Quote:

Hey Bob, I remember your ads in an audio recording magazine from sometime in the 90s. When did you first start marketing BIAB add-on styles?



When PG Music offered version 4 for Atari, it was the first version to allow end users to make user styles. I believe that was in 1991 or 1992. It only had 3 instruments. Drums, bass and piano.

The basic 24 'built in' styles were very limiting, and especially the Latin American styles wouldn't do down here in South Florida, so I wrote a number of styles for myself. Better Latin styles, more rock styles a couple of country styles and so on.

I gave my styles away to a few of my friends, and they all told me they liked my styles better than the PG Music styles (aren't friends great!). So I took out an ad in Electronic Musician magazine, I think this was in 1992, but I could be off a year.

A few months later, Peter Gannon called, and encouraged me to write for IBM compatible computers (that's what we called PCs back then) and offered to convert my Atari styles to IBM styles (Atari and IBM shared the same floppy disk format). So I sent him the disks.

Then when I sold enough style disks to buy an IBM compatible computer, I got a 386 / DOS 5.0 / Win 3.1 IBM compatible with a 5.25 floppy and a 3.5 floppy (BiaB was DOS only then, the first Windows version hadn't arrived yet). Then came the Mac Classic II running system 6. I've upgraded all but the Atari quite a few times. Though I do remember getting a 10M hard drive for the Atari that was about the size of the Manhattan telephone directory.

So I'm guessing 1992. I never thought I'd still be doing it 20 years later but I am thankful for PG Music for the product and all my loyal customers for the support.

I wonder if Peter Gannon had any idea as to what would become of that great but clunky little infant program that was developed back in the early days of the PC?

Notes

Brand new 2012.5 updates from Norton Music:
  • 2 new style disks for Band-in-a-Box
  • 2 new free (with a purchase) fancy intro/ending disks for Real Band and other DAW's
  • The Ultimate Gospel Fake Disk
  • The Real Rock Fake Disk (plenty of classic rock in this one)
  • The Beatles Fake Disk
  • And an updated Christmas Fake Disk

Hundreds of Free .sgu and .mp3 demos for the above at: http://www.nortonmusic.com