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Edit 'expand' is only good in theory IMHO and not a serious option unless using a solo piano/guitar accompaniment. Even then you'd only want to maybe alter the tempo at specific bars, not the whole tune.
the ability to do this is a function of the style more than it is a function of the program. Notes Norton sells styles that do what you want... and I believe there are PG styles that do the same thing. And the ability to make your own styles that solve this problem has been part of the package for years.<...>
Unlike a style you EXPAND in BiaB, the Norton EXPANDED styles are designed to be played EXPANDED and therefore sound MUCH, MUCH better than a non-expanded style that has been forced to expand.
With Norton's EXPANDED styles you can get up to 8 chords in a 4/4 measure of music. You can also get a chord both on the beat and the "pushed" beat before that very same beat. Impossible to do with normal styles.
Plus Norton EXPANDED styles were invented a full decade before PG Music implemented that feature.
Norton Music BIAB innovations;
Norton Music's Band-in-a-Box Innovations
Norton Music invented and implemented these innovations first, years before they were incorporated into the Band-in-a-Box program itself:
* Norton was the first to substitute other instruments into the piano/guitar/strings patch inserting synths, saxes, brass and other instruments
* Norton was the first include "shots" in the styles, years before PG (Norton called them Kicks)
* Norton was the first to make Multi-Styles, years before PG (Norton called them Mix and Match Mega styles)
* Norton was the first to introduce EXPANDED and REDUCED styles, a full decade before PG Music included them
To hear Norton's EXPANDED styles go to http://www.nortonmusic.com/styledemo.html
Notes
Bob "Notes" Norton  Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com
100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Or as was suggested, you could just play it yourself, which isn't an answer in my book when we are talking about improving an auto accompaniment program.
Good point Alan... there are so many ways to use this software that I forget about the ways I don't use it. All of my suggestions apply to the task of using BIAB to rough out a song that will end up as a recording.
Apologiers if my remarks seem to deny credibility to your request.
Pat, no offence taken to your comments which at least didn't stoop to John's somewhat derisory dismissive approach which I was taking issue with. BIAB doesn't need defending in that way because no one is attacking it. I take Mac's stance on these things; if you can't find anything good to say about a suggestion then don't say anything at all.
I hadn't forgotten about Notes Norton's styles and have every respect for his efforts in this area of Expanded styles. Unfortunately he doesn't cover much Modern Jazz (and none of the Roy Hawkesford Modern Jazz Styles he resells are expanded ones). Otherwise I'd be beating a path to his website right now.
Regards
Alan
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Well I see the ability to have a discussion is limited by something I do not understand.
I asked for some clarification, and deemed it nebulous. That's is certainly not derisive. I can do that.
I am interested in lots of types of music. Primarily hebredian stuff, which is often in weird keys. For that, my wife and I spend time working it out, and I do not use band in a box. I also mess with the keys, trying to get gull sounds and things from a piano/flute.
This is tough, because my wife, despite where we are at, finds C or B natural the lowest playable note (with a foot on the flute), and I can no longer hear a lot of the higher notes she could play.
I understand that there is a major problem with making the software do 7/4 so I don't expect it to. But my wife has enough fancy music ed that we can figure that out. (Cronan Bleoghain).
For me, Band in a Box has provided hours of study and help with practice.
NOW to the crux.
If you cannot have a discussion about a topic and carry it to a conclusion personally attacking someone does nothing for your points, nor your ability to back them up. That is just a general comment.
Since the issue was raised, no one has actually given me an example of this deficiency. I'm willing to listen.
I do not claim to know the most music, but I do have a cursory knowledge of some stuff.
Now to throw a herring into the works, or a kipper as grandad would say, I would point out that in many instances, less is more. In making a bass run, an implied chord change or note even, can be more dramatic that actually playing it. This is a concept I work on all the time, drop out some notes or chords in my compositions.
In my brass arrangements I'm even dropping the tied notes in many cases, it just opens up the next notes and allows for a comma to get inserted. A purist would say, wait, you missed a note.
To the audience they just hear something that is more crisp.
