Dear All .
this BIAB is pure magic for me but I was wondering about the likes of Fj,Tom Adams Janice and Bud RnM ,How about if possible a video tutorial of how you use biab to write and produce.
Im sure if possible other members would be enthralled to see your creative flow.
Its just an idea but I thought id put it out there
cheers Brad

Simple....

I write in BB. I use it like a scratch pad. Get the idea, grab my guitar, find a style in BB that works, and start working on the song.
Get everything like I want it. Right structure, key, tempo, groove..... save the file.

Open Real band and use it to render the tracks from the BB project to audio/waves and add the other instruments that I want in the song that are not indigenous to the style chosen in BB. For example, a hard rock style, which I often use for country, doesn't have fiddle or steel guitar but RB lets me render those kinds of instrument files.

Export the files to Sonar and mix.

I think PG was working on a project kinda like this... video of how we work, but IIRC, it got shelved. I don't like doing the video thing on this because each one of the steps could easily be 5 to 10 minutes of detailed instructional information and even after 2 hrs, there would be things forgotten and not said that make a huge difference.

I'm sure someone will provide you the video of what they or someone else has done.

If you have questions about something you hear in one of our songs and want details, just ask.

Then of course, you could look at this: http://www.pgmusic.com/videos.bbwin.htm PG has a ton of video tutorials up on how to do things. My process uses the stuff in those videos as I'm sure everyone else's does too.

User to user videos>>> http://www.pgmusic.com/videos.user.htm

I learned a lot looking at the YouTube videos of forum member +++ dfizzbom +++. While published in 2014 the videos give a pretty good overview of the steps taken to create a song from start to finish. The video features Band-in-a-Box, RealBand and the DAW Reaper.

Thanks for the link Jim. I'll check them out today.:-)

Thank you everyone for your input.its really appreciated

My top production tip to you is the master the "dots." Putting a dot (period) after the chord and before the letter corresponding to the channel/instrument allows you to solo one instrument or several, or gradually have the whole band kick in.

G.p means you will hear the G chord only played by whatever instrument is in the piano slot. G.pd means you will hear whatever is in the piano slot and drums. It only works on the the top five channels though, not melodist and below. That is reserved for midi, although though you can add real tracks to these slots, they just won't yield to the trick described above--at least not the last time I checked.

(When you open this BIAB file up in Real Band, RB preserves this "mix." Magical.)

Study these channels, look at these dots and listen to the song below and you will see what I mean. The "mystery guitar" at the first chorus was added by me. The right acoustic is me as well at the beginning of the song. I also added various other parts self-played as the song got kicking.

Good luck.

https://soundcloud.com/davidsnyderchannel/im-alive

Thanks David, I need to investigate this a bit further. I do use it from time to time, but not like a master chef...

This is a great tip David. I was not aware of using the instrument letters beyond the "dot". This opens a whole new avenue for creation. Thanks!

Jeff

Another way to add shots, holds, rests, etc. is to use the Alt-F5 key to bring up the chord options menu for the particular bar.

Jeff, read in the Help, Index about ‘Pushes, Shots and Holds’. Great info.

The key to understanding the dots, however, is understanding the legacy track names. Currently (and hopefully it will be fixed in the future), the instruments you include/exclude from shots, rests, and holds must be the legacy track names.

From left to right across the top you'll see:

Master - this is not a track name, per se
Bass - indicated by a "b", even if the instrument is something else
Piano - indicated by a "p", even if the instrument is something else (such as organ or rhodes or whatever)
Drums - indicated by a "d", even if the instrument is showing as "TrapSet" or "Bongos"
Guitar - indicated by a "g", even if the instrument showing is "acoustic" or "electric"
Strings - indicated by a "s", even if the instrument showing is "violin" or "orchestra"

In other words, don't use the initial letter of the instrument (otherwise, BIAB would get confused if for example you had two "Guitars", but use the legacy track name to indicated which instruments to exclude from a rest or a shot or a hold.

So, for example, if you have entered:

Cm7...pg

the dots should be read as "Play a Cm7 chord and hold all instruments except the instrument on the piano track and the instrument on the guitar track.

Gsus.d

should be read as "Play a Gsus chord and rest all instruments except the instruments on the drum track. Of course, effectively, this means that a Gsus won't be heard at all, because only the drums are playing (although a live soloist might be playing over the Gsus chord along to the BIAB arrangement, so you keep the chord in for notation purposes).

Bbdim7..bd

should be read as "Play a Bbdim7 chord as a shot (a hit) for all instruments except the instrument on the Bass track and the instrument on the Drum track. That means the instruments on the piano, guitar, and strings track will play the shot, but the bass and drums will play whatever riffs they would have played were the dots not there.

Additionally, you can't use the "dots" for the melody or soloist track, on the five auto-generated tracks.

There are long posts about needing to rename the legacy track names and I won't get into that here, but hopefully this helps folks use this powerful feature of BIAB.

Good point John, that's the very first mistake I made when I just tried this. I put in the first letter of the instruments I put in not the "legacy" names. Very confusing, especially when I change the track to a completely different instrument and I forgot what the original track assignment was!

Jeff

Jeff,

If it helps, I always run BIAB with the old names. This option is available on the first screen when one opens "Prefs". It's called "Auto generate track labels".

Regards,
Noel

Hey John,

Thanks for helping to clarify this. I thought I had it covered in my screen shots where I say "look at these channels."

They are, in order from top down:

B
P
D
G
S

No matter what you HAVE in those slots that is what you type in after the dot if you want to solo the instrument in that slot. That is easiest for me.

Thank you for explaining it in yet another way though.

And to make the mud even clearer, you don't actually have to type the letters in any particular order. So as long as you are using those letters, you can type them in any order and BIAB will re-sort them properly when you hit enter.

I had a play around with this and was very impressed. Great when the drums play and other instruments hold or just guitars come in or a bass solo. Also nice for drum fills. All in all very powerful. The pushes are also neat.