Muting voices in tracks

Today's helpful hint from Bob concerns the customization of a GROOVE by
muting voices/tracks for selected beats. For the down and dirty details of
the commands discussed, you should refer to the manual section "Musical Data Format" --> Rests(muting).

It is easy to mute a track(s) for a select number of beats or bars. You know, silence
the chords for a particular bar, etc. I often use this when creating intros and ends.
It is easy to do this when creating a GROOVE, but sometimes
that is a bit of overkill

For a simple example, let's assume we have a nice little groove running
using the Swing predefined library. In this example, we have 4 bars a simple
pattern...

Code:

Groove Swing
1 C
2 F
3 C
4 G7

Great. But, now we decide that the first 2 beats of bar 4 should
not have a drummer (I don't know why! She's a great drummer!)...
Easy, just use the "z" notation

Code:

1 C
2 F
3 C
4 G7zD / G7 /

The notation can be a bit confusing, let's see if we can clarify:

- A single "z" means turn off everything EXCEPT the drum.
- You can have a number of modifiers following the "z",
! - turn off everything including the drum
and one of C, A, S, W, B, R, P or D representing various tracks:
C - Chord
B - Bass
A - Arpeggio
W - Walk
D - Drum
S - Scale
R - Aria
P - Plectrum

Important to remember: you can have many different tracks of the same type in
a groove. You might have 2 different Bass tracks ... "!B" will turn off all of them
so you can't use this shortcut to specify one.

Back to our example, we could turn off the Drum and the Chords for beats 1 and 2
in bar 4:

Code:

1 C
2 F
3 C
4 G7zCD / G7 /

To add to the beauty, you can create neat solos by ONLY playing a
particular track. Again, in bar 4 we could just have the bass playing:

Code:

1 C
2 F
3 C
4 G7z!+BW / G7 /

Note, we've using BW to force playing of Bass and Walk tracks since they are
often using together in grooves.

Have fun, experiment and make some cool music! Please visit our website: www.mellowood.ca/mma for more information. And, remember that your contributions to our "Buy me a Coffee" program are motivating us for more features
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