Love-to-see: Midi controlled practice loops bar by bar - 02/23/21 05:55 PM
Something I'd like to see that would greatly aid practicing, both for learning to improvise, and for those of us that play a fiddle/violin/viola, to practice our intonation:
Suppose you type in a chord progression in BIAB, say one chord per bar. You pick a key and style, and set probably a slow tempo (for practicing), and then it would be cool if BIAB could be put into a mode where it loops on the first bar, and keeps looping on that bar until you press a pre-determined button on a midi-controller, (the midi-controller would most likely be connected to a footswitch -- I'm building such a controller for myself, for example), and then BIAB would move to the next bar and loop on that. It could go round and round to all the bars in the song this way, ultimately looping back to the beginning bar ad nauseum.
Why this would be useful: Say you are learning pentatonic scales for a song in the key of G, and have say a I-vi-VI-V progression (or whatever) loaded in. The first bar would play a G chord with whatever backing tracks you chose. You could then play around with the G pentatonic scale against that "G chord" context, which let's you train your ears and fingers to how the notes you are playing would sound with a full band behind you. And then when you want to move on, you press the aforementioned button, and BIAB would move on the Em chord in the next bar, and you can practice its pentatonic scale to your hearts content, press the footswitch again, and now you are on to the C chord, etc.
Currently I practice by using BIAB with chord progressions that loop many, many times. But I can't control when the next chord comes, so I usually have to slow the tempo way, way, down as a compromise. Being able to manually switch chords would be extremely useful.
Suppose you type in a chord progression in BIAB, say one chord per bar. You pick a key and style, and set probably a slow tempo (for practicing), and then it would be cool if BIAB could be put into a mode where it loops on the first bar, and keeps looping on that bar until you press a pre-determined button on a midi-controller, (the midi-controller would most likely be connected to a footswitch -- I'm building such a controller for myself, for example), and then BIAB would move to the next bar and loop on that. It could go round and round to all the bars in the song this way, ultimately looping back to the beginning bar ad nauseum.
Why this would be useful: Say you are learning pentatonic scales for a song in the key of G, and have say a I-vi-VI-V progression (or whatever) loaded in. The first bar would play a G chord with whatever backing tracks you chose. You could then play around with the G pentatonic scale against that "G chord" context, which let's you train your ears and fingers to how the notes you are playing would sound with a full band behind you. And then when you want to move on, you press the aforementioned button, and BIAB would move on the Em chord in the next bar, and you can practice its pentatonic scale to your hearts content, press the footswitch again, and now you are on to the C chord, etc.
Currently I practice by using BIAB with chord progressions that loop many, many times. But I can't control when the next chord comes, so I usually have to slow the tempo way, way, down as a compromise. Being able to manually switch chords would be extremely useful.
