Hi, I am curious "How many drummers on this forum use BIAB and how do they find it useful."

Thanks,
John

I use it to practice my timing with backing tracks. I input the chords from the leadsheets press play and play along.

Thanks Islansoul. Good to hear. There are two drummers in our jamming group. Maybe in time they will practice to the BIAB backing track files I use.

Do you ever try this test with BIAB. Let the song count in and mute all instruments at bar#1 to see if you finished the song at the same time that BIAB finished the song. I ask because speeding up too much is a killer with my jam group since they practice to a specific speed. At the same time they want to get enough players to eliminate BIAB. So I compromised and said we will do this test and use BIAB to see if we sped up. If we did I put the rhythm guitar click track back in for everyone to listen too so we don't speed up and I remind them of 4 web pages which are all about how to prevent oneself from speeding up (or slowing down).

I would suggest that you add a shaker from BIAB to make sure you're on point.

I was not sure what a shaker was so I had to google search it and found it at this page.. I used a cowbell for a while but it gets boring. I tried to isolate it to the right channel so only the drummer could hear it but that did not work so well. So I decided to replace my rhythm guitar with the BIAB guitar which sounds almost exactly the way I play. I also decided to balance everything across left and right channels evenly so everyone can hear it. Using the BIAB guitar allows me to set mix levels so I just do solos and sometimes melody. They just have to realize that the BIAB guitar has perfect time.

So far I have not had a drummer come out to try it so the BIAB drums keeps us in perfect time. Most jams have the addition of BIAB piano. Occasionally I put in BIAB bass. We have had 8 jams and it is working very well. We have had three drummers in our jam group. One has no problem with playing along with BIAB. One absolutely refuses and left. The other is slowly getting use to the idea after hearing just how good the BIAB tracks sound.

Sorry, I meant that you should use a shaker real tracks as a metronome and use that to play along with your backing tracks.

Wow, a cow bell as metronome count for the drummer. I am not surprised one guy would leave, but I am more worried for the guy "getting use to it".

We had one jam with congas, bass, 2 guitars and trumpet. There was a speed up issue in every song. I will blame everyone rather than one since everyone just went along for the ride :-) The slower the song the worse the speed-up. One song started at 88 and ended at 160+. The melody dropped out the 2nd time around due to the speed change. After that I put BIAB in with drums. All the remaining songs stayed dead on speed (totally fixed the problem). So now if the players want to play without BIAB I have BIAB count us in and I mute all tracks at bar #1 so I can use BIAB to determine if we sped up too much. If we did I use BIAB the rest of the night. The drummer who dropped out never came out to jam and always bragged about how great he was. I suspect he may have dropped out because he is afraid to take the test (the insecure often are afraid to admit they are and will blame other things to protect themselves). If this is true it is sad because I found four web pages with methods to resolve a speed up issue in one's playing. Running from a problem is not the way to solve it. At the same time if you are not a pro who cares? Use BIAB and have fun. So far the world has not come to an end as a result of using BIAB to enhance our jams and I doubt it ever will :-) We seem to have just as much fun.

I'm a drummer, and I use it for song writing. It's really nice to have a band on hand at any point and be able to change anything. Then I just drum along.

This may seem a bit strange, but I do feel if you create your own drum track to go with the generated tracks from BIAB, the song tends to sound more real to me. There is a more organic interplay between the drums and bass, and more natural fills that can be achieved. Granted, you could make that argument for any of the instruments. When you lock in the bass and drums though, it's pretty cool IMO.

This is interesting to me - of all the different forms of musicians, I don't often think how a drummer would use Band-in-a-Box for some reason. Some nice input so far

I have just recorded and released an acoustic album with my duo partner who is a wonderful guitarist. The ablum just has vocals, guitars and bass.

We used BIAB drums as a metronome to record to and then muted the drums in the final song. It worked a treat because it established the right groove for us to record along to, kept us in time so that we could cut and paste the vocals, guitar and bass (which were recorded acoustically) between the various sections.

Using drums as a metronome has worked wonders for me also. I have found that some people can not work with a click track, they can't keep a steady beat. But they can keep a steady beat if I use a drum track. YMMV

When I started using BIAB I had TERRIBLE timing. I had to sit down with it and go over and over and over and over until I slowly improved.

How many musicians have the time to work with me? (Plus I could throw the best person off.)

So, I can see using it as a metronome... and it doesn't complain. :-)

...Deb

I actually made a studio recording where I gave the drummer a BIAB nylon guitar track as the click. Worked like a champ. Only he heard it; the rest of the band played to the drums. In this way, I could alter the guitar tempo, too.

I finally got around to using BIAB to test my holding time on one song by muting all instruments at bar #1. It ran for 5 choruses (melody, rhythm guitar, solo, comp guitar, melody). I finished 2 bars early. That was better than I expected actually except the count was probably at a natural speed for myself. I will have to get around to testing myself at slower and faster speeds to see if I gravitate to my natural speed which I gather is my heart rate. BIAB is a great way for anyone including drummers to test themselves to see if they need to work on keeping steady time.

There are actually two band skills here.
1/ Keeping time without a drummer while playing with other instruments.
2/ Listening to a drummer, clicker or anything with good time. Some students speed up past a metronome because they are struggling with new techniques.

An interesting question comes up too. If there is no drummer who should you listen too for keeping good time? The bass player or the person with the best time? I guess the bass player is the next one in line after the drummer who should be either testing their time with BIAB or using BIAB ear piece click tracks such as rhythm guitar (maybe an MP3 player driven ear piece to avoid lugging a computer). But what about guitar duets or solo. I guess the answer ends up becoming all rhythm section players should be testing themselves or using a click track where appropriate.