Sorry if this has been asked 1001 times...

Is it possible to take an existing song (heard on the radio) and duplicate it in Band in a Box?

What about taking a song file from Guitar Pro and having it sound like more realistic than midi output?

I want to make my own backing tracks for personal use.

psychotic one

Welcome to the forums.

Band In A Box creates what are essentially 'backing tracks' based on chord progressions and
using a specific musical style (rock, jazz, Latin, reggae etc).

It is not designed to duplicate an existing song, such as including melody etc.

It does incorporate a feature 'Audio Chord Wizard' (ACW) which can analyze an audio song file and attempt to produce the chord structures used by that song file. But it is not designed to extract the melody and convert a pre-recorded song into a BiaB song.

As videoTrack pointed out no you can not.



You can get more realistic sounds with MIDI. It takes a good MIDI sound source and a little knowledge to achieve this. If you have a DAW you can take any MIDI song and change the sounds to something different and/or a lot better than the General MIDI sounds that comes with BiaB and probably Guitar Pro. FYI-DAWs can be free to very expensive and in fact the PC version of Biab come with a DAW called RealBand.



There are a couple of ways of doing this.

1-BiaB is an excellent product for producing backing tracks and many here perform using these tracks. However they will not be identical to the original songs.

2-Get a MIDI file of the song your want, put it into a DAW then delete the lead line. Note that some MIDI files do not have the lead line included. As noted you can change or improve MIDI sounds.

3-Combine #1 and #2 in BiaB and RealBand.

I would suggest you go to the User Showcase and listen to the songs that are being produced by BiaB. We can not post copyrighted songs there but the original songs posted are excellent.

You might want to try BiaB. It comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. AFAIK no one has posted that they wanted their money back.

I hope this helps.

Basically, you need to (1) type in the chords to the song into the Band-in-a-Box chord sheet, then (2) find a style that is similar to the song.

For #1, if you don't know the chords, you can find simple chord charts for most popular songs online.

For #2, use the StylePicker and look for 'RealStyles' in the genre (RealStyles start with an underscore). Try using the Title Browser and type in a popular song you know that has the feel and tempo you want.

This won't give you the melody... if you do want the melody as well, there are different things you can do.

Also FYI Band-in-a-Box can import MusicXML files, this may be of some help as well.

And the output, depending upon the style selected, will just be "in the style of". It won't have the same riffs as the original song. You won't hear that cool guitar solo, or even that one cool note that you wait to hear when listening to the original.

But you will definitely get a good, cool backing track which you can sing and/or play along to.

You can definitely use MIDI to get close to the original sound, but if you do that, you really should probably just do it in a DAW, not BIAB. Whether using RealTracks or MIDI styles, again, it will be "in the style of", but won't be the original song. Even when typing in the song into Style Picker to find a suitable style.

That being said, what some people do is find a style pretty close - style-wise, not riff-wise. And then use MIDI to enter some of the trademark riffs you hear in a song to give it a more original flavor. But you would need to know which notes to enter to do that..

There was a similar discussion -Here - back in October that included some interesting comments and a demonstration from Dr. Gannon.

Charlie

What about public domain songs that are found in beginner song books?

psychotic one,

I'm not sure what you mean. Could you please give a little more information.

Regards,
Noel

I have a Casio song book (green cover) that has a bunch of songs in it for keyboard.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star - French Folk Song
Lightly Row - Spanish Folk Song
Long Long Ago - T.H. Bayly
On Top of Old Smokey - American Folk Song

Basic snippets of melodies.

Hello psychotic one and welcome to the forum.

There is nothing wrong or forbidden to stop you from creating your version of an existing song for your own enjoyment.

What you can not do is perform the song in public without paying a fee to whomever owns the copyright to a song.

Songs like "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" have no copyright owner, no one to collect a performance fee, so they are public domain and can be performed anytime, any place, by anybody. If you record your performance, upload a copy of your performance to the internet you can post a link to that performance in the forum.

Several forum users have purchased a copyright performance license so they have paid the fee to perform a song. Typically they will include the license information if they post a link to a copyrighted performance.

Not really what I was asking.

I am trying to learn an instrument and instead of just the click of a metronome, I would like to use backing tracks. Sure I could use the song I am trying to learn as a backing track but I am not able to play up to speed. I have tried those "slow down" amps and gizmos but for the most part it puts everything out of pitch.

What I am looking for is a way to take an existing song (public domain to get my skills up) and use them as backing tracks at different speeds (50%, 60%, 70% etc.) without the pitch changing.

Here is the problem of that idea: How am I able to make a backing track of a song or melody that I never heard before? If I did hear it before, then how do I know that I make is what I hear in my head without wasting a lot of time trying to make it sound right instead of learning the instrument?

So my question again is simple: Does BIAB have the ability to make a backing track of a public domain song from the melody?

Feel free to make one out of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star or Mary Had A Little Lamb so I am able to hear it if you think that would be easier than trying to answer my question.

<< So my question again is simple: Does BIAB have the ability to make a backing track of a public domain song from the melody? >>

Yes.


And also -- yes -- to slowing down the tempo without changing pitch.


However, the simplest and most expedient way to accomplish your task is to use midi files.


Charlie

Another option would be to download a MIDI file and open it in BiaB. Now you can practice any song, even copyrighted songs, at any speed you desire. Most downloadable MIDI songs do not contain the melody line so it is a legal download.

Another option is to purchase a fake book then a matching fake book disc from Norton Music:
http://nortonmusic.com/

Notes Norton has discs that match the fake books chords exactly. I use this method to practice site reading. These disc are for BiaB.

Good luck.

But to be clear, you need the chord progression for the backing track. You can't just enter a melody and have BIAB figure out the accompaniment. Yes, it has some tools to do that somewhat, but it won't necessarily be what you are expecting and will mostly likely sound wrong.

Most music books, even simple ones, have the chord progression written in addition to the melody, and if you don't have it, it's fairly easily found on the web.