Baffled by Style

b0b · Post by **b0b** » 23 Nov 2011 8:48 pm

This has me stumped. I'm working on Cherokee with GEO_FORM.STY. The style description says "Fast 2-beat swing style featuring Ukulele ala George Formby or Eddy Peabody. 5 instruments: Ukulele, ac. piano, ac. bass, drums (br) and Sax-section BGs. T=200". Sounds promising.

It plays fine but I don't hear the uke, which is supposed to be on the guitar track. Then on bar 16 of the 3rd chorus, suddenly the guitar track appears. Bizarre! I check bar settings, chord settings, song settings, everything I can think of. I can't get the guitar (uke) part to come in until bar 16 of the 3rd chorus.

Here are the files. What's wrong?

BIAB: http://soundhost.net/b0b/Cherokee.SGU
MIDI: http://soundhost.net/b0b/Cherokee.MID
Style: http://soundhost.net/b0b/GEO_FORM.STY (in case you don't have it)

In the MIDI file, I think it's at bar 146.

Graham · Post by **Graham** » 24 Nov 2011 5:29 am

b0b:
Test drove this and uke played right from bar 1 on. Did notice that there is no alto sax listed for any of the instruments and if you do a save with patches, it does not show up there either.

Further to that, if you bring the midi up in Cakewalk, you will notice that the guitar (uke)does not kick in until bar 147.

Jim Baron · Post by **Jim Baron** » 24 Nov 2011 8:40 am

I tried your BIAB file on a Win XP with outboard sound module and it worked fine. Then tried it with new laptop Win 7 64bit with CoyoteWT synth and GSwavetable and it worked on both of them. Using Power Tracks to look at the midi file shows the uke not coming in untll bar 147. So that usually means something is messed up before the midi file is made. I saved it as a midi file into clipboard on my computer and it worked fine when opened in Power Tracks from clipboard.
So a couple of things to try, but the workaround I use most often for this is to copy the chords to a new page and see if it works. Once in awhile a file will get corrupted and it's best to just make another.
If that doesn't work we can try taking out a couple of files within BIAB and see if that helps. Later, Jim

b0b · Post by **b0b** » 24 Nov 2011 9:14 am

Thanks for testing this, guys. You hear what I'm getting in the MIDI file. This must be a Mac-only problem. I'm still running BIAB Version 12 for the Mac because it's the only one that runs on my old PowerBook.

Graham - the sax patch is what's making the accordion sound.

b0b · Post by **b0b** » 24 Nov 2011 11:12 am

Copy/paste into a new song did the trick. Thanks much, Jim. I spent a lot of time last night trying to figure out what I'd done worng. I guess that BIAB version 12 for the Mac has a bug. Fixed now.

Thanks again!!

b0b · Post by **b0b** » 24 Nov 2011 11:23 am

Okay, this is weird. It stopped working again. It seems to be related to the length of the tune. It's a 64 bar song plus an ending, and it runs 4 times. If I change it to 32 bars (the default), the guitar starts right away. If I set it to 64 bars and just play 1 or 2 choruses, it plays fine.

This uke part on the guitar track is very busy. My guess is that there's an internal buffer that fills up when BIAB composes the song. It's probably a memory allocation issue related to running a PowerPC program on an Intel machine.

I'm going to upgrade soon. In the meantime, I'll generate a 2-chorus MIDI file and expand it to 4 choruses in GarageBand. That will give me a good practice track to work.