44. Can Band-in-a-Box® input chords for my melody?

Yes, Band-in-a-Box® 2007 and higher have a feature that will create chord progressions that are based only on your Melody and a genre of your choice. This feature is called the Reharmonist, and can be accessed by pressing the button in the toolbar or by going to Window | Chord Reharmonist Dialog or Window | Auto-generate Chord Reharmonization.

Earlier versions of Band-in-a-Box® do not have this feature, however in Band-in-a-Box® 11 and higher there is a feature that will interpret chords from MIDI files. You could attempt to have Band-in-a-Box® figure out chords for your melody using this feature. To do this, you would first mute all of the tracks except for the Melody track, press the .MID button and save the file to clipboard, then go to File | Import Chords from MIDI file | [Use Clipboard]. Unfortunately though, a single line melody isn't a very good candidate for the MIDI file chord wizard. Band-in-a-Box® needs to have a bit more information in the MIDI file, for example a bass track and some sort of chording track such as piano accompaniment.

One thing you could consider doing is adding some notes to your melody to give Band-in-a-Box® something to work with. Go through your melody and add one or two notes below selected melody notes that you think "sound good" with your melody. After you have done this, save your song as a MIDI file and use File | Import chords from MIDI file as explained above. Of course, this isn't necessary if you use the Reharmonist.


Alyssa - PG Music