Audio Chord Wizard

The Audio Chord Wizard can be accessed from the Audio Edit window.

First, import an audio file with the Audio menu item.

 

Next, select Audio Chord Wizard from the Audio menu.  This will open the Audio Edit window with the Audio Chord Window marker mode selected.

 

Alternatively, you can press the [Audio Edit] button, and when the Audio Edit window opens, press the [Marker Mode] button on its toolbar and select Audio Chord Wizard from the menu.

The first task is to locate bar lines in the audio so that the Audio Chord Wizard can detect chords accurately and the audio will play in sync with the Band-in-a-Box song.

  You can add bar lines with the [Add Bar Line] button or with the L key on your keyboard.  A bar line will be placed at the audio edit cursor or at the playback cursor if the song is currently playing.

  The [Add/Delete Bar Lines] button menu has options to add bar lines based on your song structure or tempo.  You can delete all the existing bar lines or only the ones within the highlighted region.

  If “Auto Marking” is enabled, then Band-in-a-Box will automatically add and arrange bar lines based on the bar lines you have added manually.  The “auto” bar lines will show in light blue, and the “user” bar lines will show in purple.  You can change these colors in the Audio Edit Settings dialog if you want.

  If “Auto Analysis” is enabled, then Band-in-a-Box will re-analyze the chords in the audio whenever you add or move a bar line, or when you edit the audio data.  Keep this setting disabled if you prefer to set all bar lines first (i.e. establishing tempo), and then analyze the chords when you are done.

Bar lines can be moved with the mouse.  Just click and drag the thumb control at the bottom.  If you move an “auto” bar line, it will become a “user” bar line. 

You can also right-click on the thumb control to get a context menu with options to switch a marker type (“user” or “auto”), delete the bar line, or set the time signature for the bar.  The menu also shows you the tempo of the bar, based on the time signature of the bar and the position of the next bar line.

When you add or move bar lines, Band-in-a-Box will automatically make a tempo map, so your song is in sync with the Audio track.

Any changes you make in the Audio Chord Wizard mode are undo-able. 

  Use the [Analyze] button to analyze the chords in the audio.  The chords detected in the audio will be written into the Chord Sheet.  You don’t need to do this if you have “Auto Analysis” enabled, but you might want to if you have erased or made changes to the chords in the Chord Sheet.

When you open the Chord Sheet, you will see the Audio Chord Wizard has entered the chords and the tempo map.

If “MIDI to Soloist Tracks” is checked, the wizard will send the transcribed MIDI notes to the Soloist track for further analysis by the user (via Piano Roll or Notation window).  Note that this is a “snapshot” view every 8th note of the pitches present, not an attempt at polyphonic transcription.

This will remove tempo changes by stretching regions of audio so that the tempos are all equal.

MIDI File Chord Interpretation Wizard

Many people who play music by ear think of songs in terms of “Chords and Melody.”  However, many MIDI files lack chord symbols, so they become difficult to learn without the user having to figure out the chords in a time-consuming process. 

Now you can open any MIDI file in Band-in-a-Box, and Band-in-a-Box will automatically figure out the chords of the song for you.  It automatically analyzes the MIDI file, figures out where the Bass, Piano, Melody, and other tracks are, and then figures out the chord changes for the song.  The chords are written onto the Chord Sheet like any other song.  This allows you to quickly learn how to play a song from a MIDI file - just read it into Band-in-a-Box and you’ll see the chord symbols, and then learn the melody!  You can also read tracks into the Melody and Soloist tracks.

To interpret MIDI chords, first blank the Chord Sheet, by choosing File | New.  Then select the menu item File | Import | Import Chords from MIDI File or press the keystrokes control+option+I.  This launches the Chord Wizard dialog. 

  Press the [Open (Change)…] button to select the MIDI file that you’d like to import.  If you select the “All” checkbox, then all files will be displayed.  If you deselect the “All” checkbox, then only filenames ending with .MID will be displayed.

  Once you have selected the file, you can press the [INTERPRET CHORDS NOW] button.  When you do that, the chords will be interpreted from the MIDI file, and written onto the Chord Sheet. 

Prior to pressing the button, you might want to make some custom settings.

  When you load in the MIDI file, Band-in-a-Box automatically interprets many things from the MIDI file for you.  Normally you’d want this to happen, but if for some reason you’d prefer to make the settings yourself, you can set “Auto Interpret settings from MIDI file” to false.