I salute any improvements to the software that make it more marketable. Development needs to bear in mind that certain improvements have appeal. I don't know country really, except for what played on the counter in 1960 or so when Mom left the radio on. My daughter asked me if I liked some swift girl last week and I admit, I never heard of her, nor her music.
I read classical music and brass band music magazines, and keyboard stuff, and I study the years 1500 go 1900.
Every year, during testing, I listen to country tracks. Just not my thing.
Well back to Christmas dishes. Ye olde daughter, who's 20, is moving to England for 2 years on a visa, leaving in 2 days. So we did it all early.
Merry Mithros/Christmas or whatever you celebrate. I'm going to try Satin Doll at about 300 bpm tomorrow. Then Favorite Things, which is fun for improv, in that song you can hold for 2 bars and no need to even state a chord. Just come back in, that's fun. In my mind.
John Conley
Musica est vita
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Quote:
I hadn't forgotten about Notes Norton's styles and have every respect for his efforts in this area of Expanded styles. Unfortunately he doesn't cover much Modern Jazz (and none of the Roy Hawkesford Modern Jazz Styles he resells are expanded ones). Otherwise I'd be beating a path to his website right now.
hey Notes! "your mission, if you should decide to accept it is..."
I see great marketing success in a disk containing nothing but expanded styles in a variety of genres... and Alan has already said what he is willing to buy. (Me too, now that I think about it. )
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Thanks, I'll put that on the list as soon as I finish the PA80 collection. Right now I'm being bogged down by mother-in-law problems. She had spinal cord surgery and since I don't punch a clock on days, Leilani and I take the day shift. Her sisters take the night shift. Unfortunately I can't do styles there :-( She is improving and I hope to have 4 new disks released in January. 2 Style disks and 2 Fake disks. BTW, there are some modern jazz rhythms in the EXPANDED department; check out Afro Latin Jazz 1 & 2, Bossa Nova 7, Expanded 16 beat 1, 2, & 3, Expanded Jazz Funk 1 & 2, Fusion 1 & 8, Jazz Cha Cha 3, Jazz HipHop 1, 2, & 3, Jazz Rock 3, New Age 1, 2, 3 & 4, R&B Shuffle (HipHop) 3, 5, & 6 (these may be a little to hard for some jazz tunes), and Smooth Jazz 4 & 5. The number/link to the left of the demo link brings you to the disk that each style is located on. You can audition most and buy them as single styles here: http://www.nortonmusic.com/styledemo.html or you can buy them in money-saving "disk" collections. The reason why single styles are more expensive is that for everything sold, the 'silent partners' take a flat rate and percentage out of it (credit card authorization company, credit card merchant's account, and business bank). Notes
Bob "Notes" Norton Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com
100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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then it's not a chord....if you play chord progressions too fast it merely becomes a melody....just harmonized notes. A chord has to last at least a beat in order for it to be a chord, depending on tempo. And even so, you can play as many 'chords' as you like if you halven the tempo, so if the tempo is 130 bpm, record at 65 and put all the chords you want, but the thing is, even though the tempo is 'half', the frequency of the chords has to be slow enough for them to be chords.
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Sorry to disagree. I have complied and released 29 fake disks and am working on two more to be released early next year. All but one were entered using standard off-the-shelf fake books published by companies like Hal Leonard, Warner Brothers, Alfred, etc., and quite a few of the songs could not be played correctly without expanding them as they had more than one chord per beat. Even many simple chord progressions like these publicdomain ones cannot be done without EXPANDED styles (please excuse the use of the lame sounding computer sound card for the voices). There are other, better examples, but PG Music asks that we do not put any copyrighted chord progressions in this forum, so these public domain demos will have to do: http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/68_blues_2e.mp3http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/68_rock_1e.mp3http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/afro_pop_2e.mp3http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/ballad_5e.mp3http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/club_dance.mp3http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/ex_jazz_funk_1.mp3http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/open_rock_2e.mp3http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/fatback_3e.mp3http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/heavy_rock.mp3http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/jazz_rock_3e.mp3http://www.nortonmusic.com/mp3/smooth_jazz_5e.mp3I don't think the examples of having one chord per half beat in any of these makes a melody, and to get a chord on any beat and the upbeat before that same beat you simply can't do it without an expanded style. Notes ♫
Bob "Notes" Norton Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com
100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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Again, there is no list of songs in the "American Standards" that have chord progressions requiring more resolution than 4 chord changes per 'unit', 'cell', or 'measure'. I don't think I need to open any book. I do have all the Mantooth books and most of them are dog eared and falling apart from use, I something from them every day. I thought at first maybe Elmer's tune, but I pulled that out and I'm just remembering my embellishing some runs, but it's just a shell game at that point.
