Recently I can across Jacob Collier and his reharmonizations. He uses a lot of polychords. Since I did not find anything about polychords in the help section of BB, I wonder if someone has found a way around this?

No disrespect for any of the great things that BiaB delivers, but Jacob Collier is on another planet when it comes to this type of unique harmonization.

Polychords of course consist of two separate chord structures that may initially appear to contradict each other, e.g. an Eb chord in the right hand played over a D minor chord in the left hand.

They are usually written as the two chord names, one above the other such as

Eb
___
Dm

I'm not aware that BiaB chord implementation supports polychord entry. Others may know more.

This kind of data entry is not supported. You should go to the Wishlist. +1 for Jacob Collier.

The closest you can come is using a / root (single note) for bass.

I also use the Window menu, MIDI chord detection feature to enter complex chords and see if they can be spelled conventionally. This is a superb tool that is overlooked in BIAB.

Thanks Matt! I have put it on the wish list.

I think I at least want to try to get to this "another planet".

Yes, and definitely I support every effort that everyone makes to further improve

As do I.

Tonnie, there are a couple of workarounds to accomplish polychords. If you are using MIDI you could add the right or left hand chord via the notation mode or the piano roll view mode.

If you are using RealTracks you would generate a track(s) using one chord, drag and drop that track(s) into a DAW, then repeat the process using the other chord. Using the polyphonic version of Melodyne in your DAW you would delete, copy, move, etc the notes until you get to your desired results. This could be a very time consuming and tedious task.

You have my support on the wish list.

Not to derail this thread, but you come up with the greatest one-liners, and this tops it for this year, without question

An even easier workaround is to generate the song with one chord, freeze the instruments you want using that chord, then type in the other chord and generate again. The frozen tracks will keep the first chord and the unfrozen ones will use the second one. You can stack all sorts of crazy chords against each other.

Also, +1 Jacob Collier is an alien. Not remotely my kind of music, but holy moly that kid is out of this world!




Absolutely the best!

With respect, Simon, I would not expect that method to work well. You would have both chords across all registers, resulting in a musical mess. Polychords have one chord as the lower sounding chord, and one as the higher.

Matt, my suggestion does roughly the same thing as MarioD's suggestion, with the exception being that his method you could have the same instrument playing both chords (albeit in the same register)- it would be split up over at least two instruments with my method. Basically, you could have a guitar playing in one chord and a piano and bass playing in another. Of course some instruments will conflict with each other, but give it a shot and see what works!

I replied in the wishlist to this:
I only had a quick look at these, but:
How would you work it in ? All the realtracks so far are recorded normal chords.
What format would these be entered in the chord sheet, with a D-CMaj7 D-Ab-G D\CMaj7 D\Ab\G ?
How would the other instruments without polychords read them ?
How many polychords would you need to record along with the other chords in a realtrack ?
Maybe use midi that can duplicate the notes of one chord being played in the recorded material and fit them into the other omitting existing, and have another chord sheet layer for these chords ?????
Have you tried this with a MidiSuperTrack ?

I agree it merits experimentation.

The bass would have to play the ‘lower’ chord.

And I agree if you froze all the tracks except one, it would have a better chance of working. I wonder, if the guitar for example was the only instrument given the ‘upper’ chord, and you raised it an octave, would that be better?

I haven't had an opportunity to experiment, but I also wonder about unison. I would presume that the chords making up the upper and lower poly chord might not be played in sync, and that may contribute to a less than desirable result. I think that Poly Chords are generally played as unisons.

I was just going to add that about freezing, you would have different playing in one chord than the other, that's why I said about midi.

Impro-Visor in free
55. Slash Chords and Polychords
Slash chords (which specify a bass note after the slash) are indicated with a forward slash, such as D/E.

Polychords (one chord stacked atop another) are indicated with a backward slash, such as D\Bb.

Biab Chords to ImproVisor

There is a nice video on YouTube about a.o. Oscar Peterson playing a poly-chord over the usual Ebmaj7 at first full bar of Misty. He plays D over Eb!