The settings that are determined automatically for you are:

• The key signature of the song (MIDI file).  Some MIDI files contain a special event that states the key signature of the file, but most don’t.  For the ones that don’t, Band-in-a-Box analyzes the tracks and makes a “best guess” at the correct key signature for the song.  It usually gets it right, but if it’s wrong, it’s likely out by a 4th or 5th interval.
• Tempo, time signature.
• The channels used for the Bass part, Piano (comping) parts.
• The channels used for the Melody parts.
• The number of bars in the song to import, including the number of lead-in bars in the song.

Once you have loaded in the MIDI file, (by pressing the [Open (Change)…] button), and assuming that you have the “Auto Interpret” set to true, you’ll see that the dialog displays the settings that the Chord Wizard has found in the MIDI file for the key signature and channels used for the song.

Let’s work with an example song called Violet Song.MID.

This should be included in your Songs folder.  For this example, we are going to interpret the chords of this MIDI file and read them into Band-in-a-Box.

Start with a blank Chord Sheet by choosing File | New.

Choose the MIDI file Chord Wizard dialog by choosing File | Import Chords from MIDI File.

  Press the [Open (Change)…] button to select the MIDI file, and then choose the file that you would like to import.  In this case, it is called “Violet Song.MID.”

Once you load in the file, you will notice that the Chord Wizard has analyzed the MIDI file and made these determinations for you.

It has automatically determined that the “Violet Song.MID” file

•   has 2 bars of lead-in,
•   has 103 bars of chords,
•   is in the key of F with a 4/4 time signature, and a tempo of 120.
•   The Bass part is found on channel 2.
•   The chording (comping) parts are found on Channels 3, 6 and 7.
•  The Melody is found on Channel 4.
• 

  There are no other parts like the Melody that should be put on the Soloist track.

Presets for Chord Options

Now, after loading in the MIDI files, you’d normally have a look at these settings to see if they seem reasonable for your MIDI file.  If they are not, you can change the settings.  For example, if you know that they key signature of the song is not F but is C, then you would set that.  Similarly, if you knew that the Melody channel was on channel 3, you could set that to override the Chord Wizard settings.

Presets

Once you have done that, choose one of the Presets to quickly enter the settings to the type of song that you are trying to interpret.  Preset choices are Jazz Standard, Jazz (Modern), Pop (with seventh chords), Pop (with no seventh chords), Rock, Pop Ballad, Solo Piano, and Solo Piano (Jazz).

Chord Options

When you choose one of these presets, it automatically makes a number of settings in the Chord Options section of the dialog, but you can override them in this dialog.  These include,

 (Range from 1 beat to 4 bars, default = 2 beats)
This is the minimum number of beats for a chord.  For example, if you set it to 2 beats, then the Chord Wizard will never attempt to come up with different chords that are only a beat apart. 

If set, the Chord Wizard will include “slash chords” like F7/A or Cm/G.

You can set this to “Root only,” “Root third and 5th,” or “Walking bass.”  If you choose “Root Only,” the Chord Wizard will assume that any bass note is the root of the chord.  Choosing “Root-3-5” will cause the Chord Wizard to assume that the bass pattern is mainly on the root-3-5 of the chord.  If you choose “Walking bass,” it will assume that the bass notes can be changing and can include many notes beside the root.  Setting the “Walking bass” line will likely result in fewer chords overall than setting the “Root only” option.

The setting for “Allow Sus” chords determines if chords like Csus or Bbsus7 will be included.  The “Allow 7th chords” specifies if 7th chords like C7 or Bbm7 would be allowed.

Simple Rock songs might not have 7th chords or SUS chords.  Allowing chords with no thirds should be set in a hard rock song, or similar song with “power chords” that might not contain the 3rd of the chords.

Usually a bass player plays the root of the chord at or near the time when the chord changes.  But in solo piano playing or some bass styles, the bass doesn’t state the root until later on, and this setting should be set to “delayed” in a solo piano style of this type.

You can also set the primary style of the song to Jazz or Pop using the Lead sheet Method combo box.

Using the Chord Options Presets to make settings for Violet Song.MID.

For the song “Violet Song.MID,” we know that this is a Jazz Swing type of song, so we press the preset called “Jazz Standard.”

By doing this, we see that the chord options have then been set to Chord Resolution of 2 beats, no slash chords, walking bass, sus chords, 7th chords, and Jazz lead sheet.

