83. When I add a harmony to my MIDI melody track, why are some of the melody notes not harmonized?

There are a couple of possibilities.

  • You may have added or recorded pitch bend data to the Melody track. The harmony routines are set to "not harmonize" when pitch bend data follows, since they would need to be bending those harmony notes as well. Modulation Wheel would have a similar effect. You can look in the event list window to see if these controllers are present. You can use the Record Filter in the Record Melody dialog if you wish to prevent specific MIDI messages from being recorded.
  • Some of the notes may have a very short duration. Band-in-a-Box® will only harmonize notes that are greater than a certain duration. You can set your own threshold:

    1. Go to Harmony | Melody Harmony (Select).
    2. Select the harmony of interest.
    3. Click the [Edit] button.
    4. Click the [More] button.
    5. Adjust the "No Harmony if duration is less than" setting.

    Note that this will modify the harmony permanently unless you change it back or reinstall Band-in-a-Box®. You can copy the harmony to one of the "empty" harmony slots and make your modifications there if you wish. That way you don't have to worry about modifying the factory harmonies. You should make a backup of the DEFAULT.HAR file located in the BB folder if you do this. That way, if the file is overwritten, you don't lose your custom harmonies.


Alyssa - PG Music