Upgrade Manual

Chapter 12: Harmony Enhancements66
You can specify a harmony to only occur for notes longer than a certain
duration.
Many harmonies like the "Garner Piano" harmony previously harmonized every
note. This produced un-realistic harmonies, since a piano player (like Garner)
wouldn't harmonize notes of a short duration. You can specify a harmony to
only occur for notes longer than a certain duration. In the example of Garner, we
set the threshold to 200ms, notes shorter than that will not be harmonized.
There are new options for how the program 'fixes' the harmony when chord
changes occur during a sustained note harmony. Most harmonies have a feature
that changes the pitch of the harmony voices under the Melody note when the
chord changes, if the underlying voice wouldn't be a chord tone. This sounds
unrealistic for certain types of harmonies like 'Garner' or 'Guitar harmonies',
since it would be unrealistic for those instruments to change the inner voicings
in this manner. If you de-select the option to "Make new harmony with new
chord", the voices that would conflict with the new chord merely stop playing
instead of changing to new notes.
There's a 'use guitar voicings' harmony type that uses real guitar chord voicings
that display correctly on the guitar fretboard. Setting the "Use Guitar Harmony
Voicings" checkbox means that guitar chord voicings will be used, instead of
any other voicings specified in the Harmony Maker. Check out Harmony #32 (J
Pass) for an example of this.
We've enhanced the existing harmonies file to take advantage of these new
features, so your harmonies will sound better. Many harmonies have been
changed, including Harmonies # 32 (J Pass), 6, 7, 8, 16, 25, 26, 30, 32, 35, 36,
49, 50, 107, 108, and more.