These settings look OK for our Jazz song; if we wanted to customize it (for example to allow slash chords) we could do it at this point.

So, to recap, using the Chord Wizard is a 3-step process.

•   We loaded in the song “Violet Song.MID.”
•   Pressing the preset button called “Jazz Standard,” we then looked at the Chord Options settings for the various channels and they looked OK, so we didn’t make any changes.
•   We then press the [INTERPRET CHORDS NOW] button – this gets the Chord Wizard to interpret the chords and write them to the Chord Sheet.

Once we’ve pressed the [INTERPRET CHORDS NOW] button, we can see the results by looking at the Chord Sheet.  Here are the chords that were interpreted,

Chord Wizard results – interpreting from “Violet Song.MID.”

So that we can see how well the Chord Wizard did, we can compare it to the “correct chords” of the song, input by a musician listening to the song.  You can see these by loading in the song “Violet Song.MGU.”

The “correct chords” for the song “Violet Song.MID.”

As you can see, by comparing the two sets of chords, the Chord Wizard got almost all the chords correct in this example.  The Chord Wizard purposely avoids chords like “C13,” it will put a simpler “C7” instead, since this is more like a typical lead sheet.

If you have read in the entire MIDI file, you have 103 bars of chords on the Chord Sheet.  This actually contains 3 choruses of the song.  You might want to reduce that to a single chorus, by setting the chorus end of the song to bar 36, and then erasing the excess bars (after bar 36) by choosing Edit | Erase.

Examining the song that has been interpreted by the Chord Wizard.

You will notice that the title (Violet Song), key (F,) and tempo (120) have been set to the values found in the file.  Part markers are not set; the Chord Wizard doesn’t try to guess where part markers might be occurring.  You need to put the part markers in yourself.  You also need to choose the style to use (a Jazz Swing style in this case). 

If you examine the Melody track by opening the Editable Notation window and option clicking on some notes you will notice that the Melody track contains notes from Channel 4, which is what we specified in the Chord Wizard dialog.

Importing part of a MIDI file or redoing a section of the Chord Sheet.

Normally we’d want to import an entire MIDI file worth of chords.  But if you only want to import some bars, you can deselect the “Import Complete Song” checkbox, and then specify where to start in the MIDI file (i.e. “the # of lead-in bars in MIDI file”) and what bar to start at in Band-in-a-Box (“Insert to BB starting at bar #”) and the # of bars to import (“How many bars to import”).

For example, using the song “Violet Song.MID,” we could redo a section of the song using different settings (for example, a chord resolution of 1 beat instead of 2 beats).  If we were unhappy with the results at bar 7 and 8, we could redo this by making the settings as follows:

Other Settings for the Chord Wizard

Band-in-a-Box and PowerTracks Pro songs contain special events that write the exact chord names into the MIDI file.  So, if the Chord Wizard sees these events, it will use them instead of interpreting the chords, since they are likely to be completely accurate.  If you’d prefer the Chord Wizard to ignore these chord events, you set the “OK to use PG Music Chord names from MIDI file” to false.

The setting for “Write chord summary notes to Soloist Track” is only used for diagnostic or special purposes.  If set, the Soloist track will contain a special track that has a chord written every 2 beats (or whatever the setting for chord resolution is) that contains every note found for the chord.  This shows you the type of logic that the Chord Wizard was basing its decisions on.  If you encounter a song that gives incorrect results for the chords, you can try this setting, and then examine the Soloist track to see the actual notes of the chords.

You can optionally include controllers, pitch bend, patch changes, and lyrics from the MIDI file.

The Reharmonist

Generate Chords for a Melody

Generate chords for a melody, or an improved chord progression for a melody, with the “Reharmonist” feature.  This feature generates a chord progression in the chosen genre, based only on the melody.

The idea of the Reharmonist is to generate a completely new chord progression for a melody, in a genre that you choose (Jazz, Country, etc.).  This ignores any existing chords in the song.

There are 2 separate windows for the Reharmonist feature.

• Reharmonize entire song with a new chord progression.
• See a list of possible reharmonizations for a given area of a song.

Chords for a Whole Song

This example uses the melody of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #1 in F, 1st movement, but you could use the melody of any song you choose.

Go to the menu Edit | Chords | Auto-Generate Chord Reharmonization.