Several songs in my memory ring a bell but each time I check one out it's just my brain making up more or less chromatic things that imply chords.
That said things differ when you get to 12/8 or some other time sigs you don't find often in the standard repetoire.
John Conley
Musica est vita
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A lot of 6/8 and 12/8 songs have 8th note chords, which especially don't work if implemented as "swing 4/4", which many of the 6/8 tunes do. You can do it if you enter it into BIAB as two 3/4 bars, but of course notation suffers then.
I've seen 8th note chords show up quite often in the bar before the song modulates to a different key, as well as a pickup note into the next bar. In this case, in BIAB, the problem is not needing more than 4 chords per bar, but that fact that you can only push a chord ahead in time, not delay it. So a song that just needed one chord on beat one and then an 8th note pickup chord on beat 4 1/2 resolving to one chord on beat one again, can't be done in BIAB. that's just two chords in the whole bar, but it can't be done.
Ideally, I'd like to see 8th note resolution, but I'd happy if in addition to "pushing" chords ahead, we could also "pull" them back, as well.
John Laptop-HP Omen I7 Win11Pro 32GB 2x2TB, 1x4TB SSD Desktop-ASUS-I7 Win10Pro 32GB 2x1.5TB, 2x2TB, 1x4TB SATA BB2024/UMC404HD/Casios/Cakewalk/Reaper/Studio One/MixBus/Notion/Finale/Dorico/Noteworthy/NI/Halion/IK http://www.sus4chord.com
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I like the push ,pull idea John !
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Been reading this thread with interest. I can see all sides of this but to me it boils down to what exactly is someone like Alan trying to accomplish here? Is it originals or covers? We've all known for years that Biab is not what should be used to create an exact cover of anything. It's an autoaccompaniment program used to create backing tracks, not covers. If it's originals then again it's primarily used as a sketchpad to help someone get the structure, basic chords and melody. Once that's done it's time to play it for a producer and whatever musicians you want to use and start paying for studio time. Or transfer it into your high end DAW and start putting it together for real.
As for me, I'm sort of with John I do a lot of jazz and rarely run into that and I never use Biab for really complex tunes. I admit that's because I can never get them to sound good which is what Alan's point is. Maybe it could be made to do that sort of thing better but for me Biab would not be my first choice anyway, I would use Real Band or Sonar.
I completely understand the wish for Biab to be more functional, more professional and be able to generate a polished, studio quality product that's fully ready for marketing. To date, it's never been that and I personally doubt there are enough users that would appreciate that level of technical sophistication. There's enough comments/complaints that Biab is too complex as it is and this kind of thing could make that problem worse.
Perhaps PG could create two versions, Standard (what we have now)and Pro? Would they make enough money from selling the Pro version to warrant the development costs? Who knows, that's above my pay grade. Maybe with all the enhancements they keep coming up with twice a year they may already be on a long term path to create that Pro version.
Bob
Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.
