MiBAC Jazz Rhythm Section Generator Plug-in

How to get there

Select a melody with chord symbols with the Selection Tool l. From the Plug-ins Menu, choose Scoring and Arranging, and then MiBAC Jazz Rhythm Section Generator.

What it does

The MiBAC Jazz Rhythm Section Generator analyzes a staff and creates piano, bass and drum set parts based on the melody and chord symbols. You can specify a style for the accompaniment and make adjustments to the resulting notation.

• Style · Ballad · Swing · Bebop · Bossa Nova. Click this drop-down menu to choose the style of the accompaniment. This will affect the notation of the output, but not the swing setting or tempo of the playback. You can specify swing or tempo for playback in the in the Playback Settings dialog box. To create a tempo marking expression and define it for playback, use the Create Tempo Marking Plug-in.
• Piano · Bass · Drum Set; Notation · Notation w/Chord Symbols · Slashes w/Chord Symbols · None. Click the drop-down menus for Piano, Bass and Drum set to choose the notation as it will appear in the generated parts.
• New Staves at Bottom of Score. Choose this option to create new staves for each generated part and add them to the bottom of the score. The new staves added to the score will use the General MIDI patches (sounds) for piano, bass and drum set. The drum set staff will be set to channel 10 (the standard General MIDI percussion channel). If you are using an external MIDI device, or any non-General MIDI synthesizer for playback, you may want to change the playback instrument for the generated staves in the Instrument List. See Instrument List window for details.

Note: For the MiBAC plug-in to assign instruments to generated staves, “Create Instruments From Initial Patches” must be checked in the Import MIDI File Options dialog box under the MIDI menu.

• Existing Staves as Specified; Piano · Bass · Drum Set. Choose Existing Staves as Specified to apply the accompaniment to existing staves in your score. Click the drop-down menus for Piano, Bass and Drum Set to specify the staff for each part.
• More Info · Cancel · OK. Click More Info for a reminder of what input this plug-in requires and a brief summary of what the plug-in does. Click Cancel to dismiss the dialog box without making any changes, or Click OK to make the selected changes.

Note: There are twenty-eight chords the MiBAC plug-in uses to generate jazz accompaniments. These chords are mapped to existing possibilities for chord entry corresponding to Finale’s default chord suffix library. If you create a new chord suffix, or use any suffix outside the ones pre-defined in the Chord Suffix Selection window, you will first need to map the suffix to one of the twenty-eight MiBAC chords in the Chordmap.txt file, located in the Component Files folder (Finale 2003/Component Files).

To do this, double click the Chordmap.txt file to open it in a text editor. Enter a new line at the bottom of the existing list with the new chord suffix. Type it, with C as the root, just as you would in the Chord Definition dialog box. Then type an “=” (equals sign) followed by one of the twenty-eight MiBAC chord possibilities. Here is a list of the MiBAC Jazz Chords:

In this table, you will see some of the same text conventions for musical symbols used by Finale while entering chords (see Chord Tool). Exceptions are “d” (diminished), “s” (sustained) and “+” (augmented). When you have finished editing the Chordmap.txt file, save it, and then return to Finale. The Jazz Accompaniment Generator will now use the chord you specified for your new suffix while creating the accompaniment parts.