You will then see the Select Re-Harmonist dialog.

Deselect “Show-All” and then select the “Bossa Nova (Latin)” genre.

Note that the program has analyzed the melody and decided that the key should be F (this is independent of any key that was already set in the song).

Now press [OK – Reharmonize].

You will then have an entire chord progression written for the song, in a Bossa Nova style.

The Chord Progression generated is different every time, so the one that you get will be different from this one.

Play the file that you have generated.  Notice the “Bossa” style of chord progression, with 2-5 progressions, and other typical Bossa chords.

Revisit the Reharmonize dialog, and try generating a new chord progression, in a new Genre.

For example, “EZ listening (Pop)” will generate a Pop style chord progression, very different from the Jazz chords in the Bossa version.

This dialog can also be opened from the menu command Windows | Auto Generate Chord Reharmonization.

Reharmonize Part of a Song

Now let’s use the Reharmonist in an “interactive mode” where it gives us choices of various chord progressions at each bar.  Let’s see if we can interactively improve on the chord progression, according to our own tastes.

The first 2 bars generated originally are:

Make sure that the currently highlighted cell is bar 1.

Go back to the Select Re-Harmonist dialog. 

This time choose “Part of Song” and under “Set Range” enter Bar 1, Chorus 1, and the # bars as 2.

Here are two of the possible variations the Re-Harmonist has suggested for the first two bars.

See a List of Possible Reharmonizations

Go to the menu Edit | Chords | Chord Reharmonist Dialog (choose your own). 

In the Reharmonize melody – new chords for 2 bars of the melody dialog you can choose from a list of reharmonizations for any 2-bar segment of the song. The reharmonization starts at the Bar # indicated.  Use the [-2] and [+2] buttons to navigate to the segment to be recompiled.

Use the feature interactively by displaying a menu of possible chord progressions for a portion of the melody and audition them to choose the best one using the “Bar Reharmonist.”  This allows you to hear some new chord progressions for existing melodies, or brand-new progressions for tunes without chords.

  Choose a chord progression, and press [Do-Reharmonize NOW] and the program will insert that progression.

  The progressions are sorted in alphabetical order, or from “best to worst” depending on this setting.

Chord Breaks

Insert Breaks (silence) in arrangement, also called Chord Breaks, is found in the Preferences 2 dialog.  This is a great feature for practicing tempo control.

Select the # of bars, and Band-in-a-Box will play for, say 4 bars (selectable), and then will rest all instruments for the next 4 bars.  During the silence, you keep playing (comping, drums, melody, etc.), trying to stay in tempo.  Drummers can mute the drum part.  When the band comes back in after the 4 bars, you will get instant feedback on how well you have maintained the tempo, if the band comes in time with you or not.

Once set, this feature works automatically with all songs until you turn it off.

Guitar Tutor

Use the “Guitar Tutor” to analyze any song.  This feature will show the chords that are playing on the virtual guitar fretboard, in your choice of a Jazz, Pop, or Folk perspective.  The Guitar Tutor is a fun way to learn about new guitar chords while playing along with your favorite Band-in-a-Box tune.

The Guitar Tutor is most useful on styles that aren’t guitar styles.  This would apply to styles that don’t have an exclamation point (!) in the file name.  This is because the guitar styles already have a guitar part that you can learn from, on the Guitar part.

Using the Guitar Tutor, you can see (and optionally hear) guitar chords played on the guitar fretboard.  This teaches you how to play the chords on guitar.

To turn the Guitar Tutor on, launch the Guitar window and press the [Tutor] button.

Using the Guitar Tutor

Enable the Chord Tutor display by setting that checkbox.  This will silently display the chords on the guitar fretboard.  If you would also like to hear the notes, select the “Play chords through MIDI” checkbox.

The Tutor part uses the MIDI Thru part to playback on.  You can control volume, pan, reverb, and tone by using the Thru settings in the Mixer.  You can also select the patch here.

The tutor will display Jazz, Pop, and Folk voicings in easy, medium, and advanced forms.  The advanced forms use inversions, and changing patterns of chords, while the easy ones just stick to the common “campfire” chords.

  One of the tutors uses 3-note Jazz voicings to simulate the famous Big Band chord guitar comping styles.  If you use this, you will only see 3 notes in the chords of course.  Since it sometimes helps to see the entire 4 chord voicing, in this case there is the option to show the muted note as well.