MMA songs, share them here !

[david]

Hey, the songs collection is great! Good job!
But ...
I've found X7alt and X69 chords in some mma files, and mma complains about this chords.

Is it an error in BiaB converter or should MMA accept this notation?

Thanks in advance.

--
David.

[brenzi]

Hi David.

Thanks for reporting this. It is a bug (or a feature:) in biabconverter. The Question now is (to Bob:) if we could extend mma's chord vocabulary, because I think these chords are quite common. Especially X7alt should be supported for jazz.

Alain

[bvdp]

On the 7alt and 6/9 chords I'm having some private mail with Alain on this and am sorting it out. They will be in the next release. In the meantime you can define the chords yourself (probably in a mmarc file?). See defchord in the fine manual.

And if others are finding missing chords, please let me know. I do what things as complete as possible. If you send me a note please show the chord notes and the associated scale for a C chord. For example:

  Chord C7 - C  E G Bb
  scale       - C D E F G A Bb

One minor issue with the 6/9 chord is that MMA assumes that this is a slash chord. So I will probably end up renaming to a "69" chord. Either that, or I can do a "special case" in the chord code which internally converts a "6/9" to "69" and then let mma run and be happy. Comments on this appreciated. Please mail me <bob@mellowood.ca> so I don't miss it.

Bob.

[Moon]

OK, guys. Good news: there are now 3866 songs to download from the MMA download sections ! 
You can select on the style of the song.

You'll see that I didn't put too much time in the layout... but don't forget all of this is volunteers work 

I hope this section will be used a lot.

...Also don't forget to say "thank you" to Brenzie for providing us the MMA songs and Kara for the support with the conversion to the database.

Moon.

P.S.: Upload section is almost final and will be finished by tomorow...

[brenzi]

Ey Moon..thanks a lot for that great work.
Unfortunately I didn't spend too much time in finding correct translations from Biab styles to MMA styles. So most probably a lot of tunes are marked with a not-so-accurate (=>completely wrong) style. Sorry for that. But once we have a lot of corresponding styles in MMA or SOMEONE writes a biab-style-converter we could re-convert all these songs.

Good night...at least in my part of the globe...
Alain

[kara]

Not a BIAB converter, but we could have a big surprise in a couple of days...
So stay tuned !!

... SOMEONE writes a biab-style-converter we could re-convert all these songs.

Alain

[brenzi]

Not a BIAB converter, but we could have a big surprise in a couple of days...
So stay tuned !!

hmm...come on kara, tell us more about that surprise! ;-)

For what concerns the wrong styles the biabconverter.list file could help. It mentions the biab-style and the selected MMA style. So you see immediately if the choice does make sense...

biab style AFRICAN translates to SWING....so, obviously...this tune won't sound well without manual work.
But: there would be a lot more corresponding style pairs than there are listed in biabconverter. If someone is eager to volounteer ... it's an easy job to just find more pairs and list them in biabconverter's lookup table.

My big hope for MMA would be a great set of new styles. I think here lies the biggest potential for this software. As Bob says, MMA is mature. But to my musical ear this applies not yet for the style library. The stdlib-styles are great work, but for jazz I'm missing a wider choice of styles, especially "light" ones with only minimalistic accompaniment. I wrote only two styles myself. I'll share them as soon as I'm happy with 'em.

[bvdp]

To follow up on the earlier post about 7alt and 6/9 chords. I've added to MMA the following:

1. 7alt is now an alias for 7b5b9. Not a perfect choice at all times, but probably good enough.

2. 69 is now an alias for 6(add9). The notation 6/9 just doens't work with MMA's naming scheme.

These 2 will be in the next release (1.0RC1) which will be out (hopefully) before Oct 15/2006.

Thanks to Alain for help on this.

Bob.