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Band-in-a-Box for Windows
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I don't think any auto-accompaniment software product can ever make polished arrangements ready for mastering. At least with foreseeable technology. Why? It is auto-accompaniment's nature to be generic. Each style should fit a large number of songs or else why write the style? For example: By request of one of my customers I wrote a style for the Elvis Presley song, "Don't Be Cruel". It came out well for the state of the StyleMaker at the time I did it, but there was one problem. It was basically only good for "Don't Be Cruel". Using the style on anything else made it sound like "Don't Be Cruel" because of that signature guitar motif. So why write a song-specific style when you can use Sonar, Cubase, PTPro or any other sequencer to create the song much easier than you can make it work in an auto-accompaniment program like BiaB? This is one reason why I prefer MIDI styles. I can export the good BiaB output as a MIDI file, import it into a sequencer and then massage it by adding song specific motifs, re-arranging parts, exaggerating the groove (or inserting it in the styles that use the drum grid), and adding a great number of musical enhancements that I am not able to do with the Real Tracks. With a half hour or so of tweaking, I can turn the good output from BiaB and turn it into something truly excellent in a MIDI sequencer. And after all, I did buy BiaB to play with it. If I wanted something per-recorded that I couldn't play with, I'd buy a karaoke file. Still, there are parts of BiaB that are antiquated, and I suppose stay that way because PG is very interested in keeping backwards compatibility with previous versions. The styles I wrote in 1992 still work on BiaB today - and that's a good thing. But I would really like to see things like: - Resolution of at least 240 ppq
- The ability to build any chord at all via a custom dialog box that lets you pick or omit the root, third, fifth and any/all extensions
- Real crescendos, dimuendos, accerandos, ritardandos, and fermatas
- Native ability for other time signatures so that 6/8, 5/4, and other meters don't have to be forced into the BiaB grid
- More tracks (instruments) so that I could make a 7 voice band
- The ability to tie certain parts together in the StyleMaker so that if one pattern is chosen, other patterns could be tied to it (for example in a straight 8 style, if the drum pattern was set for a triplet roll, other instruments would also play triplet patterns for that bar
- Support for triplets of 2 beat duration (like quarter note triplets in 4/4 time)
- variable length endings that could actually follow chords entered for that ending
- Both long and short (or major and minor) drum rolls and the ability to enter them when desired
- an option to go from the A substyle to the B substyle without a drum roll
- a requirement that all BiaB users buy Norton Music disks <HUGE
 GRIN> - and many, many more - which I have entered into the wish list in the past.
Some of the above can be accomplished with my EXPANDED styles, but having them native in BiaB would be a good thing. Personally, I think Band-in-a-Box plus a good MIDI sequencer plus a good MIDI synthesizer or sound module is an unbeatable combination. I find all 3 tools essential to making good music. Insights and incites by Notes ♫
Bob "Notes" Norton Norton Music
https://www.nortonmusic.com
100% MIDI Super-Styles recorded by live, pro, studio musicians for a live groove
& Fake Disks for MIDI and/or RealTracks
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Ask sales and support questions about Band-in-a-Box using natural language.
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Band-in-a-Box® 2024 German for Windows is Here!
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Handy flash drive tip: Always try plugging in a USB device the wrong way first? If your flash drive (or other USB plug) doesn't have a symbol to indicate which way is up, look for the side with a seam on the metal connector (it only has a line across one side) - that's the side that either faces down or to the left, depending on your port placement.
Update your Band-in-a-Box® 2024 for Windows® Today!
Update your Band-in-a-Box® 2024 for Windows for free with build 1111!
With this update, there's more control when saving images from the Print Preview window, we've added defaults to the MultiPicker for sorting and font size, updated printing options, updated RealTracks and other content, and addressed user-reported issues with the StylePicker, MIDI Soloists, key signature changes, and more!
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A few excerpts:
"The Tracks view is possibly the single most powerful addition in 2024 and opens up a new way to edit and generate accompaniments. Combined with the new MultiPicker Library Window, it makes BIAB nearly perfect as an 'intelligent' composer/arranger program."
"MIDI SuperTracks partial generation showing six variations – each time the section is generated it can be instantly auditioned, re-generated or backed out to a previous generation – and you can do this with any track type. This is MAJOR! This takes musical experimentation and honing an arrangement to a new level, and faster than ever."
"Band in a Box continues to be an expansive musical tool-set for both novice and experienced musicians to experiment, compose, arrange and mix songs, as well as an extensive educational resource. It is huge, with hundreds of functions, more than any one person is likely to ever use. Yet, so is any DAW that I have used. BIAB can do some things that no DAW does, and this year BIAB has more DAW-like functions than ever."
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