So I am editing Midnight on the Water to include this descending bass line:
D D/C# D/B D/A
In playback, instead of playing low A (open string), it automatically shoots up an octave to A on the G string, which kind of ruins the run.
How can I force it to use the low A?
(Is “force” too strong a word? “encourage”, maybe.)
I’m also interested in the answer
I also request this… Just needed it yesterday in in the Dark Skies version I shared.
Bass note octave selection was on the roadmap for awhile, based on feature requests like this… but then I realized that the majority of the time this feature would be used to prevent ascending/descending lines from jumping around, and I could probably just make Strum Machine smarter to avoid this.
It sounds like this isn’t working reliably, though. For me, if I go edit Midnight on the Water and add a descending bass line:
…the guitar sounds good, but the bass shoots up an octave for that A note.
So I think that rather than complicating the UI with octave selection, I just need to make Strum Machine smarter about picking which octave to play. This Midnight on the Water example gives me one scenario to look at. @DavidHaile, @DavidStrickland, or anyone else reading this, please let me know about any scenarios you have come across where the correct octave wasn’t played. (And also what part; I saw Dark Skies but wasn’t sure where the issue was.)
Luke, thanks for looking at this. In Dark Skies, the last A/E (bottom right Chorus) should have the bass E an octive higher, and the final A/A diamond should have bass A an octive higher for a continuous climbing bass line under the A chord.
Thanks for looking at this, Luke. Please let us know when you come up with a solution.
Further thought… I appreciate what you are saying, Luke, about not wanting to complicate the UI further with bass note octave selection, but I can imagine scenarios where I might want to countermand whatever decision StrumMachine comes up with. Call me bloody minded, I know! But I wonder if this might be a feature that others would welcome too? We could then create a high bass countermelody from the dusty end of the fingerboard if we wanted.
I’m just a control freak which means I’d love to be able to just write a bass line using I, IV, V nomenclature. That is too much to ask, and I live in the Celtic world anyway, so I’m really not the target audience.
Luke, as you pointed out, the A (and in my case D) seems to be the octave “turning point”. If you look at the B parts, you’ll notice that:
my made up descending scale misses the A[b] (octave up) in the sequence
SM descending scale misses the A (as above) and the D (octave down)
Although the SM scale is closer to what I was looking for, in an attempt to avoid octave jumps, I forced the bass line, but the A remains high.
I tried all bass line iterations.
It would be useful to be able to switch from chord names to the number system and back. Some of the people I play with prefer it, but not all. Is there already a separate topic for this thought?
Check out my version of Si Bheag Si Mhor. I think the bass line is perfect. I wouldn’t change a thing.
Oh yes. Sorry, forgot.
