVER WE WANT!

I don't think anyone here has the answer to that yet.

bbman...

see my last reply...

imho only dr gannon can answer how intuitive bb is and why it does one thing one way and fifferent another way per your bar 17 example.
bb i suspect has various tricks and randomness so things dont get robotic ??

om

Here ya go Muso.

Triplet chords

thanks ok so note rest note...etc etc...like matt said.
thats what i did in piano roll...

by the way here in blank bar 17 i got on genning...

da da da daaaaa last note longer

unless dr pg or matt corrects me if were me to get the strict pattern in your image i would get that useing a piano roll or event editor....

lots of fun.

om