A bigger band and the horns

A piano, a bass and drums are a jazz trio, and the rhythm section of most bands. But a rock band without its guitar, or a tango without its violins, doesn’t sound like itself. Many styles bring more players: a guitar, strings or an organ, each playing the way that music uses it, and any style can add a horn section.

The Band menu

🎷 Band, at the top left of the chord sheet, chooses who plays and with which sounds. What they play, the drums and the chord and bass parts, comes from the Library (see Styles and the Library); this menu leaves it alone.

• Instrument lineup ▸ puts a whole new set of instruments in the band, keeping the rhythm, the chords and the timing: Grand piano + acoustic bass, Electric piano + synth bass, Piano, acoustic guitar + strings, Piano, electric guitar + organ, Piano + strings, Piano + nylon guitar, Accordion + acoustic bass, or Horns, timpani + strings.
• One line for each player in the band: Piano, Bass, Drums, Guitar, Strings, Organ, Soloist and Horns, as the band has them. Untick one to leave it out of the band, and click its instrument to give it another sound, from the 128 of General MIDI (see Sounds). The drums have a channel for each drum, so their sounds are chosen in the channel rack.
• Horn section adds horns to any style (see below).
• Soloist (experimental) and Another solo: see The soloist.
• No band takes the band away. The chords stay on the sheet, and a style from the Library brings a band back.

Each player has its own track in the playlist and its own channel in the channel rack, with the instrument the style chose.

Who comes in

Switch to a style without a guitar and its track and channel go away; Ctrl+Z brings them back. In the chord sheet’s You play row, a player who doesn’t play yet is greyed out.

How the guitar plays

A pianist can play any notes of a chord. A guitarist has six strings, tuned E A D G B E from the lowest, and four fingers to press them against the frets. So a guitar chord is a shape: a fret, or nothing, for each string, written in chord books from the low E string, with x for a string not played and 0 for an open one. The lowest string that sounds must be the chord’s bass: the C shape leaves out the low E string, because an E there would make it C/E.

The guitar in Ferrous Lineup finds its shapes the way a guitarist learns them, by trying the frets in reach and keeping the easiest: the open chords of the chord books (C x32010, G 320003, D xx0232, Am x02210, G7 320001), barre chords in other keys (F 133211, one finger flat across the first fret), and a shape for every chord in every key.

It strums them as a guitarist does: a down-stroke sweeps the strings from low to high, a few milliseconds apart, and the lighter up-stroke between the beats comes back over the top four. What it plays depends on the style:

• Strummed chords (pop, folk, country): the whole shape in the style’s rhythm.
• Power chords (rock, punk, metal): only the root, its fifth and the octave, A5. Distortion turns a third into a sour buzz and a fifth into a bigger sound, so rock guitarists leave the third to the bass and the singer.
• Four to the bar (swing): three-note chords, root, third and seventh, struck on every beat, as Freddie Green kept time in Count Basie’s band.
• The boogie shuffle (blues, rock and roll): two strings, the root with its fifth, then with its sixth: A and E, A and E, A and F♯, A and F♯.
• The chop (reggae, soul, Motown, bluegrass): a short chord on the top four strings on beats 2 and 4, with the snare. Country calls it the “chick” of “boom-chick”. In ska it plays between all the beats.
• Scratching (funk, disco): sixteenth notes on a muted guitar, a few accented, most only a percussive “chk”.

Strings and organ

Strings hold each chord as long as it lasts, an octave above the piano, softly: a pad, a cushion of sound under the band. Pop uses them to lift the chorus, so in Pop beat and Motown they only play in variation b (see Song form and sections).

The organ holds chords too, as a church organ in a chorale or a Hammond in a slow blues. In reggae it plays the bubble: short chords between the beats, low down, and an octave higher on beats 2 and 4 with the guitar’s chop. In Rock beat it waits for variation b, the way an organ fills out a chorus.

The horn section

Soul and funk records have one, and so do big bands, salsa orchestras, ska bands and the brass bands of the Balkans: trumpets, saxophones and trombones playing the chords together. Tick Horn section in the Band menu, and a Horns track comes in with the band, playing the chord sheet in a part that suits the style. Point at Horn section to read what the horns will play in the style you have; untick it to send them home.

The 3 + 3 + 2 rhythm splits the eight eighth notes of a 4/4 bar into groups of three, three and two, with an accent at the start of each: on beat 1, on the “and” of 2, and on beat 4. It is the tresillo of Cuban music, and it is everywhere in pop and soul horn lines. The afterbeats are the off-beats of a brass band: in a march the tuba plays “oom” on the beat and the horns “pah” between.

The horns play Brass Section in most styles, French Horn in classical ones, Synth Brass 1 in electronic ones and Alto Sax in the Big band ballad; click the Horns line in the Band menu to choose another sound.

A big band is its horns, so the Big band and Big band ballad styles bring them: Horn section is ticked as soon as you pick one of them, and untick it to send the horns home. When you then pick another style, the horns the big band brought leave with it; horns you ticked yourself stay.

Close harmony

Horns playing chords together voice them in close position: the notes of the chord as near together as they go, inside an octave, under the highest horn, the lead. That is how arrangers make three or four horns sound like one big instrument.

• There are as many horns as the piano’s chord has different notes, up to four.
• A chord with more than four notes, such as C13 (C E G B♭ D A), leaves out its fifth first and then its root, which the bass plays anyway. The horns keep what makes the chord sound as it does: E, B♭, D, A.
• The lead stays between F4 and F5, where a trumpet section sounds bright without straining.
• From one chord to the next, each horn goes to the nearest note it can. C to A♭ is E4 G4 C5 to E♭4 A♭4 C5: two horns move a semitone, and the lead holds C. From G7 to C, B rises to C and F falls to E, as the leading tone and the seventh of a dominant do.
• The horns avoid parallel fifths: two horns a fifth apart that move to another fifth sound like one horn, and a line is lost.

With Voice leading ticked in the piano roll you can watch each horn move (see Voice leading).