I'd like to know a bit more about the chords that can be used in BiaB. After I finished writing a new song with the melody and all the chords entered into MuseScore yesterday, I exported an XML file of that song, which I then opened in BiaB. But when I watched BiaB play through the arrangement that I had subsequently created, I noticed that a couple of chord names had changed. This isn't the first time I've seen this happen, but it is the first time I decided to investigate this issue further to obtain a better understanding of what BiaB was doing with my chords and why, etc.

The two chords that changed are as follows: A2 changed to Asus2, and Cadd9 changed to Cadd2. Now, I know that Asus2 is not the same as A2, so I changed it in BiaB, and BiaB accepted my change. I also know that Cadd9 is sort of the same as Cadd2 but not exactly the same. So, I tried to change this chord as well, but BiaB prevented me from doing this. (I had previously encountered the same issue in another song when I tried to change an Emadd2 chord to an Emadd9 chord.) As I thought about this, I realized that the C2 and Csus2 chords are also very similar to (if not the same) as the Cadd9 chord. This compelled me to do a search on Google to find out the technical details on these chords so that I could determine whether or not I should accept BiaB's chord substitution. As a result, I found the following article, which does a very good job of covering all the bases on these chords:

https://passingchords.com/c2-csus2-cadd2-c9-cadd9

I also found the following page on PG Music's Support page (under Tutorials) that lists all the chords that BiaB, RB, and PowerTracks recognizes:

https://www.pgmusic.com/tutorial_chordlist.htm

When I read through all the chords on this page, I noticed that the Csus2, Cadd2, and the Cadd9 chords weren't listed but C2 is. According to the chords article, the C2 chord has the same notes as the Cadd2 and the Cadd9 chords have, but the C2 chord is identical only to the Cadd9 chord because the notes in the Cadd2 and the Cadd9 are in a different sequence. I also discovered from the chords article that Csus2 isn't the same as C2, Cadd2 or Cadd9. This makes sense because the A2 chord isn't the same as the Asus2 chord. However, because I have used an Asus2 chord before in BiaB, and because BiaB automatically substitutes an Asus2 chord for an A2 chord (as I mentioned above), I would think that a Csus2 chord would be available for use as well.

Does anyone have any thoughts on all of this?


Tom Levan (pronounced La-VAN)
BiaB 2024 Win UltraPAK Build 1109, Xtra Style PAKs 1-11, RB 2024, Windows 10 Pro 64-bit, Intel Q9650 3 GHz, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD & 2 TB HDD, Tracktion 6 & 7 (freebies), Cakewalk, Audacity, MuseScore 2.1 & 3.4, Synthesizer V