User Guide

Chapter 12: Tutors, Wizards, and Practice Aids
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As you can see, by comparing the two sets of chords, the Chord Wizard got almost all of 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've 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'll 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 Notation window and right clicking on some notes or pressing the Event
List (#) button), you'll 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 re-doing 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 number
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 number
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 Audio 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 to ignore
these chord events, 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. When 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 is 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. Chord-stepping through the track (using [Ins] and [Del] on the Numpad) allows you to quickly hear the
chords.
You can optionally include controllers, pitch bend, patch changes, and lyrics from the MIDI file.