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#878412 01/31/26 07:25 AM
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Am trying to become more familiar with ‘A2 Transpose’ within ‘Melodist’. My understanding is that it will transpose the second ‘A’ section of ‘AABA’ song form. However, despite being switched on by default, it hasn’t ever seemed to have done anything.

Have checked ‘Transpose’ settings in ‘Options’ but nothing there makes any obvious difference.

BIAB Manual states:

A2 transpose: In songs with an AABA form, it is common for the second “a” section to be transposed. For example, the first “a” section might be in the key of Eb, and the second would be transposed up to the key of Gb. Melodists store these settings, and some Melodists are set to transpose the A2 sections. If you don’t want to allow Melodists to transpose the form in this way, set the A2 transpose to none. If set to “section plus,” it will transpose the A2 section, and might transpose 2 bars early or 2 bars late. The song will only be transposed if the particular Melodist is set to transpose the section.

I’m not clear what is meant by ‘Melodists’ – is it the melodies available in Melodist, or something else? If it does refer to these melodies is there any way of knowing which ones are set to carry out transposition, or if they can be edited to do this?

Can anyone shine some light on this please? Am quite happy to accept, though, that it may well be a case of ‘pilot error’!

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How I understand this setting...

1) The melodist creates MIDI melodies on the Melody track.
2) If you create a song that is designed in the AABA format (each of the four sections has 8 bars = 32 bars in total), the second A section (A2) that begins at bar 9 will be created in a different key from the original key.

The B section (which begins at bar 17) then follows (it may or may not be in a different key depending on the setting chosen for the A2 transpose feature. After that, the final A section (A3, beginning at bar 25) will be played..


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Noel,

Thanks for this. Think I'm now fairly clear about how it should operate, but the difficulty is getting it to do anything!

As test, set up 32 bar piece in key of C. Each bar is set to 'C' chord to make any changes easily apparent. My assumption would be the chords in bars 9 to 16 would change as a result of Melodist transpose operation, but nothing seems to happen - any thoughts?

On a related matter, thought the 'Transpose' function ('Edit / Transpose / Transpose From .. To') would perform something similar, but - using the above example - setting it for bars 9 to 16 with transpose from 'C' to 'D', results in bars 9 to 24 changing to 'D'. Am I doing something wrong or is there perhaps a 'bug'?

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Hi Alan,

I haven't played with this feature before. From fiddling around with it today, I have found that I can get success if I follow the plan below.

1) Have only a C chord in bar 1. Leave the rest of the chordsheet empty.

2) Enter into the Melodist and select the "Melodist Editor | Edit" (#1 on the image below). This will open the Editor window.

3) In the Editor window, set the likelihood that A2 transposition occurs to 100% (#2). (This is saying that you want transposition to always occur. By default, the setting is 30% which means that transpositions will be performed a bit less than a third of the time.) Close the Editor window by clicking OK.

4) Back in the Melodist window, set Form and A2 Transpose as shown on the image (#3).

5) Click on the Chords and Melody button (#4) to automatically set the settings appropriate for creating chords and melody.

6) Select a Melodist from the list on the left and click OK.

This should give you something worthwhile.

[Linked Image - Only viewable when logged in]

I hope this helps.
--Noel

★ my latest song using BIAB and Synth V: A World Of Wonder


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Noel,

Many thanks for taking the time to produce this helpful response. Hadn't noticed the Melodist 'Edit' button before, which is key to it all. Curious that the 'likelihood' has a percentage figure - one would think you would either want this feature or not, rather than a low percentage chance of it happening - mine was set to 15%!

However, all is well now!

Allan

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I'm glad it's all up and running smile When you are satisfied that things are all going well, would you mind marking the thread resolved? It helps others understand that this is a useful thread to read. (You probably know this already... the original post in this thread will have a RESOLVED button that can be clicked.)


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