Upgrade Manual

Chapter 13: Other New Features68

Open up a song that has a Melody, preferably a sparse Melody with some

space in it that a Soloist might be able to "jump in".

Press the Soloist button. Select the Solo Mode "Around Melody".

Set the Soloist to play in All Choruses, and un-check the Mute Melody in

Middle option.

Press Ok, and the Solo will be generated, playing riffs at times when the

Melody isn't playing.

Tip: For added effect, add a guitar chord solo to the Soloist part (using the

Chord Solo button on the Guitar and choosing Solo as the destination, or

simply choose a Guitar Harmony like 32 J Pass).

Add your own chord shortcuts.

Have you found a chord that BB doesn't

recognize? If so, add it to the your chord shortcuts file, and BB will allow you to

type in that chord in the future. This also lets you define chord "shortcuts", one

letter abbreviations for longer chord names ('J" for "Maj7" etc.).

The text file c:\bb\Shortcut.txt allows

you

to add new chord shortcuts. Note that

this file doesn't ship with BB (or it would overwrite your file!). The file

c:\bb\pgshortc.txt should be used only by PG Music for shortcuts supplied by

PG Music. You can add your own shortcuts in a text file you can make called

c:\bb\shortcut.txt.

If you find a chord that BB won't accept like Csus2, when it expects C2 instead

you can enter this on a single line (without the quotes) "Csus2@C2". Then

Band-in-a-Box will enter the chord C2 if you type in Csus 2. These allow

someone to type in Csus2 and the program will accept it. You can also use it for

shortcuts, like if you entered j@maj7, Band-in-a-Box would let you type Cj for

CMaj7. See the file c:\bb\pgshortc.txt for examples of shortcuts.

Read in Chords from a PowerTracks or Band-in-a-Box MIDI file.

Many of PG Music's programs have MIDI files with the chords in them. You

can open these files in Band-in-a-Box, and the chords will be imported onto the

chord sheet. To import the chords from a PG Music MIDI file (i.e. a MIDI file

made by Band-in-a-Box, PowerTracks or some other PG Music programs),

choose the menu item File-Open Special –Import chords from MIDI file (or

clipboard). The chords will then appear on the leadsheet, starting at bar 1,

overwriting any chords that were there previously.

Enhanced Song List Window.

The Song List Window (accessed by pressing

the SONG button) used to have a limit of 800 songs. This has been enhanced to

5,000 songs, and full information shows for each song (title, filename, style

name, Melody/ Lyric / style present status). The window auto-sizes to fill the

screen.