When I first opened The Changes on SongTrellis, my intention was to provide chord progressions for important songs in several different forms.

I wanted to provide a chord only chord progression rendering because that would be of most use for those who are studying a tune's harmony, writing a new tune using old harmony,  or were consulting it for their own compositional work 

For those who wanted to practice or improvise with a sequence, it would be best if we could provide a version in which the chords were played with comping patterns that are used in performance along with a bass line and rhythm accompaniment. The chord only versions would work for this purpose, but a full accompaniment would work even better.

I use my SongTrellis Music Editor to prepare the many chord only versions that are available in The Changes. Those usually take ten or fifteen minutes to prepare, because the program knows how to voice progressions in a reasonable way. (I created my five new submissions this morning between 7 and 8:30AM)

 I just type in the progression specifing the root, type and duration of the chords, play it once or twice, and save a particular playback's voicings as a GIF image. Then I paste in several choruses of the tune, freeze the first chorus voicings so that they will match the printed score, play the score one more time and save the results as a MIDI sequence. I then go to Song Discussions on the SongTrellis website, use "Submit a new sound" to send the MIDI file to the SongTrellis webserver and use "Submit a new picture" to post the GIF image.

I've done a handful of chord arrangements with full accompaniment, but unfortunately those can take hours to prepare. I haven't taught the editor yet how to create bass lines, although I believe I now understand how to do that now. Anyway, these kind of arrangements require that someone compose a bass line for the accompaniment and also figure out a way to play the chords using a comping scheme that properly dresses up the progresion. For someone of my talents, this is not a fast process.

I've decided that I'll do the most good for the greatest number of people by doing bare chord arrangements and put off doing the full performance arrangements until I have automatic means to produce them.

Bernard Chinn, who has contributed so much to SongTrellis, with his own compositions, and then more recently with solo choruses for a number of our listed progressions, mentioned to me that he has prepared full backing tracks for a number of tunes and wondered if I thought folks would find them useful. Having listened, I encouraged him to submit his accompaniments to SongTrellis where they could become the chords with bass and drums accompaniments that I've not been able to produce.

He sent in the first one this morning, As Time Goes By. Please let Bernard and I know what you think of this. If you send mail to me, I'll forward it.