Playing along with a single Piano Part.

[Louis B.]

Hi All + Dan especially,

I have noticed that many people are entering just a single piano part from a musical score that does not include any musical accompaniment (eg no drums or strings etc).  I always thought PB would be used with a full musical accompaniment. However there are a number of things that can be done to make this work better (hopefully)

1. automatically added a metronome /drum track.

2. copy the complete piano part to another track and set that to use a different instrument sound eg acoustic guitar.


Wow Dan,

I have just tried that Ellington classics Cottontail that you mailed me the other day. It certain is a challenging piece (for me anyway) can you play that? it certainly goes at quite a speed.

I have an idea that may make this easer to play along and that is a doubling up the piano part. Can your try copying that piano part to another track and set then set that to uses percussive instrument eg acoustic guitar. Does that help? Or how about adding a metronome drum track. does that help? Can you mail me the piece if you get around to making these changes.

If this works out I can change PB to do this automatically (doubling up the piano part and adding a metronome track)

Hopefully the Cotton Tail (1940) piece is out of copyright so you could post the midi file to this list.

Thanks

Louis

Edited: Unfortunately The Cotton Tail piece is still in copyright in the UK as it is 70 years after the composers death that the copyright lapses. Duke Ellington died in 1974.

[danboid]

Hi Louis!

Somehow this post totally passed me by, sorry.

An automatically added metronome track would be the best IMO. I slightly modified the Cottontail.mid I sent you by adding a click track which started 1 bar before the rest of the song and continues throughout, but I'd like it if PB could do this automatically with the ability to select how many bars lead in you want to be prefixed for files where the piano part starts in the first bar on the song.

Sadly I've not found as much time to play with PB recently as I'd hoped- I spent all Easter trying to set up my new netbook just for that purpose though and it was only as of yesterday I finally got it to a point where I'm reasonably happy with it. As a result, no I cannot play Cottontail at full speed yet- as it stands I can only play the first few bars and at one third speed- I'm very out of practice as I've not played keyboard in a few years. It'll take me months before I can play that 100% at this rate!

Any plans for another release soon LB?

Dan

[Louis B.]

Hi Dan,

Can you send me the Cotton Tail piece with the click track that you have added and I'll look at adding that click track to PB as standard.

Have you tried doubling up the piano part onto another track with say a guitar sound.  (you will only get the guitar sound when the  cord you played is accepted pb). Does that help? If so I can also get PB to do that as well.

I am adding note names and assingable channels in the next release and possible the metronome / click track.