[Joey Coyle]

I’ve continued to work with EZKeys, going back to my piece work method, instead of trying to create a full arrangement in EZKeys, and just used EZKey to generate small ~4-8 measure sections, and dragging them into my DAW for arrangement and tweaking.

I find it helps to look for chord change patterns that are similar to what I need, even if that means starting on measure 2 of the loop. In other words, trying to avoid using the split tool if I can, but the split tool can yield good results sometimes, just unpredictable whether it will simply be a bad result or cause downstream tuning errors. Also, I’m using the chord voicing controls more. I’ve found that sometimes you get crap and sometimes you get really nice stuff… trial and error. But by dragging all the variations into my DAW, I can throw away the crap.

If they implement a fixed chord track, they then will need to allow the user to drag the loop anywhere along the fixed chord track and then the chords get applied to loop, and then from there, you could slide the loop right or left a measure or two, and the chords would get applied. They should allow the user to still tweak the voicing with the chord selector. The hard part I see is how much the fixed chord track affects the voicings initially. For instance if the loop chord progression was doing some interesting with the ninths of a chord, but the fixed chord track stated only a triad, then what happens initially. Maybe a setting to allow embellishments?

And Yes, the chord selector issue grates on me even more when you are spending hours on this.

[Joey Coyle]

Thanks everybody… it’s good to know I’m not doing all that extra clicking and manipulating for nothing.

I tried doing a whole piano ballad with EZKeys yesterday, rather than just short sections to be dragged into a bigger arrangement. It was just undoable, the above problem, the fact I had to keep re-entering chords every time I decided I didn’t like something, the fact it would actually make mistakes and not harmonize to the chord correctly ( This was uncorrectable, and mostly happened if I had to split a chord, and then it would make mistakes downstream from the split ). In every style they make, they need more variations where the chords are changing every 2 beats rather than every measure… the chord splitting just doesn’t have very good harmonic results.

Anyway, I went back to band in a box for piano ballads. For anything large, EZKeys isn’t there yet. I think it would be faster for me to learn to play piano.

I wish someone would make a band in the box plug in, that I could insert in my DAW for a track, and enter the chord progression, and then choose various styles, on a region by region basis, and voila, I would have piano track… Hopefully that is why Logic is taking so long to rewrite 😉

jc

[Joey Coyle]

Yeah, this is a major pain, and so obviously basic to functionality, I can only believe that they were/are in the process of implementing this, but released the 0.9 version of EZKeys to get it out there for us to use. And I’m OK with that, I’d rather have something than nothing… but they should focus on getting this completed.

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