Hello, I am quite short in this forum here. My question, which I would like to ask the more experienced users of the software BIAB, is: What setting do I have to make in BIAB so that I can compose a song via BIAB with my Kronos? In general, is there a possibility to get directly the chords played on the Kronos on BIAB? Or must there be an intermediate (e.g. with MuseScore) step beforehand?
Hello de Nobbi, welcome to the forum.
Not sure if this is useful but this is my method for composing/recording with BiaB.
In step 5, I record either my bass guitar or my Korg Krome.
1. In BiaB build your backing track
2. In BiaB, mute the unwanted instruments
3. Export the backing track to your hard drive as an MP3 file
4. Import the MP3 file into your DAW (For me it's Studio One)
5. In your DAW, play the MP3 file while recording your instrument on a separate stem
6. In your DAW, mix the BiaB backing track and your instrument recording to your liking
7. Export the mix to MP3, WAV or whatever format you want
If I understand this question correctly, a Kronos is a high-end Korg keyboard. It has MIDI out, and you would connect it via MIDI or USB to whatever music interface you use on the computer running BIAB. Then, in BIAB, go to Options, MIDI Driver and select your Korg as the Input device. The Korg may require a patch map that, once loaded in BIAB, would allow you to select the higher bank patches (sounds). There are some Korg patch maps here but I don't know how close they may be to your model:
https://www.pgmusic.com/support_miscellaneous.htmBIAB has a nice utility called Windows menu, MIDI Chord Detection that can recognize what chord you are playing on your keyboard, one at a time. It offers up to four possible chord names based on what you play, and you can select one to enter it onto the BAIB Chordsheet.
If this answer is anywhere near on the right track, please confirm and let us know what it is you need to know to go further.
Hi Matt, foremost, thank you very much for the information. I have of course already experimented in advance (i.e. before I posted my request in the forum) with all kinds of clicks in the various menus of the software BIAB. There, of course, I find all Midi-enabled devices that are connected to my notebook. Besides my Kronos, that's a Roland Fantom 8, a MIO4 from Iconnectivity and a Steinberg UR44. All neatly listed when I click "Options / MIDI Audio Drive Settings". But I don't want to succeed in getting a played chord into the composition window of BIAB. Maybe this doesn't work with the Kronos or the Fantom.... for technical reasons, but it could just as well be that I'm being too stupid. There are days when I could throw all the stuff out the window....but then I would be missing something again...
Ok, so this is not a question about connecting your keyboard to BIAB. Could you tell us exactly what you expect to do? It might be that BIAB doesn’t do what you want.
Are you possibly trying to establish if BiaB can operate as an 'Arranger' with your keyboard connected, similar to Yamaha Tyros?
Hello Matt, hello AudioTrack,
what AudioTrack wrote actually sums it up quite well. My intention is to somehow get my own songs over to BiaB. If possible, BiaB should recognize my chords and display them accordingly. If this works, I could choose different styles of music for my band, so that we would have a clue how we could play it and how it should sound.
Just now I copied Midi or XML files from my app iRealPro (just finished songs to test) to my USB stick, then opened them with BiaB and played them in different music styles. This worked reasonably well.
I imagine I can get similar results with MuseScore (MuseScore recognizes my Kronos keyboard).
It would just be quite cumbersome.
That’s helpful.
This isn’t what you want but perhaps it will be useful. MuseScore is unique among music notation programs because it reads BIAB song files ( .MGU etc. ) directly.
Ok, then I must have made some kind of operator error when using MuseScore. For example, I can open the music.xml files that iRealPro gives me..... directly with BiaB. But everything I have saved with MuseScore to date, I could not get to work on BiaB. Oh well, looks like I still have a rocky road ahead of me. Hopefully I won't lose interest in the whole thing prematurely. For now, thanks for your help. I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Hi de Nobbi,
Okay. If I understand this, and I think I do, you'd like to sit down at your Kronos or Fantom or whatever, and play in your music and have BIAB figure out your chords. It would, ideally, display them in the main window and then you could pick a style to go with the song, and audition several styles to determine which might work with your band.
Great idea.
Not happening, at least not directly. I've been away from BIAB for a while now, so I'm not up on the latest features, but a while ago, we had something called the Audio Chord Wizard (IIRC) and it could analyze an audio file and extract the chords from that, but it is rather limited for what you want to do.
My recommendation is to use BIAB the way it was designed, which is to manually enter the chords for your song, and then select the styles you want.
The reasons to do this are many:
1. You'll get the chord you want, including slash chords or specific inversions.
2. You'll get it exactly where you want it, in the bar, time wise.
3. You'll be able to select the correct key for notation, if you want to have notation to print out.
4. You can cut and paste from your basic chord progression and then alter the chords in the various choruses after the first one.
I'm sure there are more reasons, that others may contribute, or you'll find yourself. But, to actually sit down and play your chords and have BIAB recognize them isn't what the program is designed to do. It is probably faster to actually put the chords in from the computer keyboard than trying to enter them from the music keyboard and then having to go back and modify and correct what you're getting.
Gary
I think you could set your Kronos to output chords in root position….. then play chords on the Kronos and have an app that converts a MIDI note into a keyboard macro…… set the macro to Cntrl-Enter, then immediately you have played a chord on the Kronos, you press the MIDI note that triggers the Cntrl-Enter Macro. That should do what you want.