Maybe walk before you try running?

A full software arranger is a mighty deep project, and Dan has already beaten you to the punch, making your efforts a less than guaranteed commercial success.

However, there's something that many arranger players could use that is FAR easier to program, and quite useful to a broad variety of arranger players... and nobody at ALL currently makes.

How about an add-on Chord Sequencer?

This is basically a program that would sync to the arranger's MIDI clock, scan the NTA channel (the Note to Arranger channel, which outputs whatever Part and Channel is being sent to the chord recognition engine - it's common on most decent arrangers) and on command, loop the input seamlessly with the output. Thus, you hit record WHILE you are playing, the program grabs the chords ONLY of what you play, then when you trigger 'Play', sends them back in again, to take over your LH chores, seamlessly.

Currently, only the PA3x and the BK-9 have one of these, they are incredibly useful for players that have other uses for their LH more than simple repetition of the same chords over and over, and no-one makes a software version so that those of us with arrangers without the feature could easily add it to arrangers we already have.

I would pay good money for this (I'd even buy a Windows notebook to run it on! ) and I am fairly sure many Yamaha and older arranger users would be very interested.

A full featured software arranger may be a HUGE bite to swallow, but this would give you much experience, target a market segment not already addressed, and give you insight into whether the full project is possible, for you...

yeah, +1 Diki...great suggestion

Dennis

Holy crap - that sounds to me like actual user feedback.
That's a rare and treasured thing. I do appreciate it.

1) I don't need money. My day job pays just fine. I've tried to "market" what I already got and have proven to myself that marketing is harder than writing code.

2) Writing a full fledged arranger might be hard. But doing something somewhat simpler isn't. PianoCheetah already has an ok way to enter chords in time. That plus style files plus arranger logic is pretty much working right now. It doesn't do live chord recognition, but it does a VERY simplified version of what band in a box does. Given some text chords with timestamps and some style files, weave an arrangement of midi. That's in development and a couple weeks from ready for the public. (If the public is interested).

3) So aren't these "chord events" or whatever recordable by your off the shelf midi sequencer? I guess it's time to hit google. But are these control change events? sysex events? It probably wouldn't be too difficult to do something along those lines. But it seems kind of geared for those arranger keyboards, not something I'd probably want in PianoCheetah per se.

So if you wouldn't mind pointing me to some specs for this "chord sequencer" you speak of, that would be great.

In the mean time, gotta go finish my mini band in a box-ISH thingy.

Oh! So Dan must be the guy who wrote vArranger. Gotcha.

They are simply MIDI notes. Nothing as fancy as sys-ex (which you have a very hard time outputting in sync) or controller codes.

Essentially, the arranger itself looks at the MIDI note output of one of the Parts (Chord recognition can be LRW, UPR or both - Whole - depending on Performance setup) called the NTA. The arranger then uses these notes played to feed to the Lookup Tables, where it determines what the chord and root is, depending again on arranger settings. These then get fed off to the NTT (the note transposition tables) where the output voicings are determined by tables that provide the MIDI notes output, depending on input and note range (there is usually a parameter that determines how high or low a chord inversion can be transposed as is, and what should be done with the overflow notes should it exceed that).

But, essentially, a Chord Sequencer doesn't need to bother its head with all that. Simple mirroring of the MIDI note input to output is all that is needed, as the arranger's own NTT's and lookup tables do all the work.

Probably the only complicated thing you'll need to work out is how to truncate notes that hang over the loop boundary, so that the first notes in the loop don't simply ADD to the notes still being played at the end of the loop, but cut them off and play alone.

Hope this gives you some ideas...

Wait, so the full gui is just a record and play button?

Hit record and it stores notes it receives on the channel into an in memory structure or something.

Hit play and it just sends out the midi it received upon clock pulse events (looping back to start)?

Is there more to it than that?

Essentially yes.

The CS records the midi data coming in from the part of the keyboard one is using to drive the arranger engine, and when the playback button is pressed it simply sends "BACK" to the arranger over a specified channel those notes.

So in effect the CS is now "playing the arranger" with those recorded midi notes, which then leaves the player free to play both hands without the need for one hand to be "tied" to generating chords...

Dennis

The CS needs to be able to quantize a bit to account for slight timing glitches from the player, and it also needs to be able to continuously loop for as long as the play is active..

The premise is rather simple but in practice there is some tricky coding needed, especially when it comes to timing.

As you would know from your own experience, there is nothing worse than those chopped of notes at the start of a bar simply becasue a player was a few milliseconds off in playing the chord

By the by, I too would be happy to pay for software such as this, very happy

Korg pa600 also has a chord sequencer.

Hmmm, ok.

Thing is, I don't have an arranger keyboard. Any chance somebody could give me a midi recording of, say 3 chord changes?

This'd be a weird little extra program in the PianoCheetah install. I guess there'd just be an input device+channel picker, output device+channel picker, record and play buttons to start off with. When I get a midi recording I can see what the timer events look like and verify that it's just plain old notes and such that I send/receive.

Very eeeeeeeeeeeenterestin'