Technical information

Chapter 5: Guided Tour of Band-in-a-Box
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When you have a note or chord highlighted press the [Ch-] or [Ch+] (insert guitar chord) button on the
guitar, or 7 or 8 on the NUMPAD keypad. Each time you press the [Ch-] or [Ch+] you'll see that the
guitar chord changes to a different
voicing, cycling through the available 5-10 voicings possible for each chord. (Some notes won't have any chord
voicings, for example a C# note on a Cmaj7 chord, because it is always a passing tone.)
In a similar manner, you can convert a chord to a guitar note using the insert guitar note button.
Pressing the [N+] (or 3 or 4 on the NUMPAD keypad) repeatedly cycles through playing the same
note on all 6 strings.
This generates a Chord Solo, using the Guitarist.
Notice the various areas of the Guitar Window.
- The top title bar states the key of the song is Cm, the Melody track is the track displayed, and the guitar is at the
8
th
position.
- The fretboard is displayed with the highest notes of the guitar at the top, and the open position of the guitar on
the left.
- There are names for the open strings displayed on the left (E B G D A E).
- There are fret positions marked at the bottom of the fretboard. You can mouse click on these positions to
change the current fret position.
- There are Note Names displayed for two positions on the guitar fretboard. One of the positions is the scale
beginning with the third of the scale on the lowest string. In the key of F, this is the 5th position beginning on
an A note (the third of the scale). Because it begins on the third of the scale, this position is referred to as the
Phrygian Position (since an A Phrygian scale is the same as an F scale). Similarly, the other popular scale is the
scale beginning on the 6th of the scale, in the key of F, this is up at the 10th position, and is called the Aeolian
Position.
- There are note names displayed in color, with ellipses around the notes that are in the scale. The root note of
the scale is highlighted in red, the third and fifth of the scale are in purple, and the rest of the scale tones are
circled in gray.
- Pitch bends show up on the Guitar Fretboard. As the pitch bend occurs, a blue line moves along the string in
real time, illustrating the height of the pitch bend. Load in the c:\bb\Tutorial\Pitch Bend demo song. You’ll
then see pitch bends written as a blue color moving along the string.
Automatic Settings for Guitar Display
Band-in-a-Box does a lot of things automatically on the Guitar window to ensure that the notes are displayed
intelligently on a guitar fretboard. These include:
- Automatically setting the two positions that will display the note names based on the key.
- Auto-Scanning the track to be played, and adjusting the display octave on the guitar fretboard to ensure that the
best octave is picked to minimize the number of notes that will be outside of the current position displayed on
the fretboard.
- After Auto-scanning the track, the best position for displaying the music on the guitar is determined. This is
always one of the two positions, Aeolian or Phrygian, though you may over-ride this by clicking on any fret
position.
- Color-coding note displays. In addition to the note names being outlined in the colors, when the note is played
it is highlighted in green if it is a scale note and yellow if it is an out-of-